Everywhere & Nowhere: Contemporary Feminism in the United States by Jo Reger

Introduction This paper compares and contrasts two regional formations, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) as models. SADC is composed entirely of lesser-developed member states, 15 in number, of which the Republic of South Africa constitutes the largest national economy. SADC was founded in 1980, as the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), although current membership overlaps with a much older regional formation, the South African Customs Union (SACU). SACU is one of the world's oldest customs unions, formed in 1910, and is rooted in the politics and economics of colonialism. Yet today's SADC is a wholly African institution that dovetails with the political and economic developmental goals of the larger African Union. (1) NAFTA, by contrast, is a much newer and more focused entity. It grew out of a Canadian-United States free trade agreement ratified in 1988 and expanded to include Mexico in 1993. The goals of NAFTA, as with other regionalist efforts before and since, include the pursuit of the developmental gains to be drawn from the advantages of increased trade and the benefits of increased direct investment for participant developing countries (or single country, in the case of Mexico). (2) One question raised is whether, NAFTA for Mexico, and SADC, serve the developing states in the manner that liberalization worked for the People's Republic of China, bringing increased growth promoting foreign direct investment? NAFTA and SADC are classic examples of hub and spokes systems. For each of the spokes, the trade relationship with the largest economy in the regional group is predominant. South Africa and the U.S. are the primary external markets, while Mexico-Canada flows are of very limited scope, as is also true for the SADC spokes. This paper explores the comparative effect of these two regional integration efforts. We examine post-integration trade and Foreign Direct Investment patterns as well as the comparative impact on Mexico and the SADC members. Central to the concerns of this paper are the institutional patterns of regionalism and how these patterns function as and ideology as defined in the next section of this paper. (3) Regionalism and Development NAFTA and SADC are examples of preferential trading arrangements based within specific geographic regions. The literature on preferential trading arrangements indicates that while such arrangements liberalize exchange between the parties in the arrangements, they may also function as protectionist for parties outside the arrangement. The classic example of European integration illustrates the point; exchange becomes open within the European bloc but not for Botswana beef exporters, which might even encounter new barriers as the EU moves toward regulatory integration. (4) It is beyond the scope of this paper to weigh in on the larger debates about free trade, as its focus is on policy. The salient fact is that regional arrangements of both SADC and NAFTA provide liberalized access to neighboring markets for participating countries. These two regional arrangements are (or are part of) the of Mexico and the SADC countries neighboring South Africa. (5) While the regional levels of in North America and Southern Africa are widely disparate, SADC and NAFTA are comparable in that liberalized access to larger neighboring markets is the key structural advantage and appeal for the lesser developed participants in each grouping. As utilized here, the term strategy denotes a policy method or approach intended to promote or at least encourage development. Development may be indicated by economic growth, although it should not be reduced to the simple measure of GDP growth, as development is a more broadly encompassing term, referring to advances in technology, human capital as well as broader social and political factors. …

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