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The Americas In Transition: The Contours of Regionalism, by Gordon Mace, Louis Bélanger, and contributors
11. Social Movements in the Americas:
Regionalism from Below?
Whether functionalist, neofunctionalist, federalists, transactionalists, or dependentists, the first generation of integration theorists saw regional integration as a regionally bound process of harmonization responding to regionally specific exigencies and taking place in the largely unconstraining milieu of the world economy. In contrast, contemporary theorists of regional integration have emphasized that regionalism is also part and parcel of a global process and that regions are in many ways as much about the world economy as they are about themselves.
This concern for the relationship between regional integration and the construction of world orders has also defined the analysis of hemispheric integration in the Americas (Atkins 1993; Schott 1991; Urquidi 1993). Though the literature has made references to such American events as the Monroe (or Blaine) Doctrine, the Cold War Alliance for Progress, and Ronald Reagan’s “Fortress America,” more remarkable has been its attempt to situate the dynamics of integration in a global context. 1
Such interest in the relationship between integration in the Americas and the management of the world economy contrasts sharply with contemporary analyses of social movements in the Americas. Indeed, with few exceptions, the literature on social movements in the Americas remains firmly anchored in the countries of the Americas themselves and emphasizes their national and regional specificity. Thus far, they have not been investigated in light of the increasingly transnational experience of other social movements elsewhere in the world economy.
There are, of course, good reasons for this. Generally speaking, social movements in the Americas (as elsewhere) have kept a primarily national focus, and their internationalist dimensions have not been readily obvious. This is, as we shall see, especially true of social movements of the Americas that have arisen in opposition to contemporary neoliberal schemes for regional and hemispheric integration. Indeed, their opposition is built on a national variation of what Antonio Gramsci would have called an “economico-corporatist consciousness” of specific interest and specific, primarily national, position in an integrating market. Thus, for example, Canadian opponents, first of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States (FTA), then of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), have spoken of “the betrayal of Canada” and of “taking back the nation” as they address themselves not to humanity in general but to that particular fraction of humanity that dwells in the Americas north of the forty-ninth parallel. Similarly, the Mexican Network for Action on Free Trade (Red Mexicana de Acción Frente al Libre Comercio, or RMALC) has organized primarily national events in defense of a specifically Mexican agenda.
Thus, notwithstanding overly internationalist claims that “the experience of the fight against NAFTA has given rise to the emergence of a new international solidarity” (Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives 1994), anti-integration movements in the Americas appear, if the literature is to be taken at face value, to have little to do with social processes and movements taking place in the world economy.
However, there may still be an important internationalist dimension to contemporary social movements in the Americas that has hitherto remained unexplored. Indeed, regionalist and hemispheric schemes of integration have, unwittingly, spawned growing transnational campaigns of resistance, animated by the defense of the imagined sovereignty of national communities yet situated by obligation on the terrain of the world economy, that look very much like an American variation on what Peter Waterman called the “new grass-roots internationalism of social movements” (Waterman 1988). In this chapter I attempt to explain contemporary social movements in the Americas in light of this new internationalism of social movements. As the new internationalism takes shape in reaction to world orders in the making, perhaps recent regional and hemispheric integration schemes will unwittingly give birth to regionalist or hemispherist social movements.
In the first part of the chapter, I draw a broad portrait of ostensibly American social movements in the context of regional integration. In keeping with the spirit of this book, I examine social movements situated within NAFTA and the Southern Cone Common Market (Mercosur) regions, the principal centers of gravity of a would-be hemispheric social formation, though I make occasional references to regions at the periphery of the integrationist policy initiatives. In the second part of the chapter, I use insights garnered in analyzing the broader experience of social movements elsewhere in the world economy to gain some political understanding of contemporary social movements in the Americas.
Social Movements in the Americas
Regional integration often appears as an incremental, almost managerial, process lacking the romantic internationalist appeal that André Malraux wrote of in L’espoir. Whereas antifascist brigades gave participants the sustaining illusion of a common humanity, opposition to regional integration takes difference and specificity as its starting points and turns them into stakes of struggle. This is an opposition that is at once a stand against the elimination of (for the most part international) difference and a struggle that in itself exacerbates differences. Depending on the place they occupy in the international division of labor and the social configurations they wish to protect from or secure through the process of integration, social forces mobilize differently and attempt to settle matters differently within national boundaries.
Thus, it is not surprising that regional and hemispheric integrationist schemes in the Americas have given birth in the first instance to national campaigns, coalitions, and networks of social movements. Beyond those, however, a regional internationalism of sorts has begun taking shape that has already transcended the level of the nation-state.
Nationally Structured Opposition to Regional and Hemispheric Integration
That political mobilization against regional integration particularizes social struggles and reduces them, at least in the first instance, to nationally bounded skirmishes has been particularly evident in countries occupying a relatively peripheral or semiperipheral position within NAFTA and Mercosur clusters.
In NAFTA countries, from the time of the Canada-U.S. FTA in 1987 to the implementation of NAFTA in January 1994, social movements in opposition to integration have been shaped first and foremost as a collection of national or nationally centered movements. In Mexico, the most visible opposition to NAFTA was organized by the RMALC, a broad coalition of social movements assembled in April 1991. From its inception, the RMALC has discussed defining strategies to defend Mexican sovereignty against foreign capital, and it has organized a political movement that has taken distinctly Mexican realities as its starting point: the severity of the structural adjustment programs adopted by the Salinas government at the request of the International Monetary Fund (IMF); the social costs of export-led industrialization; institutionalized corporatism; and, most important, the entrenched position of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) as a governing party. Furthermore, Mexican opposition to NAFTA has objected not so much to hemispheric integration or themes common to the hemisphere as to the attempts by the National Solidarity Program (Pronasol) to capitalize small farms, the usurpation of Article 27 of the Mexican constitution (on agrarian reform) by the Salinas government, electoral fraud during the 1988 elections, and the undemocratic relationship between the PRI and Mexico’s official unions such as the the Confederation of Mexican Workers and the Federation of Union Workers at the Service of the State.
RMALC opposition to NAFTA has been activated by national-corporatist appeals to an idealized notion of Mexican sovereignty, which imagines state regulation and state-led entrepreneurship as national barricades against transnational capital. More recent events such as the Liberty Referendum (Referéndum de la Libertad) (September 24–October 23, 1995), the People’s Consultation (Consulta Ciudadana) (February 26, 1995), and the First National Day of Condemnation of the Government’s Economic Policy (Primera Jordana Nacional de Condena a la Política Económica del Gobierno) (September 8, 1996) have also sought to promote national values and nationally defined social interests over regionalist initiatives. In the case of the Liberty Referendum, for example, this promotion took the form of a Keynesian Alternative Economic Strategy centered on fiscal reform, an expansionary monetary policy, an active industrial strategy, and measures designed to stimulate the growth of the domestic market (Alianza Cívicas 1995).
In the same spirit, Canadian opposition—first to the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and then to NAFTA—has taken the form of a “Campaign for Canada.” 2 Though some of the issues raised by the anti-NAFTA campaign closely resemble themes animating the RMALC (anti-U.S. sentiments and stolen free trade elections, for example), the Council of Canadians (formed in 1985), the Pro-Canada Network (PCN) and the Action Canada Network (ACN) (respectively formed in 1987 and 1991), and the Quebec Coalition Against Free Trade (Coalition Québécoise Contre le Libre-Échange) have defined themselves in national and statist terms. They have kept watch over productivity and wage differentials between Canada and Mexico, Canadian jobs lost to the maquiladoras, and cultural differences between Canada and the United States and have generally attempted, as the nationalist Council of Canadians put it, to “Stand on Guard for Canada’s Social Programs” by fetishizing state power. 3 Taken with the idea of state sovereignty, the Pro-Canada Network in 1991 went so far as to cast the Bank of Canada as a protector of the “general welfare of the country,” this after a decade and a half of rigorous monetarism and zero-inflation policies (R. Robinson 1991: 6). Even when the Canadian opposition to NAFTA was linked with opposition to neoliberalism, as such opposition was in Mexico, it remained organized as a collection of national campaigns that supported fair taxes and opposed the goods and services tax, the weakening of the Canadian Health Act, and increases in patent protection for pharmaceutical companies operating in Canada.
To a lesser extent, opposition to regional integration in the United States has also been a national-centered movement (organized, if the Liberty Lobby is to be taken at its word, by “friends of American sovereignty”). Organized first by the farm lobby, which campaigned for a Fair Trade Caucus in the House of Representatives, the U.S. campaigns against the FTA and NAFTA have been guided (though with less coherence than in Mexico and Canada) by the Fair Trade Campaign (FTC) and, after 1992, the Citizens Trade Campaign (CIC), both loose federations of unions and social and religious groups that have only recently begun growing into RMALC-like coalitions of social forces. Since their creation, the FTC and the CTC, in coalition with pan-national groups (the Alliance for Responsible Trade and the Rainbow Coalition, for example) and local groups (the Federation for Industrial Retention and Renewal, Southerners for Economic Justice, Hometowns Against Shutdown, etc.), have continuously focused on corporations that have “run away” from the United States, job protection, labor rights, and the defense of U.S. environmental protection legislation.
Outside NAFTA, the Chilean Network in Favor of a Peoples’ Initiative (Red Chile Para una Iniciativa de los Pueblos, or RECHIP) and Paraguayan Labor Movement on Mercosur (El Movimiento Sindical Paraguayo Frente al Mercosur), to mention two salient examples, have also assembled national coalitions of social movements that have taken a national stance against regional integration.
Thus, on the face of it, social movements born out of regional integration schemes in the Americas appear to have been structured as a collection of principally national and often statist groups that have little to do either with regional cooperation between social movements or with a broader internationalization of civil society. These movements appear to speak neither of the common struggle of the people of the Americas nor, more broadly, of fighting against regional zoning in the world economy. National coalitions united by their shared appeal to state sovereignty do not, however, tell the whole story of the politics of social movements in the context of regional and hemispheric integration. Indeed, both above and below the level at which the PCN, the ACN, the RMALC, the FTC, the CTC, and RECHIP speak of protecting the imagined sovereignty of national states, local and hemisphere-wide coalitions of social movements have also begun taking shape. These emerging coalitions are thought of by some, precipitously perhaps, as building blocks of an emerging civil society of the Americas.
Beyond Nationally Structured Social Movements: The Double Process of Regionalism in Social Movements
The emergence of regional and hemispheric coalitions and networks of social movements beyond nationally centered coalitions is a double process. Indeed, it is not simply a question of coalitions of social movements transcending their national point of departure but a more dialectical process whereby transnational networks emerge from regionalist organizations and networks proper, as well as from episodic contacts and tactical alliances between nationally centered movements that, once regularized and solidified, help transform social movement politics within distinct national realms. To ignore one of these processes would lead to either an unwarranted celebration of a regional civil society or a submission to nationally centered politics. Instead, both processes must be understood as closely together as possible.
At the regional level, social movements in the Americas have begun assembling themselves outside and somewhat above the realm of state and statist politics. They are a collection of rather loose and sometimes rival gatherings of regional and hemispheric social movements.
At the core of these gatherings are nongovernmental organizations gravitating around interstate organizations that may be viewed as regional affiliates of the nebula or organization managing the world economy. Just as such organizations as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank, and the IMF have set up an “architecture of collaboration” with chosen nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other representatives of an ostensibly “global civil society” in an effort to solidify the social foundations of world orders (Drainville forthcoming), such regional organizations as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Organization of American States (OAS) have set up a variety of outreach, consultation, and direct support programs that have encouraged a recentering of NGOs and social movements.
In the same spirit, regional offices of nebula organizations have sometimes set up NGO programs and policy consultations that have facilitated the building of regional coalitions. Thus, for example, the World Bank opened its Caribbean Public Information Center in Kingston, Jamaica, in September 1994 just as the World Bank-NGO Committee was deciding to restructure itself as a collection of regional groupings (Participation and NGO Group 1996), which set the stage for the formation of the Latin American Association of Promotional Organizations (Asociación Latinoamericana de Organizaciones de Promoción) (Nelson 1996).
Also at the regional level are NGOs and social movements that are representatives of movements and organizations operating on a global scale. In some cases, this second cluster of regionalist organizations is made up of regional groups parachuted into the Americas by organizations fighting global battles on many regionalist fronts. The American Institute for Free Labor Development, for example, was created as a Cold War venture by the Department of International Affairs of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Information Agency (Garver 1989: 67). In the same spirit, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) sponsored the creation of the Coordination Agency of the Labor Unions of the Southern Cone (Coordinadora de Centrales Sindicales del Cono Sur) (1986), which later attached itself to the Mercosur apparatus (via a working subgroup on labor relations, employment, and social security) and became a regional anchoring point for national labor federations from Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
In the same spirit, the International Metal Workers Federation has recently taken a position vis-à-vis the three most important schemes for regional integration in the Americas (Federación Internacional de Trabajadores de las Industrias Metalúrgicas 1995) and has organized a series of regional conferences in an attempt to facilitate the emergence of regional networks of civic NGOs and civil society organizations. 4
Once removed from these top-down regionalist organizations is an assortment of networks, coalitions, and organizations that have been assembled by the aforementioned national coalitions largely in reaction to integrationist schemes. At this level, we find organizations such as Common Frontiers (Fronteras Comunes), the Ecumenical Coalition for Economic Justice, Woman to Woman (Mujer a Mujer), the Working Woman (La Mujer Obrera), Women to Women Global Strategies, the International Coordinating Committee of Solidarity Amongst Sugar Workers, the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (formed in February 1991), the North American Worker to Worker Network, the Caribbean Feminist Network (Red Feminista en el Caribe), the Maquila’s Workers’ Network (Red de Trabajadores de la Maquila), the Women’s Network Against Structural Adjustments (Red de Mujer y Ajustes Estructurales), and the Hemispheric Network for Sustainable Development and Equitable Trade (Red Hemisférica para el Desarrollo Sustentable y el Comercio Justo).
National coalitions assembled in opposition to regionalist and hemispherical integrationist schemes have also organized a series of international meetings and exchanges that have, to a certain extent, nurtured a sense of common purpose among distinct, often national-centered organizations. Thus, NAFTA negotiations precipitated frequent transborder summits between the ACN, the RMALC, and the FTC (an explosion, according to one analyst). The first of these summits, the ANC-RMALC Meeting, took place in October 1990. On January 15, 1991, a conference titled “Agricultural, Environmental, and Labor Dimensions of North American Integration” was held in Washington, D.C. Organized by a broad coalition of U.S.-based agricultural producers and labor and environmental groups, the conference also included representatives of Mexican and Canadian groups (Thorup 1991). An important meeting of the ANC, the RMALC, and the U.S. Fair Trade campaign, which resulted in a call for a more social and democratic NAFTA, took place in Mexico on April 12, 1991. Half a year later (October 25–27, 1991), the RMALC hosted an international forum in Zacatecas, Mexico, which issued the first trinational plan for the democratic and sustainable development of the NAFTA region (Red Mexicana de Acción Frente al Libre Comercio 1992). With some variations, this call was reissued in February 1992 at the Valle de Bravo Conference and on October 2, 1993, at the trinational cross-border meeting at Niagara Falls of representatives from the ACN, the RMALC, the CTC, and the American Alliance for Responsible Trade. This was the last trinational summit held before NAFTA came into effect in January 1994.
Beyond NAFTA, there has been an “unprecedented dialogue” between unions and social movements that has taken the form of occasional meetings between a wide variety of workers: “agro-industrial workers, rubber tappers, papermakers, milk producers, building and wood workers, steelworkers, automobile workers, metalworkers, professionals, government workers and bank workers” (Smith and Healy 1994). These alternative, popular, transnational summits have been sponsored by enduring organizations such as Mercosur’s Coordination Agency, as well as by shorter-lived institutions such as the Movement for the Integration of Poor People of the Southern Cone (Movimeto pela Integração dos Povos de Cone Sul).
Of late, national organizations born out of opposition to the FTA, NAFTA, and Mercosur have extended their efforts to the whole of the continent, keeping pace with the increasingly hemispherical scope of integrationist schemes. Thus, in March 1994, the RMALC organized a meeting in Oaxtepec, Mexico, that included representatives of unions and popular organizations from South and Central America, Mexico, Canada, and the United States and called for a continental social pact of sustainable development. This call was reissued at the July 1994 International Gathering for Integration, Democracy, and Development (Encuentro Internacional Integración, Democracia y Desarrollo), also organized by the RMALC (Red Mexicana de Acción Frente al Libre Comercio 1994).
This geographical broadening of international points of contacts between heretofore nationally centered social movements and organizations has also been accompanied by the emergence of thematic and sectoral regional conferences that have gone beyond bringing together groups and organizations with essentially national centers of gravity. Thus, many conferences—for example, the Gathering of the Women of the Americas (Encuentro entre las Mujeres de las Americas) (Nicaragua 1995); the three Regional Gatherings of Maquilas Working Women (Taller Regional de Trabajadoras de la Maquila), organized by the Center for Working Women (Centro de Atención a la Mujer Trabajadora A.C); 5 and the forums organized by the Association of Central American Peasants’ Organizations for Integration and Development (Asociación de Organizaciones Campesinas Centroamericanas para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo), Unión de Pequeños y Medianos Productores de Café de México, Centroamérica Y el Caribe, and the Confederación de Cooperativas de Centroamérica y el Caribe—have brought together groups and organizations of the hemisphere that have taken as their starting point not distinct national realities, but common problems (health and safety issues, job security, crop prices, the “maquilization” of Central America). Sectoral transborder cooperation ventures (between teachers and health-care, sugar, garment, and auto workers) have increasingly become commonplace, within NAFTA countries as well as those outside.
Still further removed from the regional nebula are a multiplicity of fleeting actions, gestures of solidarity, short-lived and narrowly focused campaigns, and self-contained protests inspired less by a particularly developed regionalist or hemispherist consciousness than by the necessities to struggle against a regionally constructed disciplining cadre. This movement involves resistance communities fighting locally and regionally for jobs, land, family, and community and operating in the prepolitical dimension of everyday life. I will say more later in this chapter about the political importance of this movement. For the moment, it is sufficient to emphasize that these erstwhile local and national social movements that are far removed from the core of regionalist and hemispherical institutions have begun to assemble themselves into transnational communities that have challenged the ability of state and state-centered actors to make the Americas a continent in their image.
Thus, from the a priori regionalism of groups and organizations either gravitating around the regional nebula or recasting global agendas to fit the realities of the Americas to the reluctant regionalism of resistance communities, a first family of social movements and institutions has taken shape either alongside or against contemporary schemes for regional and continental integration. As significant as this “transnationalization of civic participation” (Thorup 1991) is, it is but the first of two intimately related social processes linked to contemporary regionalism in the Americas. The second involves groups and social movements that do not transcend national politics as much as they seek to transform it.
The current projects for regional integration have put in motion a double process—most evident in Mexico and Canada—that transforms national-centered politics as much as it stimulates the growth of a wide variety of cross-border coalitions and networks and international and transnational social movements and institutions. By virtue of their membership in NAFTA and their proximity to the U.S. epicenter of the current push for continental integration, these two countries are at once at the center of the movement for continental integration in the Americas and, by their national political mythology as well as by the self-interest of social groups most urgently interpellated by regionalism, rebuffed by it. In a word, social movements, especially in Canada and Mexico, are simultaneously driven by the emerging regional context to forge international and transnational strategic links and pushed inward and encouraged to broaden the social basis of opposition to integration. The latter effort has brought such networks as the RMALC and the ANC, which were the principal driving forces behind the creation of international and transnational coalitions of social movements in the Americas, to the forefront of national-centered struggles to broaden the democratic process.
In Canada the ACN has increasingly positioned itself as an assistant to coalition politics, and the national case against integration has increasingly adopted a broader, and somewhat idealized, notion of community sovereignty. This situation presents Canadian popular sovereignty, defined by the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives as “our ability as a nation to determine our own destiny,” as a necessary barrier to transnational neoliberalism (Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives 1992a). 6 What Tony Clarke calls a “new nationalism” begets such programs as the Council of Canadians’ “Citizens’ Agenda,” the Roving People’s Commission of the People Solidarity Quebec (Commission Populaire Itinérante de Solidarité Populaire Québec), and the “People’s Agenda,” launched by the Canadian Labour Congress in December 1991 after two years of consultation with anti-NAFTA groups (Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives 1992b). If, as Alain Touraine put it, political struggles are struggles over historicity—that is to say, struggles over “the set of cultural, cognitive, economic, and ethical models by means of which a collectivity sets up relations with its environment”—then Canadian opposition to integration in the Americas appears to be as much about constructing a national collectivity as it is about assembling international and transnational coalitions of social movements (Canel 1992: 28).
In Mexico there has also been an intimate connection between the growth of regional and hemispheric coalitions and networks of social movements and the transformation of national political relationships (Osorio 1996). Indeed, campaigns against NAFTA, the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative, and, more broadly, the maquiladorization of Central America have served as anchoring points for the current movement for democratization, as have other crucial episodes such as the 1988 and 1991 elections, the 1994 devaluation of the peso, and the Chiapas uprising and subsequent peace process. This connection has been especially evident of late, in such landmark episodes in the development of grassroots democratic politics in Mexico as the Liberty Referendum (September 24–October 23, 1995), the Citizens’ Consultation (February 26, 1995), and the First Day of Condemnation of the Economic Policy of the Government (September 8, 1996). Other important episodes include events in which the RMALC played a central coordinating role alongside other newly formed social groups and networks of social movements: the Pacto de Grupos Écologistas, La Convergencia de Organismos Civiles por la Democracia, El Foro de Apoyo Mutuo, Ganando Espacio, Mujeres Punto, Entre Mujeres, and the Red Nacional de Organismos Civiles de Derechos Humanos.
Even in the United States, where coalition politics has not been stimulated by the intuitive anti-Americanism (in the U.S. sense of the term) energizing popular coalitions in Canada and Mexico, the struggle against regional and hemispheric integration has also spawned broad coalitions of unions and environmental and women’s groups that are historically unprecedented. In Mercosur countries, schemes for hemispheric and regional integration have created a context that appears favorable to the widening and broadening of links between different segments of national social movements. In Chile, this broadening has brought RECHIP to the forefront of a broad coalition of social movements—unions and women’s, peasants’, and human rights groups—that has argued for a Carta de Derechos Económicos, Sociales, Culturales y Ambientales y de Derechos Ciudadanas (Red Chile de Acción por una Iniciativa de los Pueblos 1996). To a lesser extent, Paraguayan social forces have also broadened links in response to Mercosur (Céspedes 1994).
Contemporary initiatives for regional and hemispherical integration, then, have seemingly created a context that has both obliged social movements and groups to begin organizing defensive transnational networks, coalitions, and campaigns and moved them to foment the growth of nationally based social movements of opposition. It is important to note that the two processes—building at the regional level transnational strategic and tactical relationships that attempt to meet neoliberal regionalism on its increasingly regional terrain and weaving the fabric of a national-based civil society in opposition to plans for neoliberal integration—have gone hand in hand. They are dialectical moments of struggles intimately related by both the groups and social forces involved and the political agendas put forth.
On this basis, I will explore the relationship between contemporary social movements in the Americas and the ostensibly new internationalism of social movements, assembled from below by locally bound social forces resisting the transnational restructuring of capital.
Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism in the Americas
In many ways, the process at work in social movements in the Americas is the local expression of a broader phenomenon, “social movement internationalism” (Drainville 1995). This is the internationalism of fused groups united by their immediate circumstances and by the exigencies of the moment. It is made up of local, national, and regional social forces grounded in the specificity of locally lived situations inside the general framework of the world economy and defined in opposition to neoliberal internationalism. Furthermore, this modest internationalism takes on different appearances according to local and conjunctural specificities: food riots in Caracas or Warsaw, Buenos Aires, Abidjan, or Libreville; demonstrations for work safety in Trinidad and Tobago; campaigns against sex tourism in Southeast Asia or against poor working conditions and health standards in maquiladora factories.
Increasingly, this modest internationalism has taken shape beneath the cosmopolitan grand designs of global governance. Whereas the cosmopolitan grand designs have offered a collection of master plans, global social contracts, and reformist blueprint and humanist agendas for sustainable development, the modest internationalism has begun dragging what Anthony Giddens called “emancipatory life politics” into the realm of the world economy, not on the back of universal collective actors and not on behalf of grand plans, but through site-specific coalitions assembled.
Thus, side by side on the terrain of the world economy coexist two quite distinct movements, both attempting to clarify the relationship between locality and globality. The cosmopolitan movement is most readily visible. It starts from humanity in general and interpellates locally bound actors as members of a greater overdetermining whole. As I have emphasized elsewhere (Drainville forthcoming), this first movement is intimately linked with global governance’s efforts to “bring more orderly and reliable responses to social and political issues that go beyond capacities of states to address individually” (Gordenker and Weiss 1996). Social movement internationalism, for its part, takes humanity to be a continuously unfinished project that comes into view only through contingent, contextualized, and purposeful struggles. It is not surprising that this modest, protean internationalism has not left artifacts as eloquent as the aforementioned cosmopolitan schemes. Rather, it has taken shape as a variegated collection of punctual, distinct campaigns and events, cemented not by appeals to common programs but, more materially, by the increasingly shared social and historical experience of everyday life in the world economy.
So it is in the Americas, where the recent push for hemispheric integration has spawned two distinct political postures. First and most visible are the cosmopolitan-like efforts to negotiate hemispheric grand plans and comprehensive social contracts. In terms of political positions, these efforts have come from the core as well as the periphery of the loose collection of regional and hemispheric social movements discussed in the first section of this chapter. At the core, organizations brought together by the IDB, the OAS, and the ICFTU, for example, have echoed cosmopolitan calls for a global order by presenting draft plans of their own: the Oaxaca Initiative, the Social Charter of Integration, the Latin American Social Charter, the Social Contract of the Americas. In this same spirit as well, federations brought together by Mercosur’s Coordination Agency have argued for a “Charter of fundamental rights” (Smith and Healy 1994).
Moving toward the periphery, cosmopolitan grand plans have also come from occasional international gatherings of national coalitions. Groups present at the Zacatecas summit, for example, produced a hemispheric plan that called for the protection of the environment and human rights, the renegotiation of the Mexican debt, and democratic control over economic policies (Red Mexicana de Acción Frente al Libre Comercio 1992: 83–89; Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives 1992c). 7 Similarly, the Women’s Plan of Action produced at the Valle de Bravo Conference called for a Continental Charter of Rights for Women that would guarantee “basic rights to adequate education, health care, food, nutrition, housing, stability of employment, living salaries and training, voluntary maternity, and peace.” 8 In the same spirit, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, leader of the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) and a Mexican presidential candidate in 1988, together with Bob White, Monique Simard, Jesse Jackson, and Ifigenia Martinez (also of the PRD), spoke of alternative visions of sustainable development in the hemisphere and “an ambitious negotiation for a coherent, integrated, global approach conducive to a broad, long-term continental free trade and development pact” that would incorporate trade and investment guidelines and a social charter setting norms for work-site conditions, collective bargaining, consumer protection, and labor mobility. 9
Moving still further from the core of regionalist and hemispherical organizations, participants at the Oaxtepec summit, who represented eleven countries of the hemisphere, spoke on behalf of “The People of the American Continent” about “joint strategies and alternative policies for a popular model of integration and sustainable development” (Mujer a Mujer 1994). 10 More recently, the Encuentro Internacional: Integración, Democracia y Desarrollo (Mexico City, July 1994), the largest continental meeting of popular organizations, with over 300 people from 185 community-based organizations throughout the Americas, produced a final declaration titled “Integration, Democracy and Development: Towards a Continental Social Agenda,” which addressed the need “to advance the construction of a Continental Social and Environmental Agenda that contributes to the development of an alternative proposal on integration that favors sustainable development” (Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives 1994; Red Mexicana de Acción Frente al Libre Comercio 1992).
Thus, the recent push for regional integration in the Americas has created a context favorable to a certain regionalist cum cosmopolitan imagination and the setting of explicit regionalist agendas—this from organizations at the center of integration projects as well as from movements and organizations either peripheral to the process or critical of it, wholly or in part. Inasmuch as there is an increasing congruence between grand plans coming from the center as well as the periphery of the regional nebula of the Americas, one might anticipate that the double movement outlined in the second part of this chapter will beget elements of a hemispheric social contract resulting from compromises drawn between regionalist grand plans from below and above. Already, such initiatives as the IDB’s Small Project Programme and the Fund for Women’s Leadership and Representation, and such bureaus as the IDB’s State and Civil Society Unit and the Sustainable Development Department have begun putting in place elements essential to such a hemisphere-wide compromise. They have done so by selecting NGOs and social movements worthy of being considered relevant interlocutors and responsible stakeholders and by circumscribing and mapping the political grounds on which these would-be citizens of the Americas will meet with institutions of the nebula (Inter-American Development Bank 1994).
Yet regardless of the conspicuousness of regionalist-cosmopolitan proposals and the political momentum of hemisphere-wide social pacts, they do not tell the whole story of American social movements in a context of regional integration. As we have already seen, part of the missing story is told in the manner in which international opposition to schemes of regional and hemispheric integration has begun to transform national politics, especially in Canada and Mexico and, to a lesser extent, Chile.
Furthermore, focusing exclusively on the making of regional and hemispheric grand plans would risk missing the fleeting actions, gestures of solidarity, and the evanescent and narrowly focused campaigns organized not on behalf of the people of the Americas in general by transnational organizations but by human beings living their lives somewhere in the Americas and forced by the exigencies of continental restructuring to bring their politics to new regional and hemispheric levels. Though actors involved in these reluctantly regionalist activities have not worn their regionalism on their sleeves, and though they are explicitly not offering a cosmopolitan alternative to cosmopolitan grand plans, they are nonetheless part of what is perhaps the most consequential political by-product of the recent push for integration in the Americas.
On occasions, these punctual actions have spawned enduring institutions and contributed to the making of what Barry Carr calls “a complex web of cross-border coalitions” (Carr 1994: 1), which in turn has added to the broader organization of transborder solidarity. A well-known example is the support given by Local 879 of the United Auto Workers (UAW) from St. Paul, Minnesota, and by the Mexico-U.S. Labor Coalition (formed for the occasion) to Ford workers in Cuautitlán, Mexico, after the murder of labor activist Cleto Ningo in January 1990 (a cause célèbre of inter-American labor cooperation), which led to the creation of the North American Ford Workers’ Solidarity Network (Carr 1994). Similarly, the U.S. campaign (June–August 1987) organized by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, the Teamsters, and the UAW on behalf of Lunafil workers in Amatitlán, Guatemala, was central to the formation of the U.S./Guatemala Labor Education Project, which in turn played a central role in organizing further labor protests in Guatemala, most notably for Petrosteel and Confecciones Transcontinentales workers (Hogness 1989). Likewise, the 1992 Strategic Organizing Alliance between the United Electrical Workers in the United States and the Mexican Workers’ Authentic Front (Frente Auténtico de Trabajadores or FAT) led to the creation in 1992 of the North American Worker to Worker Network, which has had a considerable impact on specific unionizing drives (for example, the 1993 campaigns at General Electric and Honeywell plants in the maquilas of Chihuahua and Ciudad Juárez) and on the formation of a core of “committed activists [capable of organizing] rapid-response solidarity action to support workers and organizers who are victims of firing, threats, violence.” 11
More often than not, however, international and transnational campaigns and solidarity actions have remained more self-contained. To borrow a distinction made by Baldemar Velasquez, president of the U.S. Farm Labor Organizing Committee, they have presented “more of an organizing response to projects of continental integration than a political response” (Alexander and Gilmore 1994: 46). Gestures of solidarity and declarations of intent—such episodes as visits paid by workers of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (Locals 506, 731, and 1010) to their General Electric counterparts in Mexico; the common declaration of solidarity signed between the National Confederation of Unions (Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux) and FAT in Montréal on April 1991; the working relationship established between the Canadian Environmental Law Association and PACO (a Mexican network) and between the Canadian Catholic Organization for Peace and the FAT; and exchange projects between antipoverty activists in Toronto and Mexico City launched at Valle de Bravo—have not led directly to any enduring regional or hemispheric institutions. Nor have increasingly common (indeed innumerable) episodes of solidarity tourism given birth to anything resembling a set of regionalist institutions. 12 Still, taken together and studied in light of recent work on the new internationalism of social movements, these episodes acquire some significance. They point to the rise of an American civil society that is assembling itself from below against an emerging neoliberal conditioning framework.
Thus, from the descriptive compendium presented in the first part of this chapter, two quite distinct political postures can be discerned: an explicitly regionalist posture akin to an American variation on a cosmopolitan theme and a more modest, reluctant regionalism echoing the new internationalism of social movements. It is, of course, well beyond the scope of this chapter to assess the political limits and possibilities of each posture. Suffice it to say, then, that the relationship between the two has already taken the form of a political struggle, which I have elsewhere categorized as a struggle between bounded reformist attempts to settle social relations and an open-ended, potentially radical reinvention of civil society in the Americas (Drainville 1997).
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, this chapter has presented a thin slice of social movements in the Americas. I have concentrated on social forces occupying relatively exogenous positions vis-à-vis state policy. Thus, missing from my analysis is a sense of the impact contemporary projects of integration have on the more intimate relationship between state and different factions of capital in countries of the Americas. Furthermore, I have investigated neither the possible recomposition of capital along continental lines nor the potential impact of such meeting points as the Miami summit and the Bolivar program, which aspire to play for capital in the Americas the role that Bilderberg meetings played in transnational bourgeois class formation in the Atlantic area during the postwar years (van der Pijl 1979). 13
Also missing from this chapter is a sense of historical continuity between the ostensibly new internationalism of social movements in the Americas and previous episodes of cross-border activism. International and transnational social movements, cross-border coalitions, and popular summits, of course, did not begin with the recent push for regional integration. The U.S.-Mexican border, to take but one active site of contemporary cross-border activism, was an important center of activism in the post–World War I period as well, when Industrial Workers of the World and Communist Party activists sought to structure internationalism from above (Carr 1994). Similarly, in the post–World War II period, the AFL-CIO attempted to frame labor internationalism through its dirigiste policies—nicknamed monroismo obrero by Latin American labor activists (Carr 1994). More recently, in the 1970s, the Latin American left constituted itself in a truly regionalist movement:
The Central American insurgent organizations cooperated closely among themselves.... So did some organizations of the Andean region. They collaborated with each other, and received guidance, training and advice from Cuba, a nation that they regarded as a tropical beacon on the hill. Eventually they also cooperated with loosely defined extracontinental allies, from Vietnam to the PLO. (Gorritti 1994)
What I have done in this chapter is highlight an important social dynamic accompanying the recent push for regional integration in the Americas and, obliquely, raise consequent political issues. Empirically, I can conclude by emphasizing the double movement of social forces in the Americas, which are beginning to transcend nationally bound politics and whose continuing efforts to transform national and local sites of politics are being energized by their growing embeddedness in international networks of social movements.
In the short term, the first of these movements will have a clearer impact on the contours of hemispheric integration. Indeed, the hemisphere is at a moment when global governance is attempting to put in place the social and political infrastructure of a new and sustainable transnational order, assembled in consultation with selected nongovernmental organizations, government-organized nongovernmental organizations, and quasi-nongovernmental organizations said to represent a global civil sociey in the making. Both the state-led push for regional integration in the Americas and social movements’ efforts to resist it seem most likely to yield elements of a hemispheric social pact that would qualify, validate, and socialize what Ricardo Grinspun and Robert Kreklewich (1994) called (in relation to the FTA and NAFTA) a “neo-liberal conditioning framework.” In the longer term, as I have argued elsewhere, the second movement, leading back from hemisphere-wide coalitions of issue-bound social movements to nationally and locally grounded coalitions, looks to be more open-ended (Drainville 1997).
Thus, rather than ending this chapter by drawing boundaries of the future shape of social movements in the Americas, I will instead surmise that the process of regional integration will further sharpen the divergences between two dialectically related but distinct movements. The former leads to the kind of social compact envisioned by agencies of global governance. The point of arrival of the later movement is indeterminate, perhaps radically so.
Endnotes
*: I wish to thank Jean-Pierre Carrier, Hossein Pouramahdi-Meibodi, and Simon Thibault for their research assistance and the following people, who have generously shared their insights with me or one of the aforementioned research assistants: Alberto Arroyo, Peter Bleyer, Paul Brown, Bruce Campbell, Tony Clarke, Carlos Heredia, Patricia Hernandez, Andrew Jackson, Anne-Marie Jackson, Lorraine Michael, Ignacio Péon, Kerianne Piester, Estrella Rueda, Ken Traynor. Back.
Note 1: U.S. Secretary of State James G. Blaine “was the original advocate of hemispheric integration” who sought to create a hemispheric free trade zone (Grunwald 1993). Back.
Note 2: The Council of Canadians’ “Campaign for Canada” was launched in the spring of 1993, in preparation for a federal election in the fall (“Trials” 1994). Back.
Note 3: On the issues of Canadian jobs lost to free trade, see, for example, the inaugural issue of the French publication of the Action Canada Network. The warning on the cover page (“Danger Maquiladora Express”) is followed by a listing of companies that have moved Canadian jobs lost to the maquiladora. The magazine ends with an article from Bruce Campbell about the 226,000 jobs lost in Canada between November 1990 and April 1991 (Réseau canadien d’action 1991a). On this subject, see also Stanford (1991); Stanford, Elwell, and Sinclair (1993); Support Committee for Maquiladora Workers (1995); Council of Canadians (1994). Back.
Note 4: CIVICUS, the World Alliance for Citizens Participation, was founded and officially launched in Barcelona in May 1993 with the first meeting of the board of directors. It held its first world assembly on January 10–13, 1995, in Mexico and constituted regional groups in six regions (Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Arab region, North America, and Eastern and Western Europe). In Mexico, it is represented by Philos. Back.
Note 5: The first meeting took place in Chihuahua, Mexico, on December 11–13, 1992. The second meeting took place in Torreón, Mexico, in July 1993, and the third in Ciudad Juárez a year later. On the first two workshops, see Centro de Atención a la Mujer Trabajadora (1992, 1993). On the three, see also Yanz (1994). Back.
Note 6: On community sovereignty, see Cavanagh (1992: 6). In the same spirit, see Clarke (1993: 1). The fetishism of Canadian popular sovereignty went so far during the anti-NAFTA campaign that even the Quebec Network Against Free Trade (Coalition Québécoise Contre le Libre-Échange), made up of such Quebec sovereignist organizations as the Quebec Workers’ Federation (Fédération des Travailleurs du Québec), the Confederation of National Workers Union (Centrale des Syndicats Nationaux), and Quebec’s Farmers Union (Union des Producteurs Agricoles), spoke in defense of Canadian federalism, which it presented as a “right to difference.” See Coalition Québécoise d’Opposition au Libre-Échange (1987) and Hébert (1991). Back.
Note 7: The Zacatecas declaration calls for a pact of continental development. On the Canadian position going into the Zacatecas conference, see Réseau canadien d’action (1991b). Back.
Note 8: The Valle de Bravo Conference of February 5–8, 1992, was organized jointly by Mujer a Mujer and Mujeres en Acción Sindical. The Women’s Plan of Action is quoted from Women to Women Global Strategies (1993). On the Valle de Bravo Conference, see also Yanz (1992). Back.
Note 9: On Cárdenas’s “democratic continental pact,” see Réseau canadien d’action (1991a: 15); and Cárdenas (1991; 1992: 96). For a more recent variation on the theme, see Alliance for Responsible Trade (1993). This document was prepared by the Alliance for Responsible Trade, the CTC, and the RMALC and was endorsed by the Action Canada Network. On the idea of an American social charter, see also Clarke (1991a: 3; 1991b: 6). For a Quebec variation on the theme of the social charter from Monique Simard, vice-president of the Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux, see Simard (1991). Back.
Note 10: The text of the Oaxtepec declaration as well as a complete list of the organizations that endorsed it can be found in Mujer a Mujer (1994). Back.
Note 11: “Proposal for Action: U.S.-Mexico-Canada Labor Solidarity Network,” submitted by United Electrical Workers (UE) of U.S. and the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo of Mexico, quoted in Carr (1994). Back.
Note 12: In the NAFTA period, solidarity tourism was principally concentrated on the border region: In May 1991 the Canadian Federation of Labour, which had until then taken a neutral stance in NAFTA debates, sent a delegation to Monterrey and Matamoros, Mexico, and in August 1991 declared its opposition to NAFTA. In June 1992 the Canadian Catholic Organisation for Development and Peace put together a “Solidarity Visitor Programme” to help build awareness of living conditions in Mexico. Also in June 1992 the Canadian Federation of Students sent two representatives to a conference of the U.S.-based International Student Trade Environment and Development Program to meet with their U.S. and Mexican counterparts, whom they saw again at the U.S.-Canada-Mexico student conference in Mexico City in the fall of 1992. In that year as well, the Support Committee for Maquiladora Workers began organizing “Border Experience Tours,” offering “a chance for groups and individuals to meet with workers leading the struggle for justice in Tijuana’s maquiladora (Support Committee for Maquiladora Workers 1995).
More recently, as projects for regional and hemispheric integration begin taking a more concrete shape, solidarity tourists have broadened their horizons beyond NAFTA countries. In April 1994, for example, representatives of Mujer a Mujer went on an Andean tour (Correspondencia 1994). In November 1994, representatives of Common Frontiers and the Action Canada Network went on their own Andean tour, which was sponsored by the Instituto Latinoamericano de Servicios Legales Alternativos in Colombia and by RECHIP in Chile. For more episodes of hemispheric solidarity tourism, see Alexander and Gilmore (1994); Hogness (1989); Garver (1989); and Leclerc (1992). Back.
Note 13: On the Bolivar program, a regionwide political and social network of business alliances with links to globalized financial capital, see Silva (1995). Back.
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