International Politics, Special Interests and Foreign Trade Policy

This project makes an attempt to analyze under what conditions and to what extent international political considerations influence trade policy, especially when a powerful special interest group is involved in the process. Trade incentive as a foreign policy instrument has been neglected in the economic statecraft literature. In addition, the literature ignores how trade incentives are used against strategically important countries to gain their immediate political cooperation and whether special interest groups in the sender state are able to influence the process. It is argued that textile trade policy-making can be examined to understand the relative influence of America’s international political considerations and its domestic politics because a powerful import-competing textile lobby fights to gain protection while political allies and strategically important countries pressure the United States to gain a privileged access to its market. To analyze the relative importance of international and domestic influences on foreign trade policy-making, the study examines the evolution of American-Turkish political and textile trade relations through primary documents research and interviews. This study suggests that the U.S. textile industry was effective in large part in protecting its economic interests against a politically important country. This was even the case in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks that significantly increased Turkey’s political importance. However, the U.S. textile industry was especially powerful in 2002 because it gained a unique access to U.S. policy-making when the textile state representatives’ support for the passage of the 2002 Trade Promotion Authority legislation became crucially important for the U.S. administration. However, the textile industry’s influence over foreign trade decisions was cut off when the Bush administration was successfully able to present Iraq as a national security threat to the United States, which shifted policy-making power from Congress to the administration. Thus, the U.S. administration was able to offer textiles as a short-term trade incentive to gain Turkey’s military cooperation against Iraq. In short, the study produces evidence that trade is political and an understanding of both international and domestic politics is central to the study of international trade.