Transnational Social Movements and the Free Trade Area of the Americas: Towards a Critical IPE.

This paper argues that the predominance of a state-centric methodology in the study of the Free Trade of the Americas (FTAA) process is not adequate to understand the process of transnationalization of politics that is currently taking place along the Western Hemisphere. Transnational advocacy networks of civil society organizations and social movements are engaged in building coalitions with key political actors within the 34 countries that participate in the FTAA initiative to advance an alternative view of hemispheric integration, by linking trade issues to a development agenda. Dominant approaches to hemispheric integration, interested in inter-state diplomacy and in the domestic politics associated to policymaking processes, are not able to grasp the emergence of a transborder political sphere increasingly influential in Hemispheric relations. The political significance of the transnational advocacy networks mobilized by the FTAA process is derived from their bottom-up attempts to create a common consciousness among its member organizations and across different sectors to challenge the hegemonic neoliberal approach to hemispheric integration. In this respect, the contribution of the discussion of social constructivism about issues of identity and understanding is particularly relevant. The possibility of hemispheric collective action at the level of transnational social movements necessitates the creation of a political subject/agent able of coalescing different sectors and political identities into a common hemispheric agenda. Agency entails the transformation of the normative understandings of the model of capitalism currently in dispute in the FTAA process. Drawing from the recent literature on transnational social movements, a neo-Gramscian ontology and the insights of social constructivism, the paper proposes a critical IPE framework to understand the process of bottom-up regionalization around the FTAA initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]