No deals.

• Author: Doherty, Brian

After GATT, let's give unilateralism a chance.

BOTH THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION and the world are possessed by trade agreement mania. Immediately before and after passing the GATT pact, Clinton attended international summit meetings and came out with the promise of future trade treaties analogous to last year's North American Free Trade Agreement.

First there was the meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, where 18 countries agreed--vaguely--to end all trade barriers among them by 2020. Then came December's Summit of the Americas, which ended with Clinton and the leaders of 33 other Western Hemisphere countries vowing to create a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, with negotiations scheduled to end in 2005. Chile looks to be enveloped by NAFTA before then. Meanwhile, the European Union is seeking to create a free-trade zone with the Mercosur nations of South America--Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina.

For now, these are all merely agreements to agree. The details await various bureaucratic meetings that are scheduled to begin later this year but could stretch for years.

The experience with NAFTA and GATT, however, suggests that multilateralism is not the best way to achieve real free trade. Multilateral agreements tend to be larded with complications, half-measures, and escape clauses. They also create the potential for exporting onerous regulations in the name of "standardization." Those problems caused some free traders to decide that defeating those agreements would benefit the cause of free trade. But defeating them in their final stretch would have been counter-productive. The realities of GATT and NAFTA were complex and messy, but their passage indicated a growing friendliness toward freer trade on the part of both politicians and citizens in the United States.

Now more than 50 other nations also show a sudden willingness to sign on to regional free-trade regimes. Smaller free-trade agreements already abound among the countries of Latin America and Southeast Asia. The E.U.'s reach-out to the Mercosur nations shows that no one wants the Orwellian vision of three fortress-like political and economic blocs to become a reality. The newly dominant congressional party in the United States professes a strong belief in free trade, along with distaste for the complications of international agreements. This seems to be the most political propitious time imaginable to push for the proper way to knock down trade barriers...