I do not like what happened in the EU-CARIFORUM Economic Partnership Agreement. I think, to adapt what the great theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, said in another context, we were forced to board a train going in one (bad – for us) direction and then allowed to run along the train’s corridor in the opposite direction and boast how fast and well we ran.
The runaway train is the old but still gleaming locomotive of reciprocal free trade. Ideological free trade imagines a world in which everyone benefits by specializing in their strong suits and exporting the results to each other. This argument was put forward by Adam Smith in 1775 in The Wealth of Nations before being widely popularized by David Ricardo in the early 19th century. Its moment of glory was the repeal in 1846 of the Corn Laws, which had protected English farmers by taxing imported grain. But this repeal, it never seems to be noted, was simply to provide cheap food for poorly paid peasants who needed an incentive to man England’s burgeoning Industrial Revolution. The English authorities made quite sure that all sorts of rules and regulations continued in force in respect of its industrial imports and exports. Free trade applied if and when it suited them. Then as now – free trade applies only when the powerful see an advantage for themselves.
The crude inhumanity of free trade ideology can be seen in its obsession with specialization. Human beings in any given place may not all wish to devote themselves to low-wage mining or off-shore computer hack work or accommodating, driving around and entertaining tourists. They may wish to do quite other things like farming or researching new medications or making a range of products from clothes to delicate ceramic ware, even if people in other places can do these things cheaper. Should the market be organized so that they cannot sell their produce or try to find the cure for disease? Free trade says yes.
They must do only what they can do “competitively,” that is cheapest. But societies are not simply production units. Societies limited to specialties are no longer real societies, they are subject societies in the worst sense.
The leading free traders tend to be led by the executives of transnational corporations. They like a theory which permits their corporations to produce wherever production is cheapest and sell wherever prices are highest. It isn’t their business if this in the end is a self-defeating idea. After all, those paid least to produce are least likely to be rich enough to consume. And those who pay most to consume are unlikely to be able to do so if they’re unemployed.
Like all ideologies, free trade contains undeclared contempt for the individual citizen. Countries catering to the real and multitudinous needs of the marvellous variety of people with infinitely different opinions, skills and life-ambitions which make up any worthwhile society, do best when they engage in careful freedom and well-judged balance.
Free trade in certain circumstances in certain areas can be a boon for many people. In others it will be a disaster and provoke disorder and suffering. At the same time, while protection used as a general rule is a recipe for local exploitation, when used carefully and precisely it can promote growth and healthy diversification particularly among some of the weaker parties in international competition.
Free trade and protection, once stripped of their baleful ideological consistencies, are useful tools which can be balanced for general benefit and stability. The EPA which we have been forced, with no “millennium goals” sensitivity at all, to embrace, circumscribes our capacity in the medium and longer term to exercise that valuable balance.
