The FTAA, the United States and Europe. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series, Vol. 1 No. 6, September 2002

Granell, Francesc. (2002) The FTAA, the United States and Europe. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series, Vol. 1 No. 6, September 2002.

Abstract

The wrongly named Third Summit of the Americas held in Quebec from April 21-22, 2001, with the attendance of President George W. Bush and the leaders of 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries has served to reaffirm the project of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), launched by Presidents Johnson in 1967, and continued by George Herbert Walker Bush (father of the current president) in 1989. However, project negotiations only began during the Clinton administration, starting with the so called first Summit of the Americas, held in Miami in December 1994. Unlike previous projects, the FTAA stems from the U.S. offer to the democratic countries of the western hemisphere (Cuba is not included) to attain greater access to the North American market in exchange for accepting the regulations and political and technical conditions that are already currently in force in the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA: the USA, Canada and Mexico). The FTAA can be considered a second generation integration scheme, not limited to the mere elimination of customs tariffs, but extended to questions regarding democracy and good government, liberalization of economic reforms, competition, the opening of foreign sectors, and adoption of common technical regulations. In a certain sense it can be said that the FTAA is more like the common market driven by the Single European Act (obviously without any design of a Common External Tariff) than the initial schemes of the European Economic Community of the 1957 Treaty of Rome or of the European Free Trade Association resulting from the 1960 Stockholm Treaty. They have spent forty years, not in vain, to know today, that the non-tariff obstacles, more than the tariffs themselves, are the ones that prevent trade.