Making North America

In this dissertation I examine the security motivations that prompted the states of North America to enact free trade agreements (FTAs) in the 1980s and 1990s. Specifically, I analyze the decision of the US and Canadian governments to establish a bilateral FTA in 1989, and the decision of the US and Mexican governments to negotiate a subsequent FTA, which then resulted in the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. I argue that the US and Canada were motivated to establish their 1989 FTA in order to reinforce a military balancing effort that they were engaged in against the Soviet Union; in particular, to counter the Soviets' nuclear arms buildup in the arctic region. Regarding the US and Mexico's FTA negotiating process, I argue that, in the wake of the Cold War, the US sought an FTA with Mexico in order to ensure that Mexico did not ally itself with another foreign power, now that Mexico's Cold War strategy of occupying a diplomatic middle ground between the superpowers was no longer an option. Mexico, conversely, sought an FTA with the US in order 1) to establish greater influence over US foreign policy, and 2) to make Mexico more attractive to the Europeans as a trading partner, with the idea being that, by establishing a Mexican-European FTA, Mexico would then be better able to balance against the US, which was now liberated from the constraints of the Cold War, and hence able to pursue a more aggressive foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere.

This analysis rests upon two hypotheses: 1) that an FTA can serve to reinforce a balancing effort engaged in by states against a threatening, third-party state, and 2) that an FTA can serve to reinforce a bandwagoning strategy, whereby states establish an FTA with a threatening state in order to constrain that threatening state's behavior. These hypotheses draw upon aspects of both neorealist and neoliberal theories of international relations (IR). This argument thus demonstrates a manner in which the two schools of IR theory can not only be reconciled in terms of their theory concepts, but can also be combined to form a more useful theory than other theories which rely strictly upon either realist or liberal tenants. Through the application of this more useful approach, in-turn, the seemingly unlikely claim that the North American FTAs were prompted in-part by security concerns is demonstrated to be valid.