북미자유무역협정 비준의 정치과정에 관한 연구

Abstract

The North American Free Trade Agreement had evoked a wide variety of conjectures and interpretations regarding the purpose of the United States. They included: ⅰ) aiming at trade promoting effects; ⅱ) enhancing capital mobility; ⅲ) pursuing an alternative for mutlilateralism in case of the failure of the UR; ⅳ) threatening or persuading EU and Japan; ⅴ) emerging alternative or safeguard policy of a declining hegemon; ⅵ) pure foreign policy matter, etc.

Instead of establishing another conjecture, I tried a political-process-centered explanation: examining the validity of the hypotheses which had been converted into political-process-related forms form the above interpretations. The findings corroborated the fifth and sixth hypotheses: NAFTA was the administrations agenda. The Clinton administration was the sole promoter of the agreement, pouring every effort and resource into it in the final phase of the legislative process.

Given this finding, I offered a tentaive conclusion that regionalism, whether it be confined to the North America, or extended to the Asia-Pacific, had become one of the serious policy ideas for a decling hegemon, the United States.