Bush's Latin Beat: A vision, but a faulty one.

Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, American presidents did not really need "the vision thing." The Cold War itself gave them a wonderful pair of spectacles that enabled the most short-sighted observer to see the world as it was. These suddenly became useless in 1989-90.

As a president famous for not knowing foreign leaders and rarely traveling abroad, George W. Bush would not generally be expected to supply a geopolitical vision. But this assumption underestimates Bush. His early speeches and presidential actions suggest that he has a far- ranging and original vision, even a doctrine, covering mainly foreign policy but also taking in economics, domestic social affairs, and electoral politics. The Bush doctrine begins by holding that the future of the United States is to be the political leader of a Pan-American, free-trading bloc of countries from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego-the so- called Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The first major diplomatic forays of the new president were his meeting with Mexican leader Vicente Fox and his signing of the FTAA at the Quebec "Summit of the Americas." And Bush laid out the underlying idea in clear terms: "We have a choice to make. We can combine in a common market so that we can compete in the long term with the Far East and Europe, or we can go on our own. Going on our own is not the right way."

That is not strictly correct. America has a considerably wider range of choices than that between economic isolationism and economic hemispherism. Alternatives range from a transatlantic free-trade area that would unite NAFTA and the European Union to global free trade achieved under the auspices of the World Trade Organization. Bush's hemispheric trade bloc is merely one possible future.

In Bush's vision, FTAA would be firmly rooted in free markets. Indeed, the president and his allies see FTAA as a body that will tend to entrench free markets in the Western hemisphere through the magic of "jurisdictional competition." This is the theory, advanced by the distinguished legal theorist John O. McGinnis, that free trade compels nations that have chosen different systems of tax, welfare, and regulation to compete with one another. It creates a marketplace of governments. Businesses and taxpayers vote with their feet by moving from one jurisdiction (i.e., country) to another in order to enjoy the system of tax and regulation that best suits them. That system "wins" that attracts the most high-earners and businesses and so creates the most jobs and prosperity. And experience suggests that in this marketplace the winners tend to be low-tax, lightly regulated economies with modest levels of social benefits. The Bush vision is of the Americas not only integrated by free trade, but also transformed by it into successful market economies.

Hemispheric free trade is, however, only the foundation of the Bush vision. As Colin Powell made clear in a New York Times op-ed piece, published on the day before the Quebec summit, a great deal of political cooperation is already being erected on this foundation: "Ministers of trade, justice, finance, labor, environment, transportation and energy now meet regularly to tackle the problems we all face and identify ways in which we can help each other." Powell's list of possible areas of cooperation included labor rights, sustainable development, the status of women, education, information technology, health care, and disaster relief. Such political integration would transform Latin America from an economic hinterland into a political and diplomatic ally of the U.S. Not only in economics, but on these other matters, the Americas would increasingly attend international conferences as a united bloc like the EU. And as the habit of cooperation grew over time, the U.S. might even be able to call on its hemispheric allies for diplomatic and even military support in solving crises around the world.

This growing interdependence plainly has domestic U.S. consequences for such matters as immigration policy, cultural identity, and electoral politics; such changes are already in train. Vicente Fox has called for open borders and free labor mobility on the EU model between Mexico and the U.S. Although that goes too far for current American opinion, President Bush is on record as favoring a more generous immigration policy. His administration has sought to extend amnesties to illegal Latin American immigrants in the U.S. And he has asked a task force to examine the virtues of a temporary U.S. "guest worker" program for Mexican workers. All of these signs point ultimately to a single U.S.-Mexican market with full labor mobility and, as the FTAA expands to cover all Latin America, to a much broader version of the same thing.

Bush has also sought to help this process along by making the U.S. culturally hospitable to Latino immigrants-opposing "English First" laws and endorsing the argument that the U.S. is no longer united by a common culture and language but bilingual and multicultural. In the course of assuming the leadership of a continent divided mainly between Hispanic and Anglophone traditions, the U.S. will adapt to a new identity, one that is in theory multicultural, in practice bicultural:

America has one national creed, but many accents. We're now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. We're a major source of Latin music, journalism, and culture. Just go to Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago, or West New York, New Jersey . . . and close your eyes and listen. You could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago or San Miguel de Allende. For years, our nation has debated this change-some have praised it and others have resented it. By nominating me, my party has made a choice to welcome the New America.

Significantly, those words were delivered by Bush to a Hispanic election rally in Miami last August. For the final item in the Bush vision is that the GOP, as the party that welcomes the New America, will be well placed to gain a growing share of the burgeoning Hispanic electorate. One party strategist has estimated that if a targeted 40 percent of Latino voters pull the GOP lever, the party will have a natural governing majority.

Here then, in sum, is Bush's vision: a bicultural U.S. as the leading power in a bicultural, continental, free-market, free-trading bloc, unobstructed by national borders and moving toward a common citizenship, whose other member-states would give broad diplomatic and even military support to Washington in wider world affairs. Bush has not given this vision a name as yet. Similar ideas in the past have been called "hemispherism" or "continentalism." But those titles neglect its political aspects and its large ambition. John Fonte of the Hudson Institute captures these qualities with his coinage "Pan- American Conservatism"; for this is a very Big Picture indeed. And as Big Pictures go, it is more impressive from afar than when its brushwork is examined in detail.

To begin with, it is far from certain that even FTAA (which is not scheduled to start until 2006) will get off the ground. The Latin Americans want access to U.S. markets and capital, of course, but not all of them are wedded to a U.S.-led hemispheric trading bloc with its overtones of Yanqui dominance. The Brazilians in particular prefer Mercosur, the bloc in which they are the Big Piranha. And other governments may shrink from the domestic political risks of ratifying the treaty unless Bush calms their nerves by obtaining "fast track" negotiating authority. On that issue, the president faces an uphill domestic struggle: He will need, first, to remove tariffs and subsidies from such natural Republican supporters as farmers, textile manufacturers, and Jeb Bush's Florida orange growers; he will then have to win over Democrats who, under pressure from Big Labor, are drifting toward what The Economist would call economic isolationism if it were practiced by Republicans.

Even if FTAA is ratified, however, it is by no means certain that it will become an engine of deregulation and market competition. Not every government in NAFTA is likely to share the McGinnis concept of "jurisdictional competition." Social democrats, socialists, neo- Marxists, and other statists (of whom there are many in Latin America) tend to regard it as a shameful "race to the bottom"; they want instead to harmonize tax, welfare, and regulatory policies across several countries so that no one can escape the heavy hand of government. Instead of creating a marketplace of governments, they would transform FTAA into a cartel of governments-one that would extend regulations rather than restrain them.

It is not as if we have no experience of such a transformation. In the 1950s, the European Economic Community was a continental free-trade body on Bush lines. Conservative politicians advocated British entry into the EEC on the grounds that its jurisdictional competition (though they did not use that phrase) would "make socialism impossible." That argument, however, failed to take into account the fact that most European governments were either openly socialist Social Democrats or socialist-like Christian Democrats. In due course, those governments changed the free-trading, free-market EEC into the tax- and regulation- harmonizing European Union that is currently proposing to crack down on "harmful tax competition" (i.e., low taxes) among member states.

Most Latin American countries have powerful statist parties of one kind or another. Whether justified by leftist or rightist rhetoric, statist interventionism has been the main tradition of government south of the border since the Spanish empire. And although free-market "neo- liberalism" has enjoyed a recent vogue in nations like Argentina and Mexico, that is owing in part to the continent's other native political tradition-mimicking fashionable ideologies from elsewhere, usually European ideologies such as fascism and Marxism, more recently Thatcherism and Reaganism. Such fashions tend to be short-lived, however, and already Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico have disappointed those who boosted them too optimistically as the latest capitalist tigers only a decade ago. Despite the occasional ideological fluctuation, the influence of Latin American governments on FTAA is likely to be in favor of using it to extend labor and environmental regulations in trade-and statist regulations in general.

We have it from no less an authority than Colin Powell that ministers from these governments already meet the U.S. regularly to discuss labor rights, sustainable development, etc. Given that the Democrats and their liberal constituencies also want to extend regulation over such areas, the danger exists that FTAA would become a powerful engine for extending government in general. Instead of being an U.S. ally in economic competition, FTAA would then become a handicap. This is merely a danger, of course; nothing is decided.

What is much more certain is that Latin America will never provide reliable political, diplomatic, or military support for the U.S. Resenting its economic failure relative to the U.S., Latin American elites have long taken refuge in a cultural superiority that looks to Europe for its political models.

Nor has that changed, outside the relatively narrow area of trade and economics. Even there, indeed, the EU is already exploiting this sentiment by making free-trade overtures to Mercosur and Mexico. In the wider diplomatic arena, Latin countries are often disposed to side against the U.S. in international bodies or during major crises unless bribed or threatened effectively. And it is political fantasy to think that Latin nations would actually send troops to assist the U.S. in any venture that was not blessed by the U.N. and international opinion, if then.

More serious miscalculations, however, are involved in the argument that encouraging a bicultural society is required for both hemispheric leadership and domestic Republican recovery. To begin with, biculturalism divides and weakens a society more permanently and profoundly than multiculturalism. A multicultural society gradually blunders toward its own lingua franca, if only to enable the various linguistic tribes to talk to one another and to cooperate economically. A bicultural society, however, is likely to preserve its two languages indefinitely in an atmosphere of jealous rivalry. In Belgium and Canada, for instance, language has become the basis of both social division and administrative separatism.

The impact of biculturalism on politics is especially poisonous. It means that there is not one democratic conversation in society, but two quite separate ones. Quebec and the rest of Canada might be on two different planets except when their interests clash. This splintered debate gives excessive power to the elites of both tribes and promotes a kind of linguistic clientelism. Politics then becomes a negotiating process between the elites from which the mass of voters are largely excluded. It is hardly surprising that LULAC, MALDEF, and La Raza support bilingual education, for instance, since it tends to keep Latino Americans on the ethnic reservation and allow LULAC et al. to speak for them politically. And this freezing of ethnic loyalties fosters the growth of pressure groups in U.S. politics for the policies of other governments. Mexico is especially shameless in urging U.S. citizens of Mexican descent to promote its sectional interests at the ballot box. At the very least this complicates the question of America's hemispheric leadership since it makes it difficult to define a single U.S. national interest or, once defined, to pursue it in conflict with other governments.

Nor is a society based on continent-wide labor mobility and bicultural adaptation likely to be one in which the interests of the GOP naturally flourish. To embrace both legal immigration and bilingualism in the hopes of winning over Latino votes is a simple misunderstanding of the electoral facts.

On almost every count, then, the Bush vision is questionable. It risks transforming the U.S. into a culturally divided society, with some of the less attractive features of Latin American politics such as clientelism, in order to pursue the leadership of a trading bloc that is of dubious dynamism economically, naturally prone to statist overregulation, psychologically hostile to the United States, and in any event lacking the sense of global responsibility that persuades powers like Britain and France to join the U.S. in upholding international order. It should be stressed, of course, that all these matters are in the realm of contingency. Free trade throughout the Americas is a good idea in itself; it is not doomed to become an engine for extending high taxes and regulation; and it might well develop as the Bush team hopes if sufficient vigilance is exercised by conservatives and if the voters support them. Nor is it to argue that the U.S. should be either hostile or indifferent to Latin America. Quite the contrary, we should seek cooperative and mutually beneficial relationships in trade and politics. But the U.S. should also be skeptical toward the notion that a bloc of Latin allies could be any kind of substitute for the Atlantic alliance in the foreseeable future.

And, finally, President Bush would be unwise to confuse these vital and practical questions with the construction of a new national identity. There have been many attempts to construct new national identities in the last hundred years. They rarely succeed.