From Miami to Quebec: Reflections on Three Summits

Eduardo A. Gamarra
Director, Latin American and Caribbean Center

 
Seven years ago Miami organized the first Summit of the Americas. The planners of the Miami Summit, as well as the Florida business community, universities, and others, were probably not fully aware of the long- term consequences that the event would have. It set in motion a process that has transformed an important dimension of inter-American relations. With no memory of the Punta del Este meeting in 1967, the last time hemispheric leaders met to plan for a free trade area, the Miami Summit planners organized an event that they hoped would lead to something important. Critics charged that the Summit was a waste of resources that would be nothing more than a photo opportunity for 34 heads of state looking for a chance to pose with then-president Bill Clinton. But through an ambitious and carefully negotiated Plan of Action, the 1994 Summit launched a new phase of inter-American relations that is finally receiving widespread attention.

The FTAA Takes Center Stage
The leaders of the Americas did not come to Miami to sign the political and social proclamations that US planners had carefully negotiated in the months preceding the Summit. Instead, they were concerned mainly about access to the US market. Thus, it is not surprising that the principal and most noteworthy dimension of the process has been pursuit of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA); some would argue, at the expense of all other concerns. In pledging to launch the FTAA by the year 2005, the leaders believed they would have ample time to complete full negotiations for such a bold initiative.

The process initiated in Miami did not take on a force of its own immediately. In the aftermath of the Summit, the US decertified Colombia and threatened to decertify other countries for non-compliance with counternarcotics efforts. And in late 1994, the bottom fell out of the Mexican economy. In the context of these challenges, Washington appeared to have relegated its efforts to a Summit Implementation office in a remote section of the State Department. Similarly, with a few exceptions, no country in the hemisphere appeared seriously interested in the implementation of the Plan of Action. Only Florida, and more specifically Miami, appeared to be committed to forward progress. To demonstrate its ongoing interest, Florida established three organizations, including the Summit of the Americas Center at FIU, to monitor the Plan of Action and keep the Summit process alive.

Apart from its most ardent supporters, few observers realized that the Summit, and in particular the FTAA, would take on a life of its own. The process moved forward quickly through a series of vice ministerial and ministerial meetings. To monitor and influence the process, business leaders wisely organized an Americas Business Forum to coincide with the meetings of trade ministers, although they complained of having little or no influence on ministerial decisions. At meetings in Denver, Cartagena, Belo Horizonte, San José, Toronto, and Buenos Aires, the ministers signed important agreements to move the FTAA process forward. Following the San José Ministerial and the II Summit of the Americas in April 1998 in Santiago, Chile, formal hemispheric trade negotiations were launched and Miami was selected as the temporary site for the FTAA Secretariat.

Before protesting against free trade became fashionable, most people in the Americas had no idea what the Summit of the Americas process was about and few had heard of the FTAA. Even at events organized by FIU's Summit of the Americas Center, few members of the business community outside of Miami knew about the proposal. The relative anonymity surrounding the process may have contributed to the advances that have indeed been achieved.

Civil society organizations (CSOs) found some space for action at the 1996 Summit/Conference on Sustainable Development hosted by Bolivia in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. The event involved a few heads of state; most notably, it gave a small stage to then vice president Al Gore. In the end, it produced another large set of recommendations and a Plan of Action. In some measure, CSOs believed that their voices had been heard. Unfortunately, the Santa Cruz Summit was forgotten and the pledges made by a few heads of state and their representatives were shelved.

Two years later, the 34 heads of state at the II Summit of the Americas in Chile ratified the Santa Cruz Plan of Action. In addition to launching formal FTAA negotiations, they also ordered the OAS's Inter-American Commission on Drug Abuse (CICAD) to develop a mechanism to evaluate progress against the drug trade. Finally, they pledged to spend nearly $10 billion in regional educational efforts.

It is now Quebec's turn to organize and host the III Summit of the Americas. An awful lot has happened since Miami to change the nature of the event. Protests against the FTAA negotiations that began quietly during Trade Ministerial meetings escalated after the demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle. Canadian leaders who pushed to host the Summit did not foresee the evolution of the anti-free trade movement; neither did the rest of the hemisphere. To deal with security concerns-which were considerable in Miami and Santiago but nowhere near those in Quebec-four square kilometers of the city have been fenced off and nearly $30 million spent on security. Giving truth to the old adage to be careful what you wish for, the paradox of the FTAA is that for many years its proponents hoped that it would someday be recognized. They got what they asked for, without expecting the agreement to become a rallying cry against globalization.

The Quebec Summit could well become the place where the Summit of the Americas process is consolidated. To do so, however, it will have to do the impossible: The leaders of the Americas will have to demonstrate that the process is more than the FTAA and that other concerns are of equal significance. With protesters ignoring the four Plans of Action agreed to since Miami, this will be a difficult task indeed. Few will remember the pledges to make democracy work better, the promotion of human rights, the pledges to improve justice and the rule of law, the calls for improved hemispheric security, the statements about managing the environment and natural resources, and the promises to include civil society. Instead, Quebec is likely to be remembered because of the chain link fence that kept protestors from reaching the heads of state.

Three Summits, Three Lessons
Three lessons can be drawn from the Miami, Santiago and Quebec City summits. First, the Summit process has converted multilateralism into an important dimension of inter-American relations. Multilateral negotiations involve forward progress by consensus, causing the US to complain that its vote counts the same as that of St. Kitts, for example, an island nation with a few thousand inhabitants. It is clearly an exaggeration to state that the US and St. Kitts are on equal footing and that asymmetric relations are a thing of the past; at the same time, it is also clear that multilateral decision making has forced the US to accept issues that it previously rejected as a matter of routine. Yet, despite the gains on the multilateral front, bilateralism is alive and well and could still prevail in inter-American relations. If the Summit process fails to institutionalize beyond presidential photo opportunities, and especially if the FTAA fails to advance, the most likely scenario in the Americas is a collection of bilateral free trade agreements where conditionality imposed by the largest partner will prevail.

The second lesson concerns the involvement of civil society and the implementation of Summit accords. Experience has demonstrated that through continuous involvement inside the process, CSOs could have an impact. Perhaps the best example is the behavior of business organizations, which through their ABF meetings were more effective in securing the public release of the FTAA text than the rock-throwing protesters who rocked Seattle and, more recently, Buenos Aires. It might be wise for non-business CSOs to emulate the behavior of their well-organized and financed business counterparts. CSOs should carefully examine the Plan of Action text and hold leaders accountable to promises such as the "implementation and enforcement of national legislation, regulations, standards and policies that provide for high levels of environmental protection…" Plans of Action are important documents that take months to negotiate but are quickly forgotten. Not only do countries forget what they signed, but also protesters who might find some cause to support rarely read the documents. Civil society might do better if CSOs simply demanded that their elected leaders implement the many significant pledges they have made since Miami.

The third lesson is that the heads of state who sign the Plans of Action are simply temporary holders of power in their respective countries. One of the reasons for the lack of implementation of broader accords has to do with the turnover in leadership since 1994. Because most countries in the Americas have presidential systems and presidents have fixed terms, only a handful of the leaders now meeting in Quebec were at the Vizcaya Palace in Miami when the first Plan of Action was signed-all the more reason for constant non-governmental vigilance over the agreements signed in Miami, Santa Cruz and Santiago, and those to be signed in Quebec.

Summit IV will be held in Argentina, although a date has yet to be announced. By then, most of South America's leadership will have changed. The key to the success of the Summit of the Americas process is to channel non-constructive civil society action into effective and constant monitoring of elected leaders.