ABSTRACT
In the last decade of the twentieth century, the historical structure of liberal capitalist hegemony is transforming itself. This chapter will argue that the public debate in the US over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and, to a lesser extent, the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), reflected these sociopolitical changes and the possibility of renewed challenges to the hegemony of liberal capitalism and the predominant transnational capitalist bloc. I want to suggest that NAFTA and GATT were (and are) important, not just as international agreements to encourage trade and investment, but as occasions for political debate in which central tensions of liberal capitalism-long dormant within the terms of the postwar hegemonic order-were once again represented in public discourse as open questions, terrains of active socio-political struggle.1
