| WEB NEWS | Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Model North American parliament draws students from three nations

BY sally acharya

Tariffs are not usually hot-button topics on a college campus. But imagine that the United States, Mexico, and Canada were negotiating a common external tariff, one that treats all of North America as a union similar to the European Union.

And imagine that water issues, telecommunications, and human trafficking were being dealt with in the same way by a North American Parliament comprising representatives from all three nations.

Robert Pastor has been instrumental in encouraging dialogue on such a vision as director of AU’s Center for North American Studies. This week, the center cohosted a gathering of 78 students from Mexico, Canada, and the United States at the third annual Triumvirate, a model parliament that works to envision what Pastor calls a “North American community” that includes the three nations.

The participants met at AU and the Inter-American Development Bank, a cosponsor, to craft amendments to four proposed resolutions and, in Pastor’s words, to “shed the caution of our current leaders and propose a new and bold vision for our three countries.”

The students gathered in the Butler Board Room between sessions of mock negotiations moved effortlessly back and forth between Spanish, English, and French. “The future of the world community requires integration,” Pastor said. “The future can only be one in which we lower barriers, interact, and communicate every day.”

For the course of the five-day session, the graduate and undergraduate students imagined what it would be like to work out the details of such an integration. “It’s a way to learn to approach North American issues from a trilateral approach,” said Christine Frechette, president of the Montreal-based North American Forum on Integration (NAFI), which also cohosted the week-long model parliament. Pastor is on the board of NAFI.

This is the third annual Triumvirate. The first model parliament was held in the Canadian Senate, the second in the Mexican Senate.

Participants enacted the roles of parliamentarians from other countries, so that Mexican student Margarita Beltran of the University of Monterrey, for instance, took on the role of an American negotiator to gain the perspective of others.

This was the second year for Gina de la Fuente, University of Monterrey, who has found it a “wonderful” way to learn about policy formulation and other countries. Gerardo Rodriguez, Kogod ’07, also participated in last year’s Triumvirate in Mexico City. His interest in emerging markets inspired him to participate, he said.

“I saw it as an interesting opportunity to learn about negotiation and commission work,” said Francois Seguin, University of Quebec.           

“This gives us such a global context,” added Alondra Gonzalez, an international student from Mexico at the University of Montreal. Discussions continue long into the night at AU’s residence halls, she said.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, unlike the agreements that led to the European Union, does not provide a vision for the continent, Pastor told the students. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, “If there was a vision of North America, these three leaders, on Sept. 12, would have gone to the Rose Garden together and would have said, ‘this was an attack on all of us, and we together are going to respond.’”

Discussions such as the Triumvirate’s model parliament engage the next generation of leaders in thinking about ways that all three countries can work together for a continental community, Pastor said. “We need a North American parliamentary group,” he said, “and the seeds of it are right here.”