http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/opinion/in-protesting-economic-woes-recall-that-free-trade-makes-the-world-a-safer-place/480679 In Protesting Economic Woes, Recall That Free Trade Makes the World a Safer Place John Riady | November 25, 2011
This would appear to be not a good time to be making the case for free trade. The Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States has spread to countries around the world. If the movement is anything to go by, free trade has become a prime target of the anti-market mood that has gripped the public imagination. The protesters do have a point, up to a point. The excesses of neoliberalism are undeniable, particularly the delirious power that it puts in the hands of the unelected and unaccountable barons of global capital. No economy, capitalist or otherwise, can be sustainable if more and more workers are shoved into immiserization to feed the expanding greed of fewer and fewer people who control the levers of the neoliberal global economy. In such circumstances, free trade would naturally appear to be an ideological excuse to legitimize rampant and deepening inequality. Wall Street is the symbolic capital of that neoliberal world. Hence the popular upsurge against it in the United States, where high unemployment has acted as a catalyst for dismay over the economic system. The protests spread to other countries because globalization has enmeshed them all into a single neoliberal system where Wall Street rules by other names. However, the anti-Wall Street activists are wrong beyond this point. This is because it is not the free trade order per se that is at fault, but its surreptitious transformation into a malignant system in which real people and their productive work are subordinated to the fickle passions of speculative capital. This financial empire flourishes dazzlingly before it collapses as suddenly, a house of cards unable to withstand the widening fissures that it has created on the ground. This is what happened in 2008. Free trade is anything but this anti-human trade. Real free trade actually frees the working class from bondage to the national or even the regional market by offering it the whole world as its market. The larger the market, the fairer will be the matching of demand and supply. The fairer this matching, the more that honest and hardworking people will get out of the economic system. Genuine free trade is fair trade as well. Hence, this is perhaps, after all, a good time to defend free trade, both from its predictable enemies on the left and from its much more dangerous friends on the neo-liberal right. Those trying to defend free trade have a friend in US President Barack Obama. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Honolulu this month, he announced the framework of a Pacific-wide free trade agreement. He declared that nine countries had arrived at a broad outline of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and hoped to be working on the legal text of a full agreement by next year. The hitherto little-known TPP began life in 2005 as an agreement among Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore. Australia, Malaysia, Peru, the United States and Vietnam then joined it, and Japan announced just before the APEC summit that it, too, was coming in. With the United States and Japan — the largest and third-largest economies of the world — the TPP will cover no less than a third of the global economy and could become the world’s biggest free trade area, overtaking even the European Union. If China, the world’s second largest economy, participates in the TPP eventually, the agreement will become a truly trans-Pacific pact. But even leaving aside its impressive size, the TPP is important because it will set a new gold standard for free trade agreements. Obama visualizes it as a 21st-century deal that will adhere to high environmental and labor standards and address non-tariff barriers as well. What different worlds Occupy Wall Street and the TPP speak of! The Occupy Wall Street protesters, and their fellow demonstrators around the globe, can dream ultimately only of a shrinking economic world where unsupportable standards of living in the West are sustained artificially through protectionist measures masquerading as fair trade. The TPP, instead, boldly announces the possibility of a world, emerging from the Pacific, where the same economic principles and logic will apply to the Chilean farmer and the Singaporean entrepreneur. Whether the TPP ideal will be achieved in all its fullness is something that remains to be seen. Its timetable, in particular, appears to be ambitious because it cannot be easy to get 10 countries to agree on the minutiae of a deal that would run right across their economic systems. However, the TPP is too important to fail, particularly in a Pacific that is witnessing the rise of China against a backdrop of America’s relative decline. The real secret of a free trade agreement is that it is about more than trade. It is also a strategic agreement. Open economic borders create the conditions for free-trading countries to develop a deep stake in one another’s security and stability. This does not mean that a country will necessarily defend its free-trade partner if it is invaded. But it does mean that it will have a stake in its partner not being attacked, and will possibly do all it can to create the diplomatic conditions that make an invasion costly to the transgressor. This is so particularly if the country is considerably more powerful than its partner. This solidarity is no small thing in a dog-eat-puppy world. Admittedly, Indonesia is not yet ready for the TPP. Indeed, it should first concentrate on contributing to the creation of a viable Asean Economic Community, slated for 2015, before turning its attention to the Pacific. But Indonesia must think big. More free trade will expand its economic and strategic horizons. And there can hardly be an Occupy the Pacific movement. John Riady is a lecturer at Pelita Harapan University Law School and editor-at-large of the Jakarta Globe [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Post message: [email protected] Subscribe : [email protected] Unsubscribe : [email protected] List owner : [email protected] Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
