The European Trade Justice Coalition (formerly Seattle to Brussels or S2B) recently had its 25th anniversary. The keynote address was given by Luciana Ghiotto of Plataforma América Latina y el Caribe mejor sin TLC and TNI
Did Trump steal our agenda? Why fighting free trade isn’t enough anymore
Luciana Ghiotto, Plataforma América Latina mejor sin TLC / Transnational Institute (TNI)
In September 2025, we gather in Brussels to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the European Trade Justice Coalition (ETJC). Over the past quarter century, the ETJC has engaged in organized advocacy and resistance, from participating in events such as Seattle 1999 to challenging the policies of the World Trade Organization and free trade initiatives globally. For 25 years, the coalition has consistently advocated against trade models that prioritize corporate profits at the expense of social and environmental well-being.
But we are also here to face the difficult questions. Let us start with a deeply uncomfortable issue, a question we don’t like to ask ourselves but cannot avoid: why is it that when a country like the United States takes exactly the protectionist agenda that we have been defending for decades, it seems that the movement has been left without politics? In other words, has Trump left us without objectives? How is it possible that when finally, someone with real power criticizes free trade, we don’t know what to say?
Let’s think about it concretely: for decades we denounced NAFTA as “the worst treaty in history,” and Trump renegotiated it. We criticized free trade agreements for destroying industrial jobs, and Trump imposed tariffs to “protect American workers.” We warned about the risks of the Trans-Pacific Treaty, and Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement. We denounced the WTO as a falsely multilateral body with policies favoring transnational corporations, and Trump paralyzed it by blocking its dispute resolution body.
But here comes the disconcerting part: when finally, a powerful state adopts policies that resemble our historic demands, we find ourselves without response. Do we celebrate? Do we oppose? Do we maintain uncomfortable silence?
This irresolution is not exclusive to the trade justice movement. American unions for years have asked for protection for national industry, and now they find themselves in a trap: some unions support tariffs that come accompanied by massive attacks on labor rights. Trump tells them this is protection of jobs from Chinese competition, but at the same time deregulates working conditions, attacks the right to strike, reduces workplace safety protections. The unions end up celebrating policies that fundamentally weaken them as organizations.
So here is a pattern: Trump has taken the criticisms we built for decades but completely changes the diagnosis. The problem is not labor exploitation or the loss of popular sovereignty, but the “theft” of American jobs and resources by foreigners, especially at the hands of China. The result is devastating: it is the same anti-globalization discourse that we have used but inverted to justify more labor exploitation instead of less, more corporate power instead of less.
The uncomfortable question, then, is not only about trade: it is about why a right-wing nationalist project has managed to occupy the discursive space that we built during decades of resistance to neoliberalism.
To understand how we have reached this situation, we need to situate ourselves historically. This feeling of being left without answers does not arise from nowhere: it arises from the fact that we are living through the exhaustion of a cycle of struggles, our own cycle, which began almost three decades ago and today reaches its end without us having managed to build alternative societies.
The history of social movements teaches us that struggles are not linear but occur in cycles. They have moments of rise, deployment of conflict, direct confrontation, and then periods of decline or retreat.
The previous cycle, that of the sixties, escalated in the early seventies, but closed between 1984-1985 with the defeat of the labor movement in the United States and England. Today we can ask ourselves: are we living through a similar moment? And if so, how should we as trade activists position ourselves in the face of this reality?
Previous Cycle: Labor Against Capital
The struggle cycle of the sixties was marked by a clear confrontation of labor against capital. It was evidenced at that moment by the rise of worker struggle, with factory occupations, direct struggle and certain degrees of violence in protest. We saw there the articulation of union and worker struggles with other struggles: student, African American, women’s movement, against the Vietnam War, etc.
The workers’ struggle imposed a real metamorphosis of capital. Class relations were completely reconfigured, forcing capital to restructure to maintain its profit level. Capital’s response was direct: political confrontation through neoliberal governments in some places, dictatorships in others.
But this cycle had a definitive closure. This defeat was not only the result of political repression, but of a deeper process: the internationalization of capital, where capital began to flee, especially toward Asia. Why? Because European and American workers had become too expensive and problematic. They had conquered high wages, strong labor rights, powerful unions. So, capital did what it always does when it encounters resistance and declining profits: it went to look for cheaper and more docile workers.
From the mid-seventies we see exactly this: factories close in Detroit or Manchester, and open in Guangdong or Dhaka. This is a deliberate strategy: discipline the labor of the center by constantly threatening to leave.
As we said, the closure of this cycle of struggles implied the fall of union power. However, this defeat was not only the result of direct political confrontation or capital flight to Asia. It was something much deeper: the simultaneous collapse of the two historical strategies that the working class had followed worldwide.
On one hand, the exhaustion of the Keynesian strategy meant the failure of the social democratic path with the stagflation crises of the seventies. The welfare state model, based on full employment, collective bargaining and income redistribution, demonstrated that it could not resolve the basic contradictions of capitalist accumulation. The unions and social democratic parties that had bet on social concertation found themselves without tools in the face of capital’s profitability crisis.
On the other hand, the collapse of real socialism between 1989-1991 represented the definitive collapse of the revolutionary path. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR demonstrated that “really existing socialism” had failed as an alternative to capitalism, leaving communist parties and national liberation movements without political reference and international support.
This double defeat – Keynesianism and real socialism – created the ideological conditions for neoliberal hegemony. There was no visible alternative (TINA) because effectively the historical alternatives of the labor movement had collapsed. With this, the struggle cycle of the sixties definitively closed, but it also opened a strategic vacuum that would take decades to begin filling with new forms of resistance.
Our Cycle: 25 Years of Anti-Neoliberal Resistance
And what happens with our cycle of struggles? Our cycle, which we can call the “cycle of struggles against neoliberal globalization,” began with the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and its categorical “Enough Already.” It continued with resistance to the Multilateral Agreement on Investment and reached its emblematic moment in the battle of Seattle against the WTO in 1999.
This period saw the emergence of great networks of global resistance: La Vía Campesina, ATTAC, and in our region, the articulation against FTAA between 2000-2005, where union, peasant, indigenous, women and environmental movement sectors said a resounding “No” to hemispheric free trade. The struggle slogans mixed between radical anti-capitalist slogans with others of rejection of neoliberalism, with demands for redistributive policies and human rights, but within the system.
This cycle was marked by something that seemed evident to us: capital was expanding toward new frontiers. Companies no longer produced everything in one place, but fragmented production: they designed in California, manufactured in China, assembled in Mexico. At the same time, we saw how public services were privatized, common lands were enclosed, water, education, and health were commodified. Everything became a commodity.
But our movement also had new characteristics. We had seen the Berlin Wall fall, the USSR collapse, and we didn’t want to repeat the errors of traditional communist parties with their vertical and bureaucratic structures. Then the “new social movements” emerged: horizontal organizations, where positions were rotated to prevent power concentration, where agendas previously considered “secondary” were included – women, indigenous peoples, the environment were not topics for “after the revolution,” they were central from the beginning. Even unions began to change, incorporating new themes and new forms of organization.
The Movement’s Crisis
But something happened to that movement against neoliberal globalization. And it was not something minor. We are talking about a movement that seemed unstoppable: we had been part of stopping FTAA, we had put the WTO against the ropes, we had built solid global networks, we had massive mobilizations on all continents. We were the global resistance to neoliberalism.
However, when Trump appears doing exactly what we were asking for (criticizing free trade, opposing multilateral treaties, questioning the WTO) we were left mute. Not only that: a large part of our traditional allies ended up supporting things they previously rejected or were completely bewildered not knowing what position to take.
This is not a coincidence. It’s not that the movement simply “lost strength” or that “the conjuncture changed.” It’s that there were profound problems in how we conceived our strategy.
The crisis has at least two dimensions that we must analyze honestly.
First: today resistance to globalization comes from the right, not from the left. Trump has appropriated our anti-free trade rhetoric, but from a completely different nationalist-corporate matrix. It is true that some points of his argument are similar to ours: criticism of job relocation, the impacts of FTAs on workers, opposition to agreements like TPP, criticisms of NAFTA and the WTO.
But he does it from an approach that does not question the fundamental asymmetries of the global economic order, nor incorporates demands for environmental or international labor justice. What Trump claims is an exclusionary economic nationalism: his objective is not to rediscuss the role of American corporations, but to make them strong again. Instead of “Make America Great Again,” his slogan should be: “Make US Corporations Great Again.”
This situation has put us in an apparently impossible crossroads: opposing Trump’s trade policies could be seen as defending the neoliberal status quo, while supporting them would mean legitimizing a project that favors American capital without addressing underlying social exploitation and inequality.
And here is the fundamental problem: what Trumpism has put in crisis is the vision centered on economic nationalism that many social movements have maintained since the nineties. The vindication of the centrality of the state and its regulatory capacity became the articulating axis of progressive projects that sought to recover spaces of autonomy for national public policies in the face of the advance of neoliberal globalization. But this political strategy has found its limit.
Second, and here we reach the core of our crisis: the centrality that the movement placed on the state. Our argument was clear and seemed logical: “we don’t want free trade because we want the state to have the capacity to make public policy.” Our interpretation has been that FTAs take sovereignty away from the state, prevent it from regulating companies, protecting the environment, maintaining public services. That’s why we have fought for “strong states” that make industrial policy, social policy, environmental policy.
It was a correct argument against the neoliberalism of the nineties, which effectively sought to dismantle state capacities. And it worked: we managed to stop treaties, strengthen discourses on national sovereignty, vindicate the role of the state against the market.
But the limits of the state as an “instrument” were not only manifested with Trump. We also saw them clearly in the exhaustion of the cycle of left governments in South America – the so-called “pink tide” – and in the failure of Syriza in Greece. Both processes marked the limits of the strategies that dominated the left in the decade after Seattle. The Latin American progressive governments that came to power promising to recover state capacity in order to regulate capital encountered the structural limitations of operating within the global capitalist system. Even when they controlled the state apparatus, they could not fundamentally transform production relations nor escape the logic of accumulation. Syriza, for its part, demonstrated how even an explicitly anti-austerity government was disciplined by financial markets and European institutions, forced to implement exactly the policies it had promised to combat.
These cases reveal that the problem was not only that neoliberalism “weakened” the state, but that the modern state is structurally limited by its function of guaranteeing the conditions of capitalist accumulation. What happens then when the state effectively becomes “strong” and retakes a more active role against free market, but does not necessarily move toward where we want? What happens when the state presents itself to us in its most naked form: not as the neutral instrument that can be used for the common good, but as what it really is: the guarantor of capitalist profit?
Because that is exactly what we see both with Trump and with the limits that progressive strategies faced: the state does make “public policy,” but public policy at the service of capital, not social majorities. Trump actively uses the state to strengthen American corporations, while progressive governments discovered that using the state for social justice had structural limits. And we were left without response because we had placed all our hopes in “recovering state capacity”, without asking ourselves: state capacity at the service of whom? Within what systemic limitations?
What can we do then? We need to recover that radicalism we once had, but how? What Trump has made evident is that we have been trapped in a false dilemma between “free trade” and “protectionism.” Both operate within the same systemic logic. Trump does not represent a real rupture with the neoliberal order, but a reconfiguration of relations between state, corporations and world market.
At this point we can ask ourselves some questions:
First question: Can we continue putting trade agreements as the central axis of our agenda? This worked when we faced the neoliberal order of the nineties, but today that order is in crisis. Don’t we need to radically expand our agenda? Shouldn’t we develop an analysis that understands that the trade question is interwoven with productive, financial, environmental, digital questions?
Second issue: Can we continue having nationalism as a political horizon? For decades our argument was “let’s recover national sovereignty,” “let the national state be able to regulate companies,” “let´s ask states to implement national industrial (and green) policies.” It sounded logical in the face of neoliberalism that wanted to weaken states.
But what happened? Trump arrived and said the same: “America First,” “national sovereignty,” “let the American state regulate trade.” And we were left without response because we had put all our chips on nationalism. We must identify the trap here. If our horizon is nationalism, then any nationalism can appropriate our discourse.
I’m also not talking about embracing an abstract internationalism that says “we are all equal” ignoring that the United States has a power that other countries like Honduras do not have. That would be naive. But don’t we need to develop strategies that can operate simultaneously on multiple scales?
For example, when maquiladoras move from Mexico to Vietnam, is our response to ask the Mexican state to bring them back with subsidies? Or is it to build solidarities between Mexican and Vietnamese workers so that neither is used to discipline the other? When Amazon exploits workers in Spain, Poland and Brazil, is the response for each country to compete to attract Amazon with fewer regulations? Or is it for workers from the three countries to coordinate to demand the same conditions everywhere?
Third question, and here comes a much-needed self-criticism: during our own cycle of struggles the working class was profoundly transformed. However, it seems we have not known how to adapt to his new reality. While we resisted FTAs, the world of work was fragmenting under our feet. At the same moment we were marching in Seattle, precarious jobs multiplied, part-time, without fixed contracts, without social benefits.
Didn’t our movement continue thinking of the “typical worker” as the factory employee with a stable contract? Didn’t we continue organized for stable workers while the reality was the delivery person without a fixed boss, the Uber driver, the cleaning lady paid by the hour, the one who has three jobs to try to make ends meet? Didn’t we remain representing a world of work that was becoming a minority?
That’s why the final question: Who should we really incorporate? Shouldn’t it be the sectors that embody the system’s contradictions? Communities affected by extractivism, informal workers who proliferate in peripheral economies, those who cannot be incorporated with public policy because the system tends precisely toward their proliferation and cannot integrate them.
We are at a moment where the right embodies the most radical ideas, where we are living through the crisis of the struggle cycle that gave us identity for decades. Within this context, it is essential to consider whether we can effectively radicalize our own practices and demonstrate the existence of a utopian horizon, even as circumstances become increasingly turbulent.
This implies something uncomfortable but necessary: stopping the ball, in a soccer metaphor. Looking up to read the field strategically before deciding where and how to push forward, resisting the pressure to immediately react, to sprint blindly ahead simply because the game demands movement. So, this means we should be able to review our strategy and even our objectives. Not continuing to run behind the agenda that others set for us, but stopping to ask ourselves: where do we really want to go? What kind of society do we want to build? Only when we have clarity about this will we have more elements to weigh our tactics, to decide when to ally, when to confront, and how to organize.
Finally: we must assume that we are at a moment of transition between cycles. We cannot continue operating with the frameworks of the cycle that is exhausted, especially when these frameworks have left us without response in the face of the rightist appropriation of our demands. Trade justice in this new context cannot be limited to resisting trade agreements nor remain trapped in the false dilemma between free trade and nationalist protectionism.
Can the movement transcend the free trade/protectionism dichotomy? Is it possible to develop an internationalist praxis that recognizes the structural limits of economic nationalism without falling into resignation before the power of global capital? This deeper criticism does not imply abandoning the struggle against free trade treaties, but recontextualizing it in a deeper understanding of the dynamics of contemporary capitalism and in a radical transformation project that encompasses the multiple dimensions of capitalist domination. It is not about opposing specific agreements, but about building alternative models of international economic relations that question the capitalist logic itself.
25 years ago we said “another world is possible.” But that other world requires that we leave behind both the illusions of the free market and those of economic nationalism, and that we recover a radicalism that transcends the false dilemmas in which we have been trapped.