Author
Listed:
- Sheveta Sehgal
(The author is a Doctoral Candidate, Department of Political Science, Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab)
Abstract
Today, the world has indeed become more sharply demarcated in regional terms. The tendency for regionalism is evident both in developed as well as developing countries. The three distinct dimensions of regional space for the tendency to regionalism are: area (commonly known as territory); contiguity (parts are proximate to other or remote); and size (the extent of its scope). After the end of the Cold War phase in international politics, some very important developments took place, that is, ‘regionalism’. Regionalism has become an inescapable international political reality and an acceptable alternative to understand unilateral action and undependable United Nations (UN) intervention. Europe was merely a starting point for a further set of comparable experiments in integration. And, on the heels of European experience, there duly came attempts to create common markets and free trade associations in the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific and the Americas: the world was indeed filled in the 1960s with proposals for North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Pacific Free Trade Area (PAFTA), Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA) and even more. The NAFTA is the single example of a free trade area representing a group of two developed and one developing country. The NAFTA involves the creation of the world’s largest free trade agreement (FTA), with combined gross national product (GNP) of $6.3 trillion and a population of 363 million. The NAFTA, unlike other trade agreements, is not concerned exclusively with trade but also deals with environmental and labour standards. It is the first case of a developing country’s accession to this type of agreement with developed states on a fully reciprocal basis.
Suggested Citation
Sheveta Sehgal, 2010.
"The Evolution of NAFTA,"
India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, , vol. 66(3), pages 303-316, September.
Handle:
RePEc:sae:indqtr:v:66:y:2010:i:3:p:303-316
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:indqtr:v:66:y:2010:i:3:p:303-316. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.