“FREE TRADE SEMANTIC DISAGREEMENTS”: WHY WTO-STYLE MULTILATERAL LIBERALIZATION AND FTAS STAND MUCH CLOSER TO PROTECTIONISM

It is “mainstream” to say that the World Trade Organization (WTO) and Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) lead to the liberalization of the member states’ economies. Even “old school” pro free trade authors, known nowadays rather as being “against the tide” for promoting unilateral measures outside the WTO / FTAs sphere, still advocate, in an utilitarian manner, the need for commerce agreements between countries or regions as a way of extending the genuine free trade, basically due to two main reasons. Firstly, the economic gains from international trade are consolidated and improved when more countries or regions agree on a mutual reduction of commercial barriers, and by widening the markets, concerted liberalization of commerce increases competition and specialization amongst countries, thus giving a bigger impulse to both efficiency and consumers’ incomes. econdly, the multilateral cut-offs of trade barriers may deter political opposition against free trade in each of the countries involved, since those groups that otherwise would have opposed or would have been indifferent to the commercial reform may join the campaign for free trade provide they see export opportunities to the other member countries of these trade agreements. Such lines of reasoning are, in our understanding, a too charitable way of reading the reality, and to look at trade agreements between governments as drivers of the freedom to trade is a “false friend”, a piece of wishful thinking, a semantic illusion.