History will record the almost-frenzied pace with which negotiators from Mexico, the United States, and Canada have proceeded to draft a treaty that will change drastically the nature of economic relations among the three nations. Three nations with severe social and economic problems, declining competitiveness in the global economy, and virtually no plans for remedying their domestic shortcomings have rushed to drop their borders. Ironically, this act will further reduce their ability to provide domestic remedies for their current problems. It casts these three economies into the unpredictable winds of free trade precisely at a time when a truly-conservative policy would have dictated economic reform at home and efforts to resolve, first, the major domestic crises in each.

The Supposed emergence of a New World Order has quickly become one of the cliches of the 1990s. First enunciated by President Bush in the context of US attempts to mobilize international support for the Gulf War, the phrase has already been defined and redefined in countless journalistic analyses of recent events in Eastern Europe, the Gulf itself and lately of course the Soviet Union. This is not the place to add directly to that debate. It is obvious that the world order of the 1990s is very different from the post-1945 order. Briefly expressed, it is constituted by the interplay between, on the one hand, a new but still unequal diffusion of power between the core states of the world (the United States, the European Community [EC], and Japan) and, on the other, a new concentration of power in the hands of international capital.

Chile is Often portrayed as an exceptional case among recent transitions from authoritarian rule for a number of reasons. It was the last of the "bureaucratic authoritarian" regimes to democratize; the transition followed the timetable and conditions set by the military more closely than in Argentina and Uruguay; the prognosis for economic and political stability seems optimistic relative to the rest of the region. An important reason for Chilean exceptionality was the fact that, unlike in other cases, Chile's business and landowning elites supported the military government to the end. Why did they do so?

The Literature on democratic transitions suggests two opposite sorts of dangers that the successful democratizer must avoid: too much uncertainty on the one hand, and too little on the other. The first can lead to conflict, violence, and abortive transitions (Karl and Schmitter, 199D; while the second means there is no democracy at all, but leads to something less which has been variously called: "tutelary democracy," "electoralism," or "democradura."

Before the government of Patricio Aylwin took office in Chile in March 1990, most observers anticipated that the return to democracy would bring considerable social conflict and political instability. Expressing a widely held view, one expert wrote: "Any return to democracy in Chile would entail vocal demands, from a variety of social groups and movements, to reverse the policies instituted by the regime since 1973" (Loveman 1986-87:29). The need to confront human rights abuses during the military government was another potentially explosive political issue.

In 1991, Ecuador's foreign policy had to deal with the revival of its old border conflict with Peru. Nevertheless, this time the situation offered some hope — in contrast to previous occasions, the most recent being the Paquisha incident in 1982 — that the longstanding impasse between the two countries, which had hindered closer cooperation and greater integration for decades, might be nearing some sort of resolution at last.

During the first two years of his administration, President Rodrigo Borja and his Foreign Minister Diego Cordovez were primarily concerned with incorporating Ecuador into some of the Latin American efforts at international cooperation — political, economic, and commercial — which had emerged during the 1980s, such as the Rio Group, or which had been redefined and advanced in new, more creative forms, such as those exemplified by the Cartagena Group, the Asociación Latinoamericana de Integratión (ALADI), the proposed Andean Free Trade Zone, and the like.