ABSTRACT
It is fair to say the Washington Consensus evinces some signals of decay, a very early state of fragmentation, a fraying of its force at the edges without any significant challenge to its core principles, at least among opinion leaders and policy makers in the United States. Both major political parties support the Consensus wholeheartedly. The free trade argument directly and concretely challenged the sovereignty of countries, their authority to regulate borders, evoking a confrontation between nation states and markets, where the market position was represented by the Consensus. The Consensus is under stress because a large measure of the problem in the debate over free trade as presently conceived derives from the particular connotation given to the word "free". The Washington Consensus, as a representative of globalization and open trade, likewise has considerable merits. The essence of globalization is a set of horizontal functional intrusions that cut swaths through borders.
