Trade Battles

How did activists create a dynamic broad-based movement during NAFTA negotiations that politicized trade, making it a contentious issue for the first time in history? And how did their NAFTA mobilization influence trade policy and set the stage for future battles over trade? Trade Battles answers these questions using data from over 200 in-depth interviews, contributing to a vibrant and burgeoning literature that tries to understand how civil society shapes state policy. Trade Battles shows how activists created a new set of institutionalized and disruptive strategies around trade that leveraged broader cleavages across state and nonstate arenas. Activists exploited these leverage points by mobilizing across them, which enabled them to politicize trade policy and influence the content of the agreement itself. So powerful was activists’ pushback against NAFTA that future administrations closed many state institutional channels in order to thwart public opposition, curtailing public access, participation, and input. This forced activists to try to kill many subsequent trade agreements whole cloth rather than improve them, as they did during the NAFTA struggle. The analysis in Trade Battles therefore shows that the NAFTA battle was less about trade policy than the role of democratic state institutions in policymaking. By exposing the linkages between institutional opportunities and democratic practices, Trade Battles reveals how critical state institutions are for activists’ efforts to shape not only trade policy, but a plethora of international policies from climate change to migration. When the state closes institutions, it effectively severs policymaking from democratic intervention.