Abstract
The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) represented one of the most ambitious regional governance projects of the post-Cold War era. It was ambitious not only in terms of the geographical scope of the zone that would have been established, one that spanned the entire Western Hemisphere, but more important, in terms of the variation in the characteristics of the different participating countries. Specifically, the FTAA encompassed some the world’s most developed economies as well as some of its poorest, underdeveloped economies. For example, in 2005, the year the FTAA negotiations collapsed, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in millions of the combined states of South America, the Caribbean, and Central America amounted to US$2,698,103, while the GDP of the United States alone amounted to US$12,665,857.1 These differences were limited to not only objective criteria such as GDP but also significant subjective ones, such as historical experience and identity. Therefore, the negotiation of the FTAA was made up of a group of unlikely, dissimilar, and, in some cases, distant participants.
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Notes
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, “Nominal and Real GDP, Total and Per Capita, Annual, 1970–2013,” accessed Oct. 15, 2014, http://unctadstat.unctad.org/wds/TableViewer/tableView.aspx?ReportId=96.
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Ray Kiely argues that—contrary to the claims of the theory of comparative advantage, which posits that economic development will accrue to states that specialize in exporting goods that they can produce efficiently—increased international economic integration has not led to a leveling out between the core and the periphery but has rather increased “domination and marginalization” between both elements. Ray Kiely, Rethinking Imperialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 170.
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© 2015 Marcel Nelson
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Nelson, M. (2015). Introduction. In: A History of the FTAA. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137412751_1
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