The FTAA Negotiations

This chapter will provide a history of the negotiations with a particular focus on the evolution of the growing crisis of authority in the Americas. Tracing the history of the negotiations will enable an analysis of what took place during the decade in which the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was negotiated in view of Gramsci’s concepts of conjunctural and organic movements with respect to developments at the negotiation table and in relation to the broader context of the social relations of the hemisphere. This will thus provide a measure for the innumerable developments that took place throughout the negotiations, which is a task made all the more difficult by the complex and multileveled institutional infrastructure of the negotiations. This chapter will, therefore, contextualize these events by putting them in relation to the evolving social relations of the hemisphere and the specific institutional contexts in which they took place. What emerges is a portrait of the FTAA characterized by conflict and cooperation, consensus and disagreement amid fluid social relations and institutions. In the end, the growing crisis of authority regarding US leadership based, in large part, on neoliberal policies in the hemisphere coalesced the fluidity of positions into two irreconcilable camps that brought the negotiations to an unsuccessful end.