Understanding the "Security and Prosperity Partnership”

Laura Carlsen, writing over at the Center for International Policy (CIP)’s Americas Program (which was recently “inherited” from the International Relations Center, discusses “”Deep Integration”—the Anti-Democratic Expansion of NAFTA”.
She argues in her editorial (published at the end of last month) that although “The North American Free Trade Agreement is the most advanced experience of the U.S.-led free trade model in the world. The expansion of NAFTA into the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) reveals the road ahead for other nations entering into Free Trade Agreements.” But she goes further and ultimately reaches the conclusion that the SPP[i]t is not a road most democratic nations with reasonably well-informed citizens— and very much the case for the US—would knowingly take if they knew where it led.

Some clips:

The North American Free Trade Agreement is the most advanced experience of the U.S.-led free trade model in the world. The expansion of NAFTA into the Security and Prosperity Partnership reveals the road ahead for other nations entering into Free Trade Agreements. It is not a road most nations—or the U.S. public—would knowingly take if they knew where it led.

The first problem is that very few people do know. The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) was launched at a meeting of Presidents George W. Bush, Vicente Fox, and Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas. It was heralded as the next step in regional integration and as part of what some observers have dubbed the “NAFTA Plus” agenda.

The Waco meeting of the “Three Amigos” resulted in little visible progress. However, it set in motion an underground process that spawned its own working groups, rules, recommendations, and agreements—all below the radar of the legislatures and the public in the three nations. These rules and trinational programs have profound effects on the environment, the daily lives of citizens, and the future of all three countries. Unknown people, representing the interests of a narrow elite, are building an agenda that allows for virtually no public debate or input.

[. . .]

The fact that it is “White House-led” is beyond doubt. When the heads of state met in Waco and in subsequent meetings to follow up on NAFTA, both Canada and Mexico had some very serious concerns. Canada was embroiled in trade conflicts with the United States (soft lumber, beef) that it wanted to see resolved in the context of cooperation supposedly embodied in NAFTA.

The stark contradiction between open borders for merchandise and criminalization of immigrants had led over the decade-plus of NAFTA to an untenable position for Mexico’s rightwing government. On the one hand, it had a commitment to greater integration under the free trade model; on the other it was under tremendous political pressure to defend Mexicans migrating to the United States.

None of these issues made it into the SPP. Instead, the trinational agenda was hijacked by U.S. security concerns, and corporate demands for fewer obstacles to border-hopping production and sales. From the outset, the “deep integration” proposed under the SPP was indeed White House-led and highly selective in what (and who) it included in its purview.
The SPP is not a law, or a treaty, or even a signed agreement. All these would require public debate and participation of Congress, both of which the SPP has scrupulously avoided. And yet “the dialogue” seeks to make trilateral decisions of the executive branch and business binding to the point of modifying national regulations in all three countries involved.

The crux of the article is a honest and well informed, no-holds-barred analysis of what Washington’s real agenda is behind the SPP:

The Bush administration has three fundamental objectives embodied in its SPP: to create more advantageous conditions for transnational corporations and remove remaining barriers for the flow of capital and crossborder production within the framework of NAFTA; to assure secure access to natural resources in the other two countries, especially oil; and to create a regional security plan based on “pushing its borders out” into a security perimeter that includes Mexico and Canada.

For more background on SPP, check out this website and this study by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS).