Abstract
AbstractThis article challenges exclusively rationalist accounts of and offers a complementary explanation for the emergence of liberal trade policy in the Kennedy administration. I draw on recent insights in constructivist institutionalism to emphasize the need to take agency seriously in institutionalist research. Using archival records, I analyze the decisive role Kennedy's advisers played as carriers of ideas in advocating for liberal trade policy by ‘constructing the national interest’, thus convincing a reticent president to support attempts aimed at achieving closer economic integration, culminating in the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. Insights from their role as advisers can help in specifying the role of agency in the ideas and institutional change literature, through strategic action which shaped a political leader's belief and put political issues on the agenda. By grasping agency in terms of making ideas actionable, an important step is taken in advancing endogenous approaches of institutional change.
Highlights
It is obvious, that there is keen awareness on the part of the President of the fact that... the tide is running in a protectionist direction (Viner, 1961: 565)
Why were the 1960s a period of further economic integration and American trade liberalization following the passage of the Trade Expansion Act (TEA) of 1962 and the Kennedy Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), when the conditions at the time were not amenable to such reform? The quote above by Jacob Viner highlights the zeitgeist when John F
I demonstrate that rationalist accounts overlook important motivations for trade liberalization initiated in the Kennedy administration
Summary
That there is keen awareness on the part of the President of the fact that... the tide is running in a protectionist direction (Viner, 1961: 565). The Trade Agreements Act has been so amended and the atmosphere surrounding it has become so restrictive as to deprive us of almost all maneuver room...This is our situation at a time of revolutionary change in the trading world that we have known...If we can move forward aggressively, the major trading nations will follow, for the most part, willingly and readily...Our opposing choice...[is] to present ourselves to the world at large as inward-looking and fearful of the future (Memorandum, anon., 1961: 1–3). At a time at which trade liberalization was being viewed increasingly skeptically, the Kennedy administration pursued some of the most far-reaching trade liberalization the country had known. That this occurred at a time during which ‘the tide was running in the opposite direction’ constitutes the puzzle of American trade policy early in the decade
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