Free trade is an archetypal liberal project. Open markets, comparative advantage, and the moral unity of economic actors across borders have been held to be both the causes and the results of peace and prosperity since 1945. They have been touted as a bulwark against tyranny and the foundation of freedom. National sovereignty would wane, it was thought, and local identities would be subordinated to efficiency and growth; but the diminishment would be worthwhile amidst seemingly boundless prosperity.
Well, prosperity certainly doesn’t feel boundless anymore. North American and European societies, moreover, seem much less stable than they did in the late 20th century. And, very recently, the wreckage of the trade negotiations between Canada and the USA shows how empty those once unshakeable beliefs in globalisation and free trade have become.
The United States under an ‘America First’ administration treats the trading relationship as transactional and hierarchical. It has even undermined national sovereignty by demanding an end to French language protections and by threatening annexation. Canada, defending cultural particularity, discovers that liberal universalism cannot justify language policy and cultural subsidies. Nor can it mediate between an international or global market and the deeper attachments of language, culture, and national industry. Canada can choose to defend liberal internationalism or local culture, but not both.
Nevertheless, the Canadian and American positions hardly differ in principle. It must be admitted that both economies would be well served by bowing to the market to the detriment of culture and community—something that neither side is willing to do. Tariff-free trade to the detriment of local industries and even full economic integration would be good for Canadian and American GDP, but good for nothing else. Mark Carney, a former central banker associated with Davos-style internationalism, now confronts the limits of a worldview that seemed utterly unassailable within recent memory.
Likewise, Donald Trump has often invoked the culture- and community-eroding nature of free trade and globalisation. He has blamed seemingly the entire world for free-loading, China for hollowing out manufacturing, and Canada for ‘ripping off’ American farmers and industrial workers. In his own peculiar way, he is right about the vast social cost of free trade and globalisation. ‘American carnage’ he called it in his first inaugural speech. But he seems unable to recognise the problem outside America’s borders.
Perhaps negotiations will, in the end, produce a tolerable compromise. But the late 20th-century liberal vision of a radically open world, free trade, and globalised, homogeneous culture is gone. Not even liberals believe in it anymore—and this is one of the many interlocking problems in what I have called the crisis of liberalism.
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