Can Free Trade End War?

(Part 2 of a 3-part series)

Probably since the first cavemen crawled out of their burrows to exchange firewood for leopard skins, trading relationships have led to strife and war (credit). Prof. Antony Anghie’s work traces the birth of international law—at least in part—to the need to regulate these relationships. And my own recent scholarship focuses on the Berlin Conference of 1884, an attempt by European powers to avert a trade-related war by “peaceably” carving up the African continent into trade zones. Thus, war and trade have always been linked, but the civilizing influence of time was said to have moved us away from the raw grab for power and riches so prevalent in earlier centuries. Trade would now be a source of peace rather than strife (so claims Thomas Friedman in his Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention— “No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other”). In my last post, I asked whether that was possible: Can free trade end war? Prof. Colin Picker’s article, Trade and Security: Empiricism, Change, Emotion & Relevancy suggests not. Picker maintains the “new flavors” of armed conflict are such that trade policy will have little influence on them. In post-Cold War conflicts, he argues, economic factors are not the source of the conflict so much as ethnic or religious tensions. Given that reality, trade policy is a poor substitute for a more robust peace policy, and trade officials are poorly equipped to handle the problem in any case.
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:

Belgrade is a modern city integrated with Western Europe, with a population that wants to be part of today's main global trends . . . 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.

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. Rather than de-linking trade policy from modern wars, trade policy should be more conscious of the nexus between trade and peace. 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. In my next post, I want to explore the question of how might we organize trade policy to address some modern conflicts.

Can Free Trade End War?

(Part 1 of a 3-part series)

I confess: Sometimes, I look at my career as an international trade lawyer and scholar and wonder if it has gone awry. Family legend has it that at nine years old I told my dad I wanted to be “the international Thurgood Marshall.” It is a testament to my dad that his only response was “great!” As an immigrant from Haiti who still spoke “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s name in a whisper in our New York city apartment, my father’s experience of law, lawyers and the legal system was vastly different from my own. But he gave me his blessing. In college and law school, I was something of an “agitator”: I protested the last vestiges of U.S involvement with apartheid South Africa, I worked with Haitians seeking political asylum in Miami, and I joined protest movements of various stripes (I was even a vegetarian for seven long years). At NYU, I crammed in as many international law courses as I could fit alongside a heavy litigation schedule in the immigration rights clinic. 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. Suddenly, everyone around me was talking about getting a job at a major law firm. “Stamping your ticket” was now de rigueur if one hoped to become a successful lawyer. Soon enough, I found myself trudging to my cog-in-the-wheel job at a major law firm where I met my first love: International Trade law. I don’t mean to suggest I actually enjoyed sifting through boxes of receipts to validate dumping margins, but the Big Ideas of international trade I found very appealing indeed. Free trade brought prosperity, abundance, peace and security to all nations—at least in principle.
The more I learned, the more I became convinced I had discovered the Theory of Everything: Free Trade = Peace + Prosperity – (Ignorance + Zenophobia). Or even more succinctly: Free Trade = Peace.
Yes, I really was that idealistic. I probably still am to some extent (although I would now add that free trade must be fair). But this idealism is put to the test when I consider the way war can unravel in a heartbeat the prosperity that 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 I have gotten it all wrong. Perhaps the path I forged in college and law school—that of direct representation and a focus on individual rights—is the surest path to a more just world order?
I came across an interesting article the other day, which forced me to consider the question. In Trade and Security: Empiricism, Change, Emotion & Relevancy, law prof Colin Picker makes the point that “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 complex mélange of emotions and passions—suggests that “it is best if international trade is not explicitly harnessed to the goal of armed conflict reduction.”
The premise contradicts basic free trade dogma. 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, that is no longer true). Trade is meant to be a pacifying force just as much as it is meant to create prosperity. Suggesting otherwise, to my mind, calls into question the very relevance of trade policy in handling twenty-first century problems.
The question I am left to ponder is this: Can free trade end war? I want to delve more deeply into that question in my next post.