New York Times By JOSEPH KAHN
AVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 30 -- After seven years of pushing harder than any other postwar president to expand trade between the United States and the rest of the world, President Clinton told global leaders here this weekend that the American people have had enough.
Congress and society at large, despite a record-breaking economic expansion built in part on an explosion of foreign trade, have less enthusiasm for exchanging goods and services with the world than they did when he first took office, Mr. Clinton said. If new trade deals are going to get done, the world needs to reinvent the way it thinks about trade and globalization to accommodate this American political reality.
That message was delivered in an otherwise upbeat, even passionate address to prime ministers, government officials and chief executives of multinational companies who gathered at an annual conference in this Alpine village to dream up ways of moving globalization forward. Many of the people assembled here were eager to put collapse late last year of world trade talks in Seattle behind them. Mr. Clinton insisted that Seattle was no fluke.
"Those who heard a wake-up call in Seattle got the right message," Mr. Clinton said. "I do not agree with those who view with contempt these new forces seeking to be heard in the global dialogue."
These new voices, as anyone who watched or read about the demonstrations in Seattle knows, are labor unions and an assortment of private groups known collectively as nongovernment organizations.
Mr. Clinton's new trade policy has two big winners. One is those new voices from Seattle, who have been welcomed as partners in setting trade policy. The other is his vice president, Al Gore, who is running for president with Mr. Clinton's strong support.
Unions and environmental groups are a core of the Democratic Party constituency. Unions, in particular, have a record of rolling out reliable votes for their favored candidates. Those votes could potentially make Mr. Gore a winner in a close race.
Mr. Clinton urged in his speech here that the world stop thinking about those groups and their causes -- including workers' rights and environmental protection -- as nuisances to trade. The American position, he said in effect, is that trade cannot become freer unless those groups can be persuaded to like it.
In saying that, Mr. Clinton shook a pillar of American foreign policy. The United States in the post-cold-war era has made trade perhaps the most important tool for expanding its ties with other nations. But by insisting on linking trade to labor and environmental issues, he made it much less likely that the post-Seattle logjam on trade will be broken while he is in office.
Leaders of developing countries, including India and China, are about as passionate as Mr. Clinton when they insist on writing their own labor and environmental laws and on not having such laws decided in negotiations with rich countries. Even a hint that the World Trade Organization, the Geneva-based body that regulates trade, might one day become an enforcer of American standards on wages, factory safety or industrial emissions has been a deal-breaker in recent trade negotiations. There are few signs in the weeks since the Seattle collapse that poor countries are rethinking that stance.
On the contrary, Mexico, with which Mr. Clinton seven years ago sealed the North American Free Trade Agreement, probably the most dramatic market-opening measure in recent years, could hardly be more emphatic in expressing a different view.
President Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, also speaking at the World Economic Forum here in Davos last week, delivered a sharply worded attack on what he called "very peculiar alliance of left and right forces" and "self-appointed representatives of civil society." Those groups have hijacked global trade talks under the guise of protecting the poor, he said.
"We should be suspect of their motives," Mr. Zedillo said, contending that Mexico is proof that old-style free trade works wonders for developing countries. "Serious efforts to liberalize trade must not stop because a few people use fallacious arguments as subterfuges for protectionism."
No one was happier about Mr. Clinton's speech this weekend, though, than John J. Sweeney, the president of the powerful A.F.L.-C.I.O., who attended the forum in Davos. During his hourlong address here on Saturday, Mr. Clinton referred to Mr. Sweeney by name three times, more than he mentioned anyone else there. The audience included several presidents and prime ministers, including those from Turkey and Columbia.
"The president is firmly committed to making labor issues a part of trade negotiations, and he did make that clear," Mr. Sweeney said after the address.
Clinton administration officials dispute the idea that the president pushed for a more prominent place for labor and environment on the world trade agenda solely to help Mr. Gore. "These are not election year issues," said Charlene Barshefsky, Mr. Clinton's top trade official. "They reflect a change in the body politic in general."
But few would dispute that Mr. Clinton shifted gears on trade at an odd time. The president, for one, now has little time left in office to make a substantially new approach to world trade stick, even if other nations agree to start a broad dialogue on the subject this year.
Moreover, Mr. Clinton has vowed to push through the Republican-controlled Congress three big trade deals negotiated the old way -- without unions and nongovernment organizations playing an active role. Those trade deals involve Africa, Caribbean nations and, perhaps most notably for American foreign policy, China.
The administration's gamble seems to be that labor and environmental groups might soften their opposition to pending trade agreements in return for a bigger voice in future ones. But it is a risky bet. Opponents of the China trade package, for instance, are already arguing that Mr. Clinton's embrace of labor and environmental standards perfectly illustrates why Congress should vote no when presented with trade deals that do not do much to advance those standards.
Whatever the odds, Mr. Clinton said in his speech, people who favor freer trade have no choice now but to open the door to those new voices.
"The more we deny this," he said, "the more we will fuel the fires of protectionism, not put them out."
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company:
