[Francesco Duina, The Social Construction of Free Trade: The European Union, NAFTA, and Mercosur, Princeton University Press: Princeton (2006), ISBN: 978-0-691-12353-0, pp. 249, $35.00]

A. Introduction

In his recent book The Social Construction of Free Trade, sociologist Francesco Duina engages in thoughtful comparative assessment of three regional trading blocs and associated agreements—the EU, NAFTA, and Mercosur—in an effort to refute the notion that regional trading blocs express a consistent economic logic and can therefore be analyzed as a homogenous class of organizational realities.  Contrary to much of the literature published during the upswing in regional and bilateral trade in the 1980s and 1990s which focused on either the facilitative (i.e., trade creation) or inhibitive (i.e., trade diversion) implications of regional trade agreements for an multilateral trade regime governed by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization, Duina’s project is concerned less with assessing the stated or implicit objectives of regional trade agreements and more with the historically informed contexts and in which those agreements are forged. Duina focuses on the impact of legal traditions of the members states on the development of regional trade law as well as the extent to which political actors within regions contribute to organizational adaptations in response to legal change as well as how such actors steer the formation of regional law. In doing so, Duina reflects on the nature of globalization, the “varieties of capitalism” in a post neo-liberal market reform world, and the phenomena of regional law in the law-nation-state matrix that characterizes the Westphalian international community. 

B. The Basis of Markets

Duina ably demonstrates that “market building” is a process of social construction that is particular to the places in which markets are formed and is fundamentally a social, rather than an economic, activity. The author emphasizes the social embeddedness of markets, both regional and national. This situatedness of institutions and political actors contributes to the formation of differing...