NAFTA and the Promises and Perils of the New Internationalism.
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1 Wolfgang Sachs, "On
the Archeology of the Development Idea," p. 4. Unpublished in
English, but manuscript produced by the Science, Technology and Society
Program at Penn State, November 1989.
1 These terms
are elaborated in Jeremy Brecher's contributions to Global Visions:
Beyond the New World Order, edited by Jeremy Brecher, John Brown
Childs, and Jill Cutler (Boston, South End Press, 1993) and in Jeremy
Brecher and Tim Costello, Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic
Reconstruction from the Bottom Up (Boston, South End Press, 1994).
1 For an overview
of some of these initiatives see Brecher and Costello, Global
Village or Global Pillage. Periodicals which include regular
coverage of these netoworks include Labor Notes and Crossroads.
Mexican discussions can be found (in English) in the newsletter The
Other Side of Mexico published by the NGO Equipo Pueblo; Canadian
coverage can be found in the monthly Canadian Dimension.
1 See Douglas
Chalmers et al, Mexican NGO Networks and Popular Participation,
Columbia University Institute of Latin American and Iberian Studies,
Papers on Latin America #39, January 1995.
1 There are
no agreed upon definitions of terms like "network" and "coalition" so
the fact that the inter-organizational ties in Mexico and Canada
are called networks and the US one is not does not necessarily mean
much. I find it useful to define and thereby distinguish the terms
as follows: a coalition of organizations comes together because to
campaign collaboratively around a particular issue on which members
agree. As such coalitions are likely to be quite politically heterogenous
and are unlikely to exist after the particular issue has been addressed
(be it through legislative action, an administrative ruling, or an
event that the coalition itself creates). A network links politically
mixed organizations which work on the same broad set of concerns
or politically similar organizations which seek to coordinate on
a range of shared concerns. Networks thus have, for me, greater political
coherence, and are intended to be relatively more permanent than
coalitions. Both coalitions and networks can a) help sustain contacts
between member organizations, provide them with information, educational
materials, etc. to increase the capacity of the member organizations
to to work on shared projects; b) undertake tasks--such as lobbying,
research, media outreach--on behalf of member organizations which
they are unable to do on their own. Most coalitions and networks
do a combination of both, but problems can arise--I think--when different
groups have different expectations, especially when the staff of
the network or coalition thinks they should be doing the second while
many member organizations expect them to be doing the first.
1 For a fuller
discussion of different meanings of the term sovereignty see the
author's unpublished working paper, "Democracy Yes, Sovereignty
No: An Exploration of Tensions between Domestic and Transnational
Political Activism."
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