Bill Clinton: “I think the impression developed because some people in the Government and in the press in America I think had the…”

“I think the impression developed because some people in the Government and in the press in America I think had the impression that MERCOSUR might be used as a vehicle to limit the growth of trade and investment with the United States in ways that would have adverse consequences for our long-term political as well as our economic cooperation. Now, let me say, at the end of the cold war there were Americans who felt that way about the European Union as well. When I became President, there was a group of people, good people, in our Government, permanent civil servants, who had the same feeling about the European Union. But I have a very different view. I believe that the United States should do whatever it can to promote the political and economic cooperation of democracies, not simply to grow the economy but in a larger sense to lift the conditions of ordinary people and to strengthen democratic institutions so that they cannot be reversed, and finally, because the threats we face today at the end of the cold war are much more likely to be threats that cross national borders, like terrorism, drugs, organized crime, as opposed to threats from other nations. So we all have to adjust our thinking. What I'm trying to do is to promote a process of reorganization of the world so that human beings are organized in a way that takes advantage of the new opportunities of this era and permits them to beat back the problems. If you start with that presumption, instead of a political organization in South America that doesn't include us is a threat to us, then you come to a very different conclusion. My conclusion is that MERCOSUR has been good for the countries that are members of it because they've torn down barriers among each other. That helps them all economically. At the same time, our trade with all the MERCOSUR nations has increased. And it permits other things. For example, Brazil and Argentina worked with us to stop the interruption of the democratic process in Paraguay. We now have the problems of potential terrorist activities in the tri-border--the countries are now better equipped to do that. So to me this is a positive thing. Now, having said that, what I had hoped to do on this trip is to convince the leaders, not just the Presidents but the leadership generally, that it is also in our interest to follow through on the commitment we made at the Summit of the Americas in Miami to work toward a free trade area of the Americas, and to see MERCOSUR, NAFTA, Andean Pact, CARICOM as building blocks in this. This is very important, because if the rest of the world should happen not to agree with us philosophically, then having a big trade area will be a great insurance policy for all these countries. And if we can prove that you can merge integrated economies and integrated democracies, then we'll be more likely to build a global system of this kind. So that's a long answer, but anyway it's important that you understand that this MERCOSUR issue for me is part of a very big world view. I just never felt as threatened by it as a lot of people who saw it in terms of this particular negotiation over this tariff or this custom or that sort of thing. Social Inequity”