Paul Adler is an Assistant Professor of 20th Century US and World History at Colorado College. Since joining the History Department in 2018, Adler’s research and courses consist of US history, the “Global Cold War,” international political economy, and social movements.
In the wake of Adler’s recent book, No Globalization Without Representation: U.S. Activists and World Inequality, we sat down with him to discuss the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the more recent United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) — and their implications on the neoliberal world order.
How did you first become interested in activism, social change, and globalization research?
ADLER: Growing up with liberal Jewish parents, including my father who has been involved in consumer protection and consumer rights activism since the early 1970s, was a big influence on me. I had parents who constantly talked about politics, so that was the water that I swam in.
The “Battle of Seattle” was a big influence on me. That happened during my senior year of high school, and so I entered university in this brief window when “global justice,” for lack of a better term, was one of the hot topics in campus activism. It was a political moment and a set of issues that made you think globally and structurally, and that was imprinted on me for the rest of my life. I then became involved with various kinds of activism in undergrad that solidified my concern with these issues up to the present day.
I graduated in 2004, and started at Global Trade Watch two months before the vote on the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). The process was a real dragged out fight, which ended with Tom DeLay keeping the floor vote open well past the time when the ticker had ended in order for that agreement to pass (by one vote!) in the US House of Representatives. I was doing a lot of — and I mean this in a loving way — the grunt work, but a lot of what helped keep the organization going. I even wore a giant rat costume to a protest we organized, and handed out fake money to Democrats who had voted for CAFTA-DR!
What is your take on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and its successor, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)? Is the USMCA actually the improvement that it was promised to be, or merely NAFTA 2.0.?
ADLER: What NAFTA represented was an escalation of neoliberal governance. There is an analysis by some academics and many activists that posits neoliberalism is just about less government and more capitalism. There’s a more nuanced argument however, which my book makes, building on the work of activists and scholars, that neoliberalism, at its core, is actually not about getting rid of government, but about using government to protect and promote private industry. So that is where you get the investment protection provisions and heightened enforcement of intellectual property rights we see in trade deals today. These are the things where the government or an international body is being proactive, but in the interests of private enterprise. Thus, NAFTA was an early example of putting a lot of different neoliberal ideas, investment protections, lower tariffs, intellectual property protections, and so on and so forth together within one agreement.
NAFTA was an early example of putting a lot of different neoliberal ideas, investment protections, lower tariffs, intellectual property protections, and so on and so forth together within one agreement.
The USMCA fight happened as I was finishing up the book. From my understanding, on a few somewhat narrow issues of certain kinds of labor rights and some of the Chapter 11 investment protections there were notable improvements that were won through transnational coalition building and the heightened strength of what I would call the “Social Democratic wing” of the Democratic Party — Warren, Sanders, Jayapal, so on. But from talking to friends in environmental advocacy, there are many areas of USMCA where there was no improvement and potentially even worsening of environmental protections. This outcome resulted partly from different advocacy groups with different issue goals working separately based on their differing perceptions of what a “victory” would be. That said, I don’t think anyone on the progressive side sees USMCA as a model for future trade deals.
Much of your work focuses on social movements and organizing in response to globalization. Where can we draw inspiration and lessons for our activism today?
ADLER: Let me first start by singing the praises of the Green New Deal because I think the GND framing was a huge step forward, where it was finally grounded in a concrete form. The GND frames the issue as not only about sacrifice and things just getting worse, which is how most framing about climate change has been since activism around it really started in the 1980s. Instead, the GND is about what people — especially working class people, more impoverished people, and middle class people — could get from a program that also addresses the climate crisis. There are some really powerful lessons to be learned about the GND from some of the grassroots political organizations that went into constructing the larger New Deal political order. So, overall, I think it is huge.
You can learn more about NAFTA and USMCA here. No Globalization Without Representation: U.S. Activists and World Inequality can be purchased through the Center’s Bookshop link and the University of Pennsylvania Press’ website.
It is “the story of how consumer and environmental activists became significant players in U.S. and world politics at the twentieth century's close.” This book examines the work of different non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as Friends of the Earth and Public Citizen, “while showing how public interest groups helped ensure that a version of liberalism willing to challenge corporate power did not vanish from U.S. politics.” Such groups worked together to “forge a progressive coalition that lobbied against the emerging neoliberal world order and in favor of what they called ‘fair globalization.’ ” This book “also illuminates how professionalized organizations became such a critical part of liberal activism — and how that has affected the course of U.S. politics to the present day.” — University of Pennsylvania Press
