Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: PTAs (Preferential Trade Agreements) are spreading rapidly - hundreds have already been notified to the WTO and more are being created. Are these agreements bad news, not just for global prosperity, but also for global political equality? We do not adopt the standard economic refrain that a rise in absolute global economic prosperity offsets the importance of how those gains are distributed (Wolf 2004). Rather, we accept that the world economy is characterized by substantial distributional inequalities between states, generating material power politics and shaping development. But the apparently increasing gap between the poor and the rich is not the whole story, and international institutions are not uniformly making the problem worse, as some have argued, or better, as others think. Preferential trade arrangements like NAFTA more and more govern economic exchange, shaping material power relations derived from sums of money or financial transactions – although there is some debate whether these organizations have an appreciable effect on material wealth and power or not (Frankel 1998); yet the same PTAs also create and sustain social power politics created by group dynamics. Like other organizations (Ingram, Robinson, and Busch 2005; Hafner-Burton and Montgomery 2006; Dorussen and Ward 2008), these institutions form social network structures, creating ties between states. The distribution of these ties endows certain states with more social capital than others, creating social power relationships that significantly affect international politics, shaping issues like whether or not states go to war or use economic sanctions (Hafner-Burton and Montgomery 2005, 2008). While states’ material power is determined by the relative size of their material capital, social power is determined by the relative social capital created by and accessed through ties with other states in the international system such as ties through mutual membership in PTAs. In this paper, we demonstrate that while inequality in material power has increased over time,inequality in social capital among states due to PTAs has decreased quite substantially.