In return, the European Union will expand trade, liberalize the visa systems and give financial assistance.
But its most striking aspect was that 109 Democrats voted yes and 116 voted no, reopening the fissure that developed during the Clinton administration, when much of the party bucked President Bill Clinton as he pressed for the North American Free Trade Agreement and liberalizing trade with China.
The conventional wisdom about the importance of fast-track trade negotiating was shown to be flawed last year, when Congress not only passed a significant and controversial trade bill liberalizing textile tariffs, but also enacted permanent normal trade relations with China -- both in an election year and without fast-track.
But as important as those details are, they were secondary over the last six days of negotiations to finding some way, through painful compromises and artful fudges, of building a consensus among the members of the World Trade Organization that liberalizing international trade was a priority worth sacrificing for.
Robert B. Zoellick, the United States trade representative, said this week that liberalizing trade was an urgent priority to avoid giving nations an excuse to revert to protectionism.
Since its accession to the World Trade Organization, China's market has become much more open and its trade greatly liberalized.
The standard trade theory argues in favor of liberalizing trade because it allows countries to specialize in the production of goods for which they have a comparative advantage, allows access to foreign markets, gives access to foreign direct investment, and facilitates technology transfer and marketing networks.
"In the long run, a transatlantic market could become a pathfinder and a pace setter for an opening of world trade which would go beyond" the World Trade Organization's Doha round of global trade talks, aimed at liberalizing world trade, said Wissmann, chairman of the European affairs committee of the German parliament.
The third horizontal regime created in the 1851 1951 period was the trade regime, represented by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, 1947), which liberalized trade but recognized that states may restrict trade to protect health (GATT, Article XX[b]).
