Does Free Trade = Peace?

by Marjorie Florestal

“Why?” my father finally asked. As an immigrant from Haiti who still spoke “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s name in a whisper--almost as if speaking the name aloud might actually bring the man to life right there in our apartment--my father’s experience of law, lawyers and the legal system was vastly different from my own. He could not understand my desire to fight for social justice. Where my father came from, that sort of work always brought bad news.

The truth is at least part of the reason I wanted to be a lawyer was because my father did not want that for me; I had a defiant streak that would test the saintliness of Mother Theresa. But I also longed to "save the world," whatever that might mean to a nine year old. Thurgood Marshall seemed to be a man who understood that desire. He was an agitator in the best sense of the word, and I followed in his footsteps in the only way I could. In college and law school, I protested the last vestiges of U.S involvement with apartheid South Africa, worked with Haitians seeking political asylum in Miami, and joined protest movements of various stripes; I was even a vegetarian for seven long years. I felt I was on the path to doing for international law what Thurgood Marshall had done for American justice (oh the arrogance of youth!)

And then someone sent in the decoy—that traitor of a horse the cowboys deploy to roundup the Wild Ones. Just as I was graduating law school, everyone around me began talking about getting a job at a major law firm. “Stamping your ticket” was now de rigeur if one hoped to become a successful lawyer. Soon enough, I found myself trudging to my cog-in-the-wheel job as an international trade associate at a major D.C. law firm. Sitting in a plush office sifting through mounds of receipts and documents, I felt I had strayed far from my self-imposed path. But little by little, the impossible began to happen: As I learned to calculate dumping margins (don't ask!), I actually found myself falling in love with international trade law. Trade was not about the small things. It was about creating prosperity, abundance, peace and security. Trade was about freedom.

The more I learned, the more I became convinced that in free trade I had discovered the Theory of Everything:

Free Trade = Peace + Prosperity – (Ignorance + Xenophobia)

Or even more succinctly:

Free Trade = Peace

But my theory is put to the test when countries go to war. War can unravel in a heartbeat the prosperity trade takes generations to produce. When I reflect on the recent fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the slow-burn in the Congo and the Ivory Coast, and the continuing instability in Haiti, I wonder if free trade can truly prevail over the cataclysmic destruction of war.

Setting the Stage:

The year was 1803 and a rag-tag group of freedom fighters, led by the charismatic Toussaint Louverture, fought with unyielding strength and conviction against Napoleon’s army. The army was sent to regain control of a rebellious island of slaves. A verdant land blessed with fertile soil and abundant natural resources, Haiti had once been the richest jewel in Napoleon’s crown. Exports of Haitian sugar, cotton and coffee in the past accounted for one-half of all of metropolitan France’s foreign trade. Napoleon sought to retain his pearl of great price [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Pearl], but the Haitian Revolution (1791-1803) would foreshadow his ultimate defeat at Waterloo twelve years later.

On January 1, 1804, founding father Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared the independence of Ayiti (a Taino Indian word meaning “mountainous country”), which became only the second free state in the Western Hemisphere, and the only successful slave revolution in modern history. But what the rebels failed to realize was that their biggest battle lay before them. Terrified these newly-freed slaves would give “big ideas” to America’s own shackled masses, President Thomas Jefferson refused to recognize the newly independent nation (despite having aided it in the struggle). Instead, Jefferson imposed a trade embargo on Haiti, and with the stroke of a pen he achieved what Napoleon’s army could not. The four year embargo economically crippled the newborn republic for years to come.

Trade is a powerful tool. Managed well, free trade can bring peace, advancement and prosperity. And its absence brings economic marginalization from which a country may never recover. The architects of the modern trading system understood the power of free trade.

In 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill secretly met on a ship off the coast of Newfoundland to chart the course for peace and freedom after World War II. They envisioned a new world order where free trade was one of the guiding principles. Only in free trade could we avoid the descent into chaos war inevitably brings. Churchill and Roosevelt's meeting would give birth to the plethora of international economic institutions created in the late 1940s—from the Bretton Woods Institutions to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization).

The GATT self-consciously sought to harness the power of trade to create a more just world order. Trade would now be a source of peace rather than strife. The United States' chief negotiator to GATT back in 1947, W.L. Clayton, explained the purpose of free trade in this way:

The questions with which [free trade] is really concerned are whether there is to be economic peace or economic war, whether nations are to be drawn together or torn apart, whether men are to have work or to be idle, whether their families are to eat or go hungry, whether their children are to face the future with confidence or with fear.

The adoption of free trade principles on a global scale has led to an explosion of economic prosperity the likes of which the world has never seen before. Yes, it is true that wealth is not evenly distributed--the gulf between prosperous and poor countries and people grows ever-wider by the day. But the maldistribution of wealth that globalization creates only serves to make the point that free trade creates prosperity. A more difficult question is whether free trade can end war.

Can Free Trade End War?

Trade is meant to be a pacifying force just as much as it is meant to create prosperity, and the prevailing view is that free trade leads to peace. Perhaps Thomas Friedman put it best when he said “No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.” Sadly, Friedman's Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention disintegrated with the war in Kosovo. So, does that mean the linkage between free trade and peace no longer holds true? Colin Picker, a law professor at University of Missouri, would answer "yes."

In Trade and Security: Empiricism, Change, Emotion & Relevancy, Picker maintains “after generations of study and the employment of sophisticated economic, statistical and scientific techniques, we are unable to say whether the optimistic liberal trade views [that free trade leads to peace] are supported by the evidence.” Picker argues the nature of modern conflicts—the fact that they are primarily internal ethnic/tribal disputes that call up a complicated mélange of complex emotion and passions—suggests “it is best if international trade is not explicitly harnessed to the goal of armed conflict reduction.”

The premise contradicts a key reason why the principle of free trade was created in the first place. Trade was to generate prosperity, which in turn would produce peace. A few years ago, I read Thomas Barnett’s, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century and was struck by his charge that modern instabilities in the world order stem almost exclusively from those countries left out of the “functioning core” of globalization. In other words, those countries that are "off the globalization grid," that are left to wallow in poverty and ignorance will serve as the greatest challenge to peace in the Twenty-first century. If we fail to bring the prosperity trade engenders to every corner of the globe, then we risk having those neglected and long-forgotten castaways visit us in our own backyards. Rather than de-linking trade policy from modern wars, trade policy should be more conscious of the nexus between trade and peace.

While I would agree that in many (if not most) conflicts, trade policy standing alone is not enough to achieve a lasting peace, I also suggest that it is often the first step. Whether internally or externally generated, war is a failure of diplomacy that necessarily leads to a breakdown in linkages between the warring parties. Trade is a way of re-establishing some ties, which hopefully prove too lucrative to dissolve permanently. Friedman claims, for example, that while the war in Kosovo was a refutation of his Golden Arches theory, it was the exception that proved the rule. “Once NATO turned out the lights in Belgrade, and shut down the power grids and the economy, Belgrade's citizens demanded an end to the war. It's that simple. Not only did NATO soldiers not want to die for Kosovo -- neither did the Serbs of Belgrade. They wanted to be part of the world, more than they wanted Kosovo to be part of them. They wanted McDonald's re-opened, much more than they wanted Kosovo re-occupied.”

Can free trade truly end war? Standing alone, the answer is probably no. But there is much that free trade can do in conjunction with other efforts. We must begin to explore and exploit that potential for the greater good. One thing we know for sure: We need an end to war—by any means at our disposal.

Conclusion

I started this discussion with a confession: At times, I worry that in straying from a career focused on preserving individual rights through direct representation of “real people,” I have not fulfilled the longing of my nine year old self to become the “international Thurgood Marshall.” But on good days, I recognize that law and justice represent an infinite (and hopefully intertwined) line, and at whatever point in the continuum we intervene to make a worthy contribution is a job well done. Marshall surely would have agreed.