Sir James Goldsmith in Le Piège (Paris, 1993) eloquently defended the nation and regional free trade against internationalists advocating global free trade. He provoked a formal answer from the European Commission in October 1994. A month later the English version of The Trap appeared, followed by a torrent of contradiction and polemic from various academics, the governor of Hong Kong, and Norman Macrae of the Sunday Times. In the fall of 1995, Goldsmith took time from his work as leader of the Europe of the Nations group in the European parliament and advocate of a referendum on Britain’s participation in the European Union to publish The Response. It is a calm but damning indictment of the future that awaits us under the globalist regime established by NAFTA and GATT.

For example, Goldsmith’s chapter on “The Story of Global Free Trade” shows that while such trade causes phenomenal growth in the Gross National (or now, Domestic) Product, it increases structural unemployment and public debt. In France, the GNP has grown 80 percent in the last 20 years, but real unemployment rose from about 400,000 to over five million. This last figure is the equivalent of 22 million in the United States. With our inferior educational system, the actual numbers are likely to be much higher. Unemployment and an aging population put enormous pressure on the industrialized nations’ social safety net. Goldsmith presents a chart that illustrates the Gross Debt (1994) plus the Net pension liabilities (1990) of major industrialized nations as a percentage of their GDP. These two figures show that the United States owes 130.6 of its GDP, while Japan owes 296.7 percent, Canada 345.6 percent, and Italy 356.2 percent of their GDP. The G7 countries owe an unweighted average of 264.7 percent of their GDP. This pyramid scheme can go on indefinitely, if countries with trade surpluses continue to lend money. What will happen if we see “the emergence of some sort of Sino-Indian- Japanese currency bloc,” which would invest in itself and write off earlier loans as bad investments? Norman Macrae envisioned this eventuality in 1993, without drawing the likely conclusion: bankruptcy, ruin, mass unemployment, and murderous ethnic conflict.

Such works as Hobsbawm’s Industry and Empire and Bairoch’s Economics and World History show that the amazing economic growth of the United States in the 19th century was based on a massively protectionist system. Alan Tonelson’s “Beating Back Predatory Trade” from Foreign Affairs (July 1994) proved that the prosperity of the American automobile, machine-tool, and computer-chip industries in the 1980’s, while our television and VCR industries were disappearing, was due to protectionist treaties negotiated under President Reagan. The phenomenal prosperity of the Reagan years rested on protectionism. The Bush-Clinton years undermined that prosperity.

In 1993, Goldsmith predicted that multilateral free trade treaties yoking together such unequal partners as the Ignited States and Mexico would cause unemployment in the United States while devastating the Mexican economy. Of prophets and treaties it is true that by their fruits ye shall know them. The December 10, 1994, Economist loudly mocked Ross Perot’s prediction of a “giant sucking sound” of jobs being drawn into Mexico and quoted outgoing Ignited States Secretary of the Treasury, Lloyd Bentsen, that NAFTA was “a win-win situation.” By then Bentsen was being replaced by Clinton’s éminence grise, Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs. On December 20, 1994, the Mexican peso collapsed. From the United States perspective, this magnified the advantage of Mexican labor costs. In 1992, excluding transshipments, the United States had a $5.7 billion trade surplus with Mexico. The U.S. Department of Commerce estimated that by the end of 1995 that will have turned into a $20 billion trade deficit. Add to that $25 billion deterioration in our balance of trade the $30 billion “bailout” loan engineered bv Secretary Rubin and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Every day Mexico approves two or three maquiladora plants, factories just over the border aimed at the United States market.

In Mexico, inflation is estimated at 50 percent, the peso has lost half of its value, but salaries have risen only 20 percent. Unemployment for the poor and bankruptcies for the middle class arc at record highs. The Mayans arc in open revolt, and the average Mexican is close to despair. “NAFTA is a typical case of mutual poisoning,” writes Goldsmith. Michel Camdessus of the International Monetary Fund warned of “a world catastrophe.” Goldsmith notes, “Submarines are built with watertight compartments, so that a leak in one area will not spread and sink the whole vessel. Now that we have globalized the world’s economy, the protective compartments no longer exist.”

Cui bono? When Rush Limbaugh openly opposed the bailout, he was jawboned for hours by Alan Greenspan, after which Rush tried to console his television audience with the news that “Most of this money is not going to Mexico, folks. It’s going to Wall Street.” More than $5 billion of the bailout money went to Secretary Rubin’s old firm, Goldman Sachs. Dr. Samuel Francis leaked the letter Rubin had sent to his Goldman Sachs clients, telling them that he hoped “to continue to serve them in his new position.” Rarely have auspications been so fruitfully fulfilled. The demoralization of First World nations and the ravaging of the Third World are accomplished for the benefit of international corporations. Goldsmith’s summary is as clear as it is chilling: “Some can still remember the old adage: ‘What is good for General Motors is good for America.’ But that was in the days when the corporate economy and the national economy had the same purpose. Now there are two distinct economies. Not only do they have different interests, but those interests arc conflicting. As corporations switch production to the areas with the cheapest labour and then import the products made abroad, they destroy jobs at home and increase the nation’s trade deficit.”

The old distinctions between left and right have lost their significance. The French Revolution that created them is over, as François Furet has noted. Now internationalists, socialist and capitalist, or corporatists, as Goldsmith prefers to call them, face off against the believer in the importance and vitality of the nation. One group will lead us to the Brazilianization predicted by Jared Taylor and, after him, Michael Lind. The other defends the nations of the world as the great laboratories of freedom and creativity. C.S. Lewis feared that misuse of the social sciences could lead to the “abolition of man.” Misuse of economics is leading to the abolition of the nation. In the end, the two results seem very similar.