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Debunking the North American Union Conspiracy Theory
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on June 15, 2007, Printed on June 15, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/54184/
Just what is the North American Union (NAU)?
There are several ways to answer that question. First, the NAU is an
increasingly popular conspiracy theory about a group of shadowy and
mostly nameless international "elites" who are planning to "replace
the United States" -- in the words of Jerome Corsi, a key figure in
the SwiftBoat Veterans for Truth project and a leading NAU
conspiracist -- with a transnational government. The theory holds that
the borders between Mexico, Canada and the United States are in the
process of being erased, covertly, by a group of "globalists" whose
ultimate goal is to replace national governments in D.C., Ottawa and
Mexico City with a European-style political union and a bloated EU-
style bureaucracy.
The North American Union story is an offspring of the John Birch
Society right, with its attendant xenophobia and paranoia. It comes
complete with a shadowy international cabal intent on stabbing decent,
hard-working Americans in the back -- Dolchstoss! Articles and
websites condemning the NAU flourish in that political space where
right- and left-wing populism become indistinguishable, along with a
dozen other fundamentally reactionary theories of what's really going
on with our contemporary political economy.
To fully understand the growing fascination with the NAU in various
corners of the internet, one has to view it also as a cultural
phenomenon; it's an entirely logical reaction to a process of
corporate-driven global integration that feeds into Americans' very
real and wholly valid economic anxieties. As David Moberg recently
noted, Americans, "by a margin of 46 percent to 28 percent, [believe]
that trade deals have harmed the United States," and four times as
many people surveyed by Pew said U.S. trade deals had lowered wages
than the number who believed the deals had raised them. According to
Public Citizen, opponents of NAFTA-style trade deals picked up 37
seats over defenders of the status quo during last year's midterms.
But, despite that political landscape, one of the first things the new
Democratic majority did when it got into power was cut a new "Grand
Bargain" with the White House to push through more of the same kind of
trade deals. As David Sirota pointed out, the Democratic leadership
did it in secret, behind closed doors. And it did it over the
objections of many of the freshman lawmakers that gave them their
majority in the first place.
With that as a backdrop, it should come as no surprise that people
tend to look for a wizard working behind the curtain. The idea that
shadowy forces beyond our perception are really in charge of steering
the most powerful country in the world is reinforced every time a
bipartisan "trade" deal with little or no support gets jammed through
Congress.
Ultimately, though, the answer to the question "What is the NAU?" is
this: It is absolutely nothing. The NAU exists only as a proposal
contained in one of a thousand academic and/or wonky papers published
each year that advocate all manner of idealistic but ultimately
unrealistic approaches to social, economic and political problems.
Most of these get passed around in their own circles and eventually
filed away and forgotten by junior staffers in congressional offices.
Some of these papers, however, become touchstones for the conspiracy-
minded and form the basis of all kinds of unfounded fears.
Such is the case with the monograph, "Building a North American
Community," which was produced by a group of eggheads at the Council
on Foreign Relations and their counterparts in Mexico and Canada. It
calls for a North American economic union to stretch from Canada's
northern border to Mexico's southernmost point. It would basically be
a customs union -- similar to the old European Community before it
became the European Union -- with expedited travel between countries,
a single market with standardized external tariffs, etc.
One should never say "never," but barring a remarkable change in all
three countries' political cultures (but most importantly that of the
United States), the kind of formal North American political union
described by the theory's proponents has zero chances of getting off
the ground any time in the foreseeable future.
A kernel of truth
I am the last person in the world to argue that there's no reason to
worry about the push for more and more regional economic and security
integration. At its heart, as is always the case with these kind of
dark plots, are some real dots. The analyses go off the rails when
those dots are connected.
For those of us who have spent years trying to raise awareness of
what's really going on in the movement to blanket the earth in "free
trade" deals -- geared as they are more towards compelling countries
to deregulate and protecting investors than by any genuine desire to
free up trade -- it's somewhat satisfying to see new interest being
paid to an issue that gets far too little attention. Like other
conspiracies, the problem with the North American Union is that it is
a distraction; it represents a massive energy drain.
The NAU monograph explicitly rejects an EU-style political union and
the kind of supernational institutions that have grown up like
mushrooms in Brussels. One of the principles that guided the committee
that drafted the proposal was that the NAU would not resemble the EU:
North America is different from other regions of the world and must
find its own cooperative route forward. A new North American community
should rely more on the market and less on bureaucracy, more on
pragmatic solutions to shared problems than on grand schemes of
confederation or union, such as those in Europe. We must maintain
respect for each other's national sovereignty.
Despite that rather clear statement of principle -- and the fact that
the paper lays out a series of recommendations that do not include the
creation of some new continental supergovernment -- it does call for
new "dispute" resolution mechanisms, the free flow of people between
the United States and Canada (but not between Mexico and its northern
neighbors as long as a large disparity between workers' incomes
remains) and a unionwide regulatory framework.
Another "dot" that makes up the supposed NAU is the Security and
Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), a chat-shop for
American, Canadian and Mexican leaders to meet annually and discuss
common security and economic issues.
And then there's NAFTA, and the so-called "NAFTA Highway." These are
not one but several truck "transit corridors" that backers hope will
eventually connect Mexican, American and Canadian markets more
effectively and facilitate trade. With construction funds authorized
by Congress in dribs and drabs since 1997, and very little work
completed south of the Mississippi, it's unclear whether the roads
will ever be more than a waste of a few hundred million in taxpayer
funds.
Robert Pastor, an academic specializing in elections at American
University and one of the authors of the NAU proposal, also suggested
the adoption of a common currency, like the Euro. That suggestion,
however, wasn't included in the NAU "recommendations."
The context in which these marginally related dots emerged is an
important reason why they've taken on a sinister air in many people's
minds. NAFTA was part of a larger push for legal and regulatory
"harmonization" between the three countries of North America. Business
groups and other "trade" lobbyists have in fact advocated greater
consistency in North America's regulatory environment, and that always
means decreasing, not increasing, labor, environmental, workplace and
other standards. It is not the highest common denominator that backers
want to see spread far and wide.
Make no mistake, I've shed blood opposing corporate trade deals like
NAFTA and the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and there are very real
and very significant problems with the push toward harmonization and
the relentless assault on national sovereignty represented by the arm-
twisting that goes into forcing a trade "consensus." Construction of
key parts of the "NAFTA highway" have raised serious environmental
concerns. We don't need to expand NAFTA or the other institutions of
international commerce; we need a pause in the march towards global
(or in this case, regional) economic integration, not more of the
same.
And Canadian activists like Maude Barlow of the Council for Canadians
have warned for some time that the SPP is part of a push, financed by
Canadian and U.S. corporate think tanks, to essentially bring an end
to Canada's social welfare state through regional integration. (More
detail can be found in this PDF posted by the Council of Canadians.)
The right stuff
These, and a number of other concerns, are entirely valid. But the NAU
story is a creature of the far right, and, as such, those who have
"connected the dots" have done so according to their ideological
preferences. The North American Union they've conjured up comes with
the assumptions embraced by the coterie of wing-nuts who have promoted
it.
Chief among them is World Net Daily, the "archconservative news site"
responsible for such hard-hitting journalism as its recent expos
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on June 15, 2007, Printed on June 15, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/54184/
Just what is the North American Union (NAU)?
There are several ways to answer that question. First, the NAU is an
increasingly popular conspiracy theory about a group of shadowy and
mostly nameless international "elites" who are planning to "replace
the United States" -- in the words of Jerome Corsi, a key figure in
the SwiftBoat Veterans for Truth project and a leading NAU
conspiracist -- with a transnational government. The theory holds that
the borders between Mexico, Canada and the United States are in the
process of being erased, covertly, by a group of "globalists" whose
ultimate goal is to replace national governments in D.C., Ottawa and
Mexico City with a European-style political union and a bloated EU-
style bureaucracy.
The North American Union story is an offspring of the John Birch
Society right, with its attendant xenophobia and paranoia. It comes
complete with a shadowy international cabal intent on stabbing decent,
hard-working Americans in the back -- Dolchstoss! Articles and
websites condemning the NAU flourish in that political space where
right- and left-wing populism become indistinguishable, along with a
dozen other fundamentally reactionary theories of what's really going
on with our contemporary political economy.
To fully understand the growing fascination with the NAU in various
corners of the internet, one has to view it also as a cultural
phenomenon; it's an entirely logical reaction to a process of
corporate-driven global integration that feeds into Americans' very
real and wholly valid economic anxieties. As David Moberg recently
noted, Americans, "by a margin of 46 percent to 28 percent, [believe]
that trade deals have harmed the United States," and four times as
many people surveyed by Pew said U.S. trade deals had lowered wages
than the number who believed the deals had raised them. According to
Public Citizen, opponents of NAFTA-style trade deals picked up 37
seats over defenders of the status quo during last year's midterms.
But, despite that political landscape, one of the first things the new
Democratic majority did when it got into power was cut a new "Grand
Bargain" with the White House to push through more of the same kind of
trade deals. As David Sirota pointed out, the Democratic leadership
did it in secret, behind closed doors. And it did it over the
objections of many of the freshman lawmakers that gave them their
majority in the first place.
With that as a backdrop, it should come as no surprise that people
tend to look for a wizard working behind the curtain. The idea that
shadowy forces beyond our perception are really in charge of steering
the most powerful country in the world is reinforced every time a
bipartisan "trade" deal with little or no support gets jammed through
Congress.
Ultimately, though, the answer to the question "What is the NAU?" is
this: It is absolutely nothing. The NAU exists only as a proposal
contained in one of a thousand academic and/or wonky papers published
each year that advocate all manner of idealistic but ultimately
unrealistic approaches to social, economic and political problems.
Most of these get passed around in their own circles and eventually
filed away and forgotten by junior staffers in congressional offices.
Some of these papers, however, become touchstones for the conspiracy-
minded and form the basis of all kinds of unfounded fears.
Such is the case with the monograph, "Building a North American
Community," which was produced by a group of eggheads at the Council
on Foreign Relations and their counterparts in Mexico and Canada. It
calls for a North American economic union to stretch from Canada's
northern border to Mexico's southernmost point. It would basically be
a customs union -- similar to the old European Community before it
became the European Union -- with expedited travel between countries,
a single market with standardized external tariffs, etc.
One should never say "never," but barring a remarkable change in all
three countries' political cultures (but most importantly that of the
United States), the kind of formal North American political union
described by the theory's proponents has zero chances of getting off
the ground any time in the foreseeable future.
A kernel of truth
I am the last person in the world to argue that there's no reason to
worry about the push for more and more regional economic and security
integration. At its heart, as is always the case with these kind of
dark plots, are some real dots. The analyses go off the rails when
those dots are connected.
For those of us who have spent years trying to raise awareness of
what's really going on in the movement to blanket the earth in "free
trade" deals -- geared as they are more towards compelling countries
to deregulate and protecting investors than by any genuine desire to
free up trade -- it's somewhat satisfying to see new interest being
paid to an issue that gets far too little attention. Like other
conspiracies, the problem with the North American Union is that it is
a distraction; it represents a massive energy drain.
The NAU monograph explicitly rejects an EU-style political union and
the kind of supernational institutions that have grown up like
mushrooms in Brussels. One of the principles that guided the committee
that drafted the proposal was that the NAU would not resemble the EU:
North America is different from other regions of the world and must
find its own cooperative route forward. A new North American community
should rely more on the market and less on bureaucracy, more on
pragmatic solutions to shared problems than on grand schemes of
confederation or union, such as those in Europe. We must maintain
respect for each other's national sovereignty.
Despite that rather clear statement of principle -- and the fact that
the paper lays out a series of recommendations that do not include the
creation of some new continental supergovernment -- it does call for
new "dispute" resolution mechanisms, the free flow of people between
the United States and Canada (but not between Mexico and its northern
neighbors as long as a large disparity between workers' incomes
remains) and a unionwide regulatory framework.
Another "dot" that makes up the supposed NAU is the Security and
Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), a chat-shop for
American, Canadian and Mexican leaders to meet annually and discuss
common security and economic issues.
And then there's NAFTA, and the so-called "NAFTA Highway." These are
not one but several truck "transit corridors" that backers hope will
eventually connect Mexican, American and Canadian markets more
effectively and facilitate trade. With construction funds authorized
by Congress in dribs and drabs since 1997, and very little work
completed south of the Mississippi, it's unclear whether the roads
will ever be more than a waste of a few hundred million in taxpayer
funds.
Robert Pastor, an academic specializing in elections at American
University and one of the authors of the NAU proposal, also suggested
the adoption of a common currency, like the Euro. That suggestion,
however, wasn't included in the NAU "recommendations."
The context in which these marginally related dots emerged is an
important reason why they've taken on a sinister air in many people's
minds. NAFTA was part of a larger push for legal and regulatory
"harmonization" between the three countries of North America. Business
groups and other "trade" lobbyists have in fact advocated greater
consistency in North America's regulatory environment, and that always
means decreasing, not increasing, labor, environmental, workplace and
other standards. It is not the highest common denominator that backers
want to see spread far and wide.
Make no mistake, I've shed blood opposing corporate trade deals like
NAFTA and the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and there are very real
and very significant problems with the push toward harmonization and
the relentless assault on national sovereignty represented by the arm-
twisting that goes into forcing a trade "consensus." Construction of
key parts of the "NAFTA highway" have raised serious environmental
concerns. We don't need to expand NAFTA or the other institutions of
international commerce; we need a pause in the march towards global
(or in this case, regional) economic integration, not more of the
same.
And Canadian activists like Maude Barlow of the Council for Canadians
have warned for some time that the SPP is part of a push, financed by
Canadian and U.S. corporate think tanks, to essentially bring an end
to Canada's social welfare state through regional integration. (More
detail can be found in this PDF posted by the Council of Canadians.)
The right stuff
These, and a number of other concerns, are entirely valid. But the NAU
story is a creature of the far right, and, as such, those who have
"connected the dots" have done so according to their ideological
preferences. The North American Union they've conjured up comes with
the assumptions embraced by the coterie of wing-nuts who have promoted
it.
Chief among them is World Net Daily, the "archconservative news site"
responsible for such hard-hitting journalism as its recent expos