276 The making of American foreign policy
industry, large business versus small business. Overlaid on this complexity is
a thick soup of ideological attitudes: free trade versus protectionism, inter-
nationalism versus isolationism, environmental concerns, anti-globalisation,
and concern with human rights. Pluralism can go no further, yet the president
and the administration must attempt to pick their way through this thicket,
with the knowledge that in international trade policy, unlike the sphere of
military action, every aspect of the outcome will be subject to the approval of
Congress. In principle, successive administrations have been committed to a
free trade policy, but in practice they come up against the deeply entrenched
attitudes of those who consider that they will be adversely affected by this
policy, or those who consider it to be morally indefensible.
The effects of this context of policy-making can be seen in the creation of
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was approved
by Congress in 1993. This established a free trade area covering Mexico, the
United States and Canada; in principle it provided for the abolition of tariffs
and trade barriers between these three countries, but in practice President
Clinton had to make so many concessions to different groups of American
producers in order to get the necessary legislation through Congress that
the actual result was far from the creation of a genuine free trade area. This
issue created internal divisions within both political parties, and in order to
win the votes in Congress President Clinton had to rely on the support of
Republicans, as a majority of his own party were opposed to the Agreement.
An extraordinary coalition formed in opposition to the passage of the legisla-
tion. The democratic leadership in the House of Representatives was joined
by a most unusual alliance of pressure groups. David Houghton describes it
thus:
The labour unions were especially determined to defeat the agreement... The congressional black caucus and former Democratic Party candi-
date Jesse Jackson had similar misgivings... The conservative journalist
and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, the consumer advocate and
Green Party candidate Ralf Nader and the Reform Party presidential
candidate and Texan billionaire Ross Perot all weighed in against NAF-
TA.
The negotiations for NAFTA had started under President Bush and there
was much more support for the agreement among industrial and commercial
interests. Clinton had to rely therefore on the support of Republicans to pass
the measure; in the event the vote in the Senate was thirty-four Republicans
and twenty-seven Democrats for the agreement, and ten Republicans and
twenty-eight Democrats against; in the House there was a similar pattern
- 132 Republicans and 102 Democrats in favour, 43 Republicans and 156
Democrats against.
The federal government’s involvement in the World Trade Organization
(WTO) has been, if anything, more contentious. The WTO was the successor