Asterix in Belgium

PLUCKY little Wallonia! On October 14th the parliament of this rust-belt region of Belgium voted against the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), a proposed trade deal between the EU and Canada. To its admirers, this French-speaking corner of ancient Gaul, with a population of just 3.6m out of the EU’s 508m, has taken an Asterix-like stand against the implacable forces of globalisation. Free-traders may seethe that such a tiny minority can threaten a proposed treaty seven years in the making. But they cannot disregard it. Failure to secure a deal with Canada would undermine much of the EU’s trade-negotiating policy, and raise troubling questions for Britain about trade with the union after Brexit.

Politix v economix

Wallonia, once Belgium’s steel-and-coal heartland, is the sort of place where a bleak view of globalisation flourishes. Industrial plants are shutting down. Unemployment is high. In such poverty traps it is easy to misconstrue free-trade deals as giving supranational capital the right to trample over local legal systems, as well as environmental and labour standards. Yet political leaders, instead of facing up to this plight and presenting free trade as a way out of a dying past, make a case for it that is ever more convoluted. At best, they focus on technical fixes to finagle agreements such as CETA through. At worst they pander to rising protectionism with xenophobic rhetoric.

CETA has raised hackles across Europe. It had already been dealt a blow by Germany’s constitutional court, which, in a suit with 190,000 plaintiffs, this month ruled that it must not cut across areas under national (as opposed to EU-level) “competences”. Protesters against CETA have taken to the streets of many European countries. Anti-globalisers fear that it would pave the way for a proposed EU-America agreement, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

If only. Trade pacts are the walking dead of diplomacy, repeatedly rising from the grave and lurching ghoulishly through yet more rounds of “last ditch” talks. So CETA is not buried yet—though, as we went to press, the prospect that it might be signed as planned on October 27th looked remote. TTIP, whose condition seems terminal, also limps on. The TransPacific Partnership (TPP), covering America, Japan and ten other Pacific-rim countries, has yet to be ratified by Congress. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both say they oppose it.

Part of the problem is that even supporters of these agreements fail to defend them. In CETA negotiators have made striking improvements in contentious provisions, such as those for settling disputes between investors and governments—a bugbear of its opponents (see article). They have protected national laws on health and the environment and provided for transparent arbitration proceedings. They have guarded against a foreign-trade invasion to a fault: hundreds of its 1,598 pages cover national “reservations”, protecting everything from the livelihoods of veterinary surgeons in Alberta to executive-search services in Slovenia.

All the carve-outs, side-letters and “interpretative declarations” point to how trade policy skirts around the benefits of more openness, more trade and more globalisation. Most leaders understand that, as Barack Obama wrote in these pages two weeks ago: “Trade has helped our economy much more than it has hurt.” Yet in America many still dream that the best way to pacify Congress is through procedural gestures, and that the lame-duck session after the presidential election will at last ratify the TPP. (Perhaps they hope the electorate will not notice.) As for Europe, its stuttering recovery can ill afford to forgo the fillip from CETA and TTIP. Britain would be foolish to rejoice in the idea that, if those deals fall through, the Conservative government might easily strike some post-Brexit bilateral replacements. Britain’s future arrangements with the EU will be far more important. And if the union cannot reach a trade agreement with cuddly Canada, what hope is there for renegade Britain?