THE END OF HISTORY TOOLBOX:

The Freedom Connection: How the U.S. uses trade agreements to promote democracy (Susan Ariel Aaronson, June 11, 2007, American)

From the very start of his administration George W. Bush has posited a direct link between trade and democracy. As early as February 2001, in his first address to Congress, he claimed that “free trade brings greater political and personal freedom.”

Though Bush has been a particularly enthusiastic advocate of this view, the connection is nothing new, and it is not merely abstract. Policymakers have long recognized that they can use trade agreements as a tool for encouraging democratization. For over 60 years, the U.S. government has included provisions in multilateral and bilateral trade agreements that require trade partners to encourage transparency, protect due process rights, and promote citizen participation in policymaking.

Anecdotal evidence and preliminary studies indicate that such provisions may be effective at encouraging improved governance and greater political participation. [...]

Scholars are trying to investigate the relationship between WTO membership with quantitative tools. Political scientist Mary Comerford Cooper used Freedom House Data (www.freedomhouse.org) to examine the effects of membership in the GATT/WTO over time. She found a relationship between WTO membership and democratization, but could not determine whether democratic states were more likely to join the GATT/WTO or whether WTO membership makes countries more likely to become or remain democratic. In my own review of the this relationship, I found that if we exclude the 24 high income long democratic OECD countries, a growing percentage of GATT/WTO members are free and democratic, The percentage of WTO members increased from from 19% in 1986 (GATT) to 42% in 2005 (WTO) With my colleague Jamie Zimmerman, I also compared political participation scores over time with length of GATT/WTO membership, using the CIRI Human Rights Data Set developed by David Cingranelli and David Richards (ciri.binghamton.edu) Again, excluding the 24 high-income OECD countries, the data indicates that the longer a country belongs to the GATT/WTO, the higher its political participation scores. Between 87 and 92 percent of countries that had been members for over 11 years had high political participation scores, compared to just 72% of those that joined after 1995.

More empirical research is needed before scholars will be able to say for sure whether trade agreements have directly led to greater democratization. It’s possible that there are outside factors at work, or that the causality is reversed (i.e., the more democratic states become, the more they want to join and remain in the WTO). But it seems likely that once citizens learn to influence their governments on trade issues, they will also want their voices heard on other aspects of public policy. The evidence suggests that ever so gradually over time, habits of due process and political participation encouraged by WTO rules and procedures may spill over to other aspects of the polity.

Their opposition to free trade is just one manifestation of the Democrats' lack of faith in the Anglo-American way.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 11, 2007 7:50 AM