ther reason for people who put "my country's interest" first to be inclined toward the regional alliance route.Which Areas to CoverWhen most Americans think about international trade, they think about stereos, cars, computers, VCRs, packaged foods, liquor, jewelry--the things you can buy in a duty-free shop in an airport, or an import store in this country--and these things are all covered by the current free trade agreements.But so are many other things.Provisions of GATT, some of them involving all signatories and some of them "plurilateral agreements" involving some signatories, cover the following controversial areas: Intellectual property, such as books, movies, and computer software Agriculture and dairy products, including whether it's legal to ban imports of beef where the cattle have been fed hormones or vegetables that have been dusted with DDT Civil aircraft, an industry often considered crucial to military preparedness Government procurement, an area where many feel that nationalism is particularly appropriate Timber and other non- (or too-slowly) renewable resources, which can be depleted by low prices abroad and become insufficient to meet local needs Intellectual property is, in some senses, the least threatened of these areas, because language and culture are such dominating factors in terms of what intellectual property customers want to buy. Given Americans' traditional resistance to foreign films and translated books, we are at no threat of having our citizens prefer foreign intellectual property to the home-grown variety, though of course there is little, except perhaps for the language barrier, to stop the Hollywood movie studios (one of the country's two largest export industries) from moving over the border to Mexico and running the film industry from there, hiring Mexican workers for all, or most, off-screen jobs.Software, another area where the U.S. exports far more th...
