In this book, J. P. Singh couches the Global North’s lack of trade reciprocity toward the South in a broad theoretical argument about paternalism and race. Singh documents how less-developed countries (LDCs) are perennial losers in international trade negotiations. Through multilateral negotiating forums (i.e., the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and the World Trade Organization), the United States and the European Union pry open markets in LDCs but do not reciprocate with equivalent trade concessions of their own. The rare exception occurs when LDCs manage to gain negotiation advantages via successful coalition building or export diversification. Meanwhile, rich countries accompany their unfair negotiating practices with patronizing rhetoric—about their own benevolence and the development benefits of trade—and with small side payments, such as foreign aid or subsidies to foreign farmers. Ultimately, these empty measures are the paternalistic “sweet talk” of the book’s title, and the author contends that they are embedded in the North’s racist cultural attitudes toward the South and the South’s people of color.
Singh executes a multimethod research design that marries quantitative and qualitative techniques. He conducts process tracing on the history of several multilateral trade issues, such as Britain’s imperial preferences and the Generalized System of Preferences (Chapter 3), agricultural tariffs and subsidies (Chapter 5), and intellectual property rights and trade in services (Chapter 6). In these case studies, he painstakingly details the competing players and interests, as well as how negotiations played out. LDCs have typically made deeper cuts to trade barriers than has the North—a point he supports with quantitative analyses of tariff reductions—and the North often accompanies these moves with small measures that are largely ineffective in aiding development in the South. For example, Singh argues that the Generalized System of Preferences, ostensibly designed to allow exporters in low-income countries access to the North’s markets, has yielded negligible positive results for the South’s export volumes. Moreover, he argues that the positions of US and EU negotiators often deviate from strict political economy imperatives, meaning the demands of domestic producers and other strategic concerns. He seeks to fill this explanatory gap with recourse to the North’s racist cultural orientations.
Scholars will see Sweet Talk as an excellent one-stop resource on the various ways in which the North exploits its upper hand in international trade negotiations. The breadth of cases, issues, and eras covered is impressive, and the unfortunate ubiquity of unfair outcomes, all accompanied by meager policy overtures, is difficult to deny upon seeing the evidence. Singh’s argument is also dynamic and recognizes change, as he shows that the asymmetry in trade concessions has diminished (“the end of Sweet Talk,” p. 171). Recent negotiations over trade in services have produced more balanced outcomes.
Singh’s primary theoretical aspiration is to further efforts to inject the study of racism and cultural orientations into the field of international relations. The book’s boldest statement is surely the following: “At a broad level, the entire history of North–South trade may be read as a history of racial codes” (p. 47). In setting up the empirical findings, Chapter 2 draws a straight line from Western colonialism to the North’s preferences and behavior in multilateral trade forums. Given its boldness, this book will become a crucial and oft-cited contribution to research on the intersection of race and international relations. But a work that is this bold is unlikely to convince on all fronts.
Most importantly, Sweet Talk does not always persuade the reader of the theoretical, explanatory payoff of the race and paternalism perspective. Only some of the case studies clarify and demonstrate precisely how a North that is motivated by racially tinged cultural preferences acts differently from a (hypothetical) North that is motivated strictly by strategic and political-economy demands (pp. 3, 129, 168). For a book that aspires to bring racial attitudes and culture to the forefront of the North’s trade preferences, the (otherwise compelling) case studies are too silent on these matters. At times, the side payments themselves are taken to be prima facie evidence of the North’s racially coded motivations (p. 137), but the mere presence of this common negotiating tactic is insufficient to signal racial paternalism.
Moreover, Singh’s working definition of paternalism—so crucial to his argument—is vague and hard to decipher. Typically, scholars define paternalism as the notion that person A thinks s/he knows better than B what is best for B, although in practice, the concept is also applied to notions of putatively benevolent prejudice (e.g., Africans are like meek children). The author deploys the term, both in definition and in measurement, in a host of ways, only some of which are loosely related to these standard conceptualizations. One definition is unilateral handouts and side payments by the North to the South, such as the granting of quotas to one’s friends and strategic allies (pp. 21, 129). Another definition is benevolent speech about the global poor (pp. 1, 14), which is contradicted by another one that includes “strongly negative . . . feelings toward sets of people” (p. 34). Still another is based on an apparent merger of these two, operationalizing paternalism as a “moralistic, preachy or patronizing” discourse about the South (p. 86), as exemplified by blaming the South for blocking liberalization efforts (p. 137). (In a book that is otherwise qualitatively rich, examples of paternalistic speech, along with explanations for precisely why they are paternalistic, are relatively absent.)
Singh’s least defensible definition of paternalism, however, is political and cultural similarity to the United States. He develops a “paternalism strength index” (PSI) that is a quantitative, country-level indicator used in multiple chapters. The PSI is a composite of factors that include a country’s cultural similarity to the United States (itself comprised of variables such as “the degree of inequality in society” and “connections of people to each other”), its similarity to the United States in UN General Assembly voting, and the concentration of its export markets (pp. 96–97). The author declines to explicate how any of these factors measure paternalism, or even how entire societies and nation-states can be deemed more or less paternalistic in the first place. He shows the indicator to be negatively correlated with the degree of agricultural trade concessions granted. Because the indicator is largely a proxy for societal wealth and proximity to the North, however, it is hard to see this finding as anything more than a restatement of the descriptive claim that rich countries concede less.
Still, Sweet Talk is a sweeping and ambitious work. It provides a valuable map and hypothesis for understanding the contours of international trade negotiations and outcomes over the past several decades. It will exert an important influence on scholarly understandings of trade and race in international relations.
