In 1997 a coalition of more than 600 organizations from seventy countries launched a transnational campaign that aimed at stopping the negotiations of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). Debates about this treaty had begun a couple of years earlier within the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in view of the difficulties to negotiate a global agreement on investments at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The goal was to establish a set of rules on liberalization and investor protection, based on a broad definition of investment. Among the most contentious provisions included in the draft of the treaty were the possibility of compensation for expected profits in cases of expropriation, and a dispute settlement system that enabled investors to sue states before international tribunals.

Participants in the anti-MAI Campaign framed their resistance to the proposed agreement largely in terms that would resonate with domestic public opinion. More specifically, issues such as the defense of national autonomy and democracy were at the forefront of discourses. For example, in a joint statement, publicized by over a hundred CSOs from all over the world in 1997, it was argued that the agreement's intention “is not to regulate investments but to regulate governments” and that “the MAI did not respect the rights of countries … including their need to democratically control investment into their economies” (Alternate Forum for Research in Mindanao et al. 1997).

Arguably, transnational collective action goes back as far as the creation of national borders themselves, but more immediate historical precursors of advocacy transnationalism include campaigns for women's suffrage (between 1888 and 1928) and the movement against foot binding in China (from 1874 to 1911) (Keck and Sikkink 1998: ch. 2). Other precedents include transnational political and ideological movements such as those led by organizations of anarchists, communists and socialists, faith-based movements and organizations, and labor collaboration that crossed national borders before and after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel's famous call for the workers of the world to unite (Marx and Engels [1847] 1998).

The trade policy arena itself has historically been a contentious one, so much so that recent mobilizations cannot be seen as entirely innovative. It has also been a multifaceted arena. Because of the potential impacts of trade policies on productive systems, on the labor market, prices of goods, and technological innovation, decisions about trade have always been a part of broader economic and political debates about development models, international relations, and the role of the state. More specifically, the interfaces between trade and other policy arenas, such as the environment, food safety, or human rights, have not been ignored in the past. Furthermore, because of the fact that gains and losses from trade are unevenly distributed, the moral implications of trade have been an inseparable part of policy debates.

Parliamentarians, government officials, the media, and civil society organizations (CSOs) often haven confronted challengers of trade agreements with the question: What do you propose instead? The pressure to present alternatives during negotiations is felt in domestic as well as in international fora. As this chapter will show, challengers of trade agreements have struggled to design proposals, but have done so through very different ideational pathways. Given the ideological heterogeneity and the organizational fragmentation among challengers of trade agreements, analyzed in the previous chapters, this is not surprising. Furthermore, considering that since the beginning of the 1990s debates about international trade policy making in the Americas have tended to become more and more polarized, with shrinking ground for agreement between supporters and challengers of new free trade negotiations, it has been easier for CSOs to coalesce around the opposition to specific negotiations.

At the beginning of the 1990s, CSOs that challenged the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) did make an effort to present a variety of alternative proposals. The founders of the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade (RMALC) carefully named the coalition to avoid presenting itself simply as anti-trade or anti-NAFTA. Instead, they called for the opening of channels of dialogue and denounced the lack of transparency in the negotiations. They organized numerous events to debate alternatives and proposals.

How did a select number of labor, rural, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) come to form the core of the networks of trade challengers, within and beyond national boundaries? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to put the social network data presented in the last chapter in a historical context. The analysis presented below provides a detailed account of the origins of transnational ties within these three groups of organizations, and the pathways to transnationality taken by civil society organizations (CSOs) from each of these sectoral domains, as they responded to changes in their relational and political environments.

This approach makes sense if we consider that transnational ties have tended historically to be stronger among similar types of organizations, a trend that, according to the network data uncovered, seems to still hold true. At the same time, the data also showed some evidence for what the literature on transnationalism has been arguing: that cross-sectoral, multi-issue ties have become more common in the last few decades. An analysis that focuses on both intra- and intersectoral ties, such as the one presented below, shows that the construction of domestic and transnational networks among trade challengers has been full of tensions and ambiguities.

The Power of Labor Organizations and Its Limits

In total, informants from eight national labor federations and eighteen key sectoral unions answered the social network questionnaires in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and the United States (see Appendix A).

At the end of the 1980s, the Americas became an important laboratory for new trade negotiations. Debates about trade liberalization were not, however, unknown to the region. The idea of free trade between the United States and Canada was over a century old when the two countries signed their free trade agreement in 1989. Similarly, the history of Latin America is punctuated by failed attempts to fulfill what many saw – at least rhetorically – as its “historical calling,” that is, to become united as one country. The first round of attempts at integration in the nineteenth century – some of which included the United States -collapsed under the weight of geographical distances, the power of caudillos (local strongmen), and the differing interests of the subregions.

A second round of attempts to integrate the region began in the 1950s, as part of a development strategy that aimed at industrializing Latin America. Between the 1950s and the mid-1980s, the United States and Latin America pursued antagonistic trade policies. Whereas in the United States the years following the Second World War inaugurated a period of trade liberalization, in Latin America this was the age of protectionism. Both of these strategies were influenced by the Cold War. In the United States, free trade was perceived as an important part of its anticommunist strategies, whereas in Latin America protectionist policies were considered a key tool in reaching autonomous economic development.

In December 2007, the U.S. Congress approved the free trade agreement between Peru and the United States. This agreement did not have large economic impacts in the region, nor did it open the way to the resuscitation of hemispheric talks. What makes it an interesting story, though, is that it passed by a large bipartisan vote, in spite of rising skepticism about free trade agreements in the last few years and the recent election of a new majority of Democratic legislators. In 2001 the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill had passed by only one House vote. In 2006 the U.S.–Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) passed by just two votes. However, U.S. civil society organizations (CSOs) that had fought adamantly these previous initiatives were divided on how to respond to the Peru free trade initiative. For the first time since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was approved, the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) decided not to oppose a new trade deal negotiated in the Americas. This position can be understood only in light of the changes in the political environment in the United States.

The Democratic Party won the majority of seats in Congress in the 2006 elections, in which many of the contenders gained votes by criticizing NAFTA-like agreements in local campaigns (Destler 2007: 1).

As an increasingly wide spectrum of civil society organizations (CSOs) began to debate how they could coordinate actions to challenge free trade agreements, there was a glaring lack of blueprints available for coalition building across groups, sectors, and national boundaries. Previous transnational arrangements in the Americas were in the main specific to categories or types of organizations, such as international labor or religious organizations, with few intersections among them. These initiatives were institutionalized in hierarchical and territorial terms, as national organizations became affiliated with international bodies.

Trade-related coalition-building efforts in the Americas led to the emergence of a new repertoire, which built upon but extrapolated from preexisting initiatives, bringing about a constellation of new and old organizational pathways to transnationality. As noted in Chapter 2, the process of coalition building is not linear. Organizations do not necessarily become more international through time. Furthermore, there is no deterministic trend leading CSOs from intermittent participation to adhering to more sustained organizational pathways.

To capture these dynamics, this chapter analyzes the process that led to the creation of hemispheric coalitions on trade. Chapter 8 complements this analysis by focusing on the creation of trade coalitions in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and the United States. The main argument is that actors have built organizational arrangements that are influenced by previous social networks and coalitions, but that these have been rearranged through the creation of new ties and efforts to balance power relations, the diffusion of successful experiences and their adaptation in new environments, and the creation of brokerage roles that link the national and transnational scales.

This chapter lays out the networks created among challengers of trade agreements in the Americas in the last twenty years of mobilizations and debates. Based on a combination of data gathered through social network questions answered by informants, document analysis, and semistructured interviews, it presents an analysis of how actors relate to each other, within and across national borders. The embeddedness of actors in these networks tells us much about their strategies and goals, and helps us understand changes in their pathways to transnationality.

Informants from one hundred and twenty-three civil society organizations (CSOs) in Brazil (29), Chile (23), Mexico (30), and the United States (41) answered the same questionnaire (see the lists of organizations in Appendix A and a copy of the questionnaire in Appendix B). This was not meant to be a representative sample of the literally hundreds of CSOs that became involved in challenging free trade agreements at one point or another. However, they do include the major challengers in each country, until the freezing of the Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiations in about 2004.

The mapping of ties among trade agreement challengers focused primarily on the strongest relationships among them, based on the perceptions of intensity of relations among informants at the time of the interview. Thus, the social networks presented in this chapter do not represent all forms of interaction among actors.