Twenty years of bilaterals.org, twenty years of fighting FTAs

When bilaterals.org was set up back in 2004, the world looked rather different. There was a global network of activist organisations fighting the World Trade Organisation (WTO), coordinated for the most part by Our World is Not for Sale, while social movement struggles against bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) and investment treaties were very isolated from each other. These were the days when IndyMedia Centres played a critical role on the alternative media front, and people were just starting to use something called instant messaging.

The original impetus behind bilaterals.org was to provide a one-stop spot on the internet where people could see the full array of bilateral trade and investment deals raining down on us and what folks were doing to fight back. No such resource existed back then. And the aim was to make it open, participatory and people-driven, to stoke the exchange of experiences and strategies. That meant using open-source software, making it a collective site and providing interactive tools like forums and self-publishing.

We called it bilaterals.org to stress that this was a space to look at and discuss what’s happening outside the WTO. For many of us, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which became law in 1994, was the first FTA of our times as it set a blueprint for many similar, often bilateral, deals. It was comprehensive in scope, covering issues from investment to intellectual property. It went beyond the international trade rules agreed to at the WTO. And it unleashed a powerful movement of social resistance as it was understood as a tool of imperial control. It was not just about advancing neoliberalism; NAFTA was a geopolitical project. The same lessons emerged from the broad social movement against the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

When bilaterals.org was launched, it quickly became a tool to visibilise and generate support for similar struggles against similar FTAs and bilateral investment treaties in Thailand, Costa Rica, South Korea, Colombia, Nicaragua, Morocco and elsewhere. Whether pushed by the US, Japan, European blocs or Canada, a whole wave of new trade and investment pacts promised huge shifts in power and policies for the benefit of corporate lobbies.

First, the good news: a number of these deals were stopped or seriously scaled back. The US-Thai deal was defeated. The EU-African economic partnership agreements only got partly through. The mammoth EU-US agreement was canned. And India pulled out of RCEP. All of these, and yet other examples, were the result of effective social movement pressure and resistance.

Another piece of good news is that the days of comprehensive trade deals like NAFTA seem to be numbered. It’s true that some wide-scale agreements are still moving ahead, like the EU-Mercosur deal or the revised EU-Chile agreement. But governments are increasingly turning to more focused pacts, limited to certain sectors, like digital trade. We’ve seen this in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, but also in the pragmatic I2U2 partnership between India, Israel, the US and the UAE. These deals bind concrete trade and investment plans to geopolitical commitments, like mini-FTAs.

First of all, social movements against trade and investment deals have lost the depth, breadth and meaning that they had in the past. Until a decade ago, these fights were societal upheavals, mobilising millions of ordinary people into the streets and were part of every day national discussions. With few exceptions, such as the the Chilean people’s resistance against the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for a Trans-Pacific Partnership, this intensity and mobilisation has died down, and fights now seem reduced to campaigns, often led by NGOs. It would be good to see how to rekindle broader political struggles around these deals, if and when this makes sense.

Secondly, the impacts of the last 20 years of trade and investment agreements seem to have been accepted or absorbed in many countries, and things just move on. Whether we are talking about new standards for food production (e.g. the acceptance of GMOs or seed patenting), new roles for foreign trading partners in domestic policy-making (through FTA dialogue spaces) or domestic producers and companies losing markets to the new competition, the results are playing out as planned. In that process, we do see economic power shifting more and more to transnational corporations, as groups feared, while all the negative social impacts are blamed on “scapegoats”, like immigrants, migrant workers and refugees. Covid-19 notwithstanding, FTAs have pushed global capitalism further ahead and deeper inside our society.

Third, efforts to “tame” capitalism by making trade and investment deals a little more environment-, labour- or human rights-friendly, especially through the use of nice language, are also working – but in a way that ultimately perpetuates the very architecture of power that these deals promote. Take what’s happening in Africa as an example. European and US interests have long tried to get Western models of trade and investment policy adopted in Africa and they've slowly managed do so – be it through trade deals, development finance and debt, the WTO itself, and now in the form of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The AfCFTA may be Africa-led, but it is Western-shaped. Even the so-called “progressive” elements of the AfCFTA – like its rules on which investments will be protected, drawing from efforts to socialise capitalism and give it a nicer face – seem to be written straight out of a Western playbook. These dynamics entrench neoliberalism, they do not stop it.

We must stop FTAs and bring an end to the regime they have instilled in so many countries. It's not just about how we trade and invest. We have to push social interests – for food sovereignty, climate justice, environmental and technological commons, local markets, social enterprises, public services, living wages and social protections – first. Trade and investment should support them, not the other way around. Only then might we get on the right path. Let’s hope that open platforms like bilaterals.org can stick around another 20 years to accompany us in that struggle, as we reclaim and build a clear and radical political and economic vision.

Image: María Chevalier ([email protected])