Remaking U.S. Trade Policy

The emergence of globalization was neither accidental nor inevitable. To make the "free flow" of commodities, capital, and money possible, governments first had to introduce a new political infrastructure. In Remaking U.S. Trade Policy, Nitsan Chorev focuses on trade liberalization in the United States from the 1930s to the present as she explores the political origins of today's global economy.The ability of the U.S. government to impose its preferences on other governments is an important part of the story of globalization, but what is central to Chorev's analysis is understanding why the nation's leaders supported trade liberalization in the first place. For Chorev, the explanation lies in domestic political struggles. Advocates of free trade prevailed in the struggle with protectionists by working to change the institutions governing trade policy, replacing institutional arrangements that favored protectionism with new ones that favored a free-market approach.The new institutional arrangements shifted authority from a protectionist Congress to liberal agencies at the executive branch and to the World Trade Organization. These transformations entailed a move from a politicized location, in which direct negotiations and debates dominate the process of decision-making, to bureaucratic and judicial arenas where a legal logic dominates and the citizens have little voice.

"Remaking U.S. Trade Policy is a beautifully crafted, fine-grained account of the institutional shifts that pushed and pulled U.S. trade policy in a more liberal direction. It puts the various pieces of the policy puzzle together in a novel and compelling way. Nitsan Chorev's analysis is especially effective in pinpointing the institutional drivers of policy change."—Linda Weiss, University of Sydney, "Remaking U.S. Trade Policy is very provocative and raises a whole set of fascinating questions. Nitsan Chorev addresses one of the most important issues of our era—how the present globalized world economy was constructed. To my knowledge, there is no other book that carries out such a rich and carefully researched sociological investigation of the ebbs and flows of U.S. trade policy over the past seventy-five years."—Fred Block, University of California, Davis

Nitsan Chorev is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brown University.