Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Singh, J. P., 1961 author.
Title: Sweet talk : paternalism and collective action in North-South trade relations / J.P. Singh.
Other titles: Emerging frontiers in the global economy.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2016. | Series: Emerging frontiers in the global economy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016036586 (print) | LCCN 2016037327 (ebook) | ISBN 9780804794121 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503601048 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503601055
Subjects: LCSH: Developing countriesForeign economic relationsDeveloped countries. | Developed countriesForeign economic relationsDeveloping countries. | International economic relations. | Paternalism.
Classification: LCC HF1413 .S54 2016 (print) | LCC HF1413 (ebook) | DDC 382/.3dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036586
Typeset by Thompson Type in 10.25/15 Brill
Cover image is Chones from Adobe Stock.
Cover design by Angela Moody, amoodycover.com.
Preface
Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle.
Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education (1985: 186)
THIS book puzzles about trade reciprocity. It explores the conditions under which the trade concessions countries of the Global NorthSouth make to each other deviate from reciprocity. The puzzle developed from two real-world prompts that made me reflect on identity issues underlying reciprocity. One was about a trade diplomat and the other about the marketplace, both about the Global South.
During 2006, I was a visiting scholar at the World Trade Organization in Geneva. An anecdote circulated about a trade diplomat from Sub-Saharan Africa who complained about not being invited to a particular meeting until the chair noted that he was sitting in the meeting from which he thought he had been excluded. Poor diplomat! He didnt even know he was there. His nationality changed as I heard the story repeated but the identity affixed on him remained the same. That of not knowing, of incompetence.
Around the same time, back in the United States, struggles raged on how the developing world was pirating secrets, inventions, and creative digital works. It was even stealing outsourced high-tech jobs, grounds on which the United States had stood confident with its competitive advantage. Several xenophobic and racist comments circulated through the media. Poor developing world! It suffers even when it knows.
I resolved to write Sweet Talkit would deal with an old conflict, sugar, and a new one, telecommunications or information technologies. As I researched, my ambitions both tamed and multiplied. Merely providing a structured, focused comparison of two issues was not going to be persuasive. I had to be thorough. This book, therefore, presents a history of NorthSouth trade negotiations in the postcolonial era. In doing so, it addresses issues in agriculture, manufacturing, and high technologies. However, I retained the title Sweet Talk, which came from thinking about sugar and telecommunications.
I argue that the North paternalizes and gives little to the developing world at trade negotiations. The developing world is better off when it helps itself, either through collective action at negotiations, or best off when it diversifies its exports in products and markets. Although rooted in the political economy of trade, this is ultimately a narrative about cultural identities, which starts with a clash of civilizations, or at least one civilization. In the colonial days, the colonial powers set out to civilize the unenlightened other. In the postcolonial era, they benevolently dole out sweet talk, trade-capacity building assistance, and a few nonreciprocal trade preferences, while withholding on the meaningful trade concessions the developing world needs.
Empirically, the book employs mixed methods for providing evidence from several perspectives. The book develops an index for measuring paternalistic strength, and multiple regressions test the effects of paternalism and negotiation indicators on degrees of reciprocity. The official rhetoric of the United States in trade, specifically twelve years of press releases from the US. Trade Representative, is also analyzed using manual coding through NVivo content analysis software. Qualitative and historical descriptions trace the processes through which reciprocity works. The book narrates the NorthSouth trade story in cultural terms and the rootedness of trade preferences in historically derived cultures; therefore, the book returns to colonial era history in a few places. Specific issue area casestextiles, sugar, cotton, telecommunications, and outsourcingprovide a granular view.
Ultimately, the book is about the present, not the past. The WTOs Doha Round of trade negotiations launched in 2001 is practically dead, and the future of multilateral trade negotiations and NorthSouth interactions is unclear. Developed countries fear exports from emerging powers such as Brazil, China, and India and seek to exclude them from their preferential trade agreements. Outside of trade negotiations, in the post-9/11 era, many have asked in the West: Why do they hate us? This book explores the underlying cultural conditions in the rarified halls of trade diplomacy. If cultural clashes can happen there, they can happen anywhere.
In the last decade as I worked through the ideas for this book, I incurred many debts to students, friends, family, colleagues, and policy practitioners (not mutually exclusive categories by any means). I began conceptualizing the subject with a graduate seminar on The International Politics of Race when I taught at Georgetown University. It was one of the most intense courses I have ever taught.
Four years ago, I retrained myself in quantitative methods and went for two summers to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. Several instructors and TAsespecially Bill Jacoby, Shawna Smith, Rebecca Grady, and Kelly Gleasonwere remarkably helpful. They are people who believe in empirical data but think of quantitative analysis both as an art form and a science. I related to their worldview and empathized with the technique.
