The Social Dimensions of Globalization: NAFTA Ten Years On

for inviting us to participate in this session, and Makarand Paranjape for conversations on this and related subjects. All errors or omissions are, as ever, our own responsibility. In this paper, we review the major issues in the debate preceding the original Canada – US Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA), predecessor of the North American FTA (NAFTA), focusing on its social dimensions, and relating it to current debates around globalization. We take a broad view of “social”, to encompass culture. In Canada, the debates around culture form part of a larger national debate on how closely the country should integrate, economically and otherwise, with the United States, and to what extent it should mimic American institutions, be they political, social, or cultural. It is fair to say that in Canada, fears about globalization are more precisely fears about Americanization, in contrast to emerging economies, of either the developing or transition varieties, where cultural nationalists worry about globalization writ large, and not Americanization per se. To the contrary, a healthy dose of Americanization is often seen as welcome relief from the legacies of colonia