Opinion Archive

What to Make of Conspiracy Theories

September 17, 2008

The Republican National Convention in Minneapolis had competition from the Right during its brief stint in Minnesota. Across the river in St. Paul, Ron Paul (no relation), rallied his freethinking faithful to back his "rally for the Republic". While The Economist reports that many worthy topics were discussed, such as government waste and the need for a profound review of US deployment of military power, another whipping boy reared its paper dragon head: the imminent creation of a North American Union. In the fantasies of its believers, this would tie down the mighty United States, Gulliver-style, subsumed by nebulous Big Business interests, Canadians and Mexicans (the mightiest Lilliputians of this tale). I kid you not.

Presumably, reading Jerome Corsi's "The Late Great USA" is de riguer among North America conspiracy theorists. The anti-Democrat character assassin author of "Unfit for Command" (anti-Kerry) and "Obama Nation" (anti-Obama) set his sights on our governments' cooperation mechanisms and treaties to denounce "the coming merger with Mexico and Canada". Like the tomes relating to the Democratic candidates, "The Late Great USA" is a New York Times Bestseller.

In the interest of full disclosure, your correspondent is revealed in the book to be a co-conspirator, by virtue of having attended a meeting of the North American Forum in 2006 (a list of attendees is included in an appendix). The fact that I write for an English-speaking newspaper in Mexico probably proves to them that I am a card-carrying member of this fifth column of "elites". But the mood at the conference was much more one of concern about the lack of coordinating mechanisms between the three countries. Specific gripes related to a lack of military coordination with Mexico (our armed forces are still wary of the Americans), protectionism vis-à-vis Mexican trucks entering the US, and American softwood lumber trade disputes with Canada. All very mundane.

For the cloak-and-dagger set the supposed mechanism for integration stems from the wishful words of the Security and Prosperity Partnership, an initiative announced by President Bush that basically proposes further cooperation, mostly to safeguard the continent and its trade. The initiative was announced in 2005 and very little of substance has occurred, but in the face of this snail's pace, the paranoid cite that this is in line with the "incrementalist" approach seen in Europe. Of course.

Then they point to the disappearance of the two dollars (American and Canadian) and the peso, to give rise to the "amero". This stems from an academic exercise by Canadian Herbert Grubel of the Fraser Institute in 1999, and it has no policy initiative basis whatsoever, but boy did it capture the imagination of conspiracy theorists. A series of infrastructure improvements in Texas are evidence of a "NAFTA superhighway", presumably to be used for Schengen-like open borders in the near future.

The one element of substance that Corsi and his believers point to is the massive amounts of Mexican immigration into the US. The fact that much of this coincided with the beginning of NAFTA, a bona fide government policy, makes it look like it's all part of a "master plan" to integrate the two countries.

NAFTA was a necessary but woefully insufficient step in the direction of modernizing Mexico's economy. The legal limbo in which 6 million illegal Mexican immigrants live (out of a total of 28.3 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans) is a result of the imperfect de facto compromise that the stalemate on the amnesty question has wrought. Rather than being an example of politicians overstepping their mandate, they are evidence of a lack of strategic long-term thinking.

Having borne witness to the birth of NAFTA on Capital Hill as an intern in Washington, and having attended these cabalistic conferences, I can perhaps give hope to those who are afraid of North American cooperation. What this correspondent has seen is groups of well-meaning technocrats and ex-notables trying to find politically viable stopgap solutions, such as trade agreements and the Mérida Initiative, to issues that have, quite frankly, overwhelmed our continent.

What's especially frustrating is that, when something that was never going to happen doesn't happen, conspiracy theorists often claim that it was their fearless exposure of the plot that lead to its demise. It's a self-fulfilling non-prophecy.

North America has legitimate concerns that demand cooperation between our three governments, not the least of which is security. There is no conspiracy to subsume anyone's government to anyone else's. If anything, our cooperation mechanisms are too limited and fragile (in the sense that they can be easily derailed by misunderstandings). To throw stones in this house of glass is silly and irresponsible. The danger is not that the world's leaders talk too much amongst themselves, but rather that they do not talk enough.

For the latest thought-provoking article by Agustin Barrios Gomez please go to our Opinion Column page

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