Networks of Trade Protest in the Americas: Toward a New Labor Internationalism? Marisa von Bülow ABSTRACT In the mid-1990s, for the first time in the history of the Americas, truly hemispherewide collaboration among labor organizations became possible. Yet this new political opportunity structure has not brought actors together in an undisputed new labor interna- tionalism. This article focuses on two key sources of contention among labor organizations in the context of free trade mobilizations between 1990 and 2004: the discussions about coalition building with other civil society actors and the debates about including a social clause in trade agreements. It argues that transnational col- lective action occurs parallel to the continued relevance of national- level claims and targets, and that this simultaneity represents a real source of challenges, for scholars and labor organizations alike. Based on social network data and qualitative interviews in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and the United States, the article analyzes the actions taken by labor organizations, and how these changed through time. W hen labor organizations began to mobilize around the wave of free trade agreement negotiations that swept the Americas in the 1990s, their leaders realized how ill-prepared they were to deal with this new context. First, some of the key labor federations in the region did not speak to each other because of grievances inherited from the Cold War era. 1 Furthermore, there were few hemispheric or even subregional spaces to exchange ideas and information with other civil society actors. Even if the spaces existed, labor organizations that felt threatened by trade agreements were also struggling to elaborate common alternatives to the neoliberal model that came to dominate the hemisphere in the 1990s and that had free trade as one of its pillars. Labor organizations were not the only civil society actors to face such organizational and ideological challenges. In fact, these have been at the core of a broader debate, held by scholars and activists alike, about the characteristics and potentiality of transnational civil society collective action. Since the publication of the pioneering studies on this issue more than four decades ago (see Kaiser 1969, 1971; Nye and Keo- hane 1971), the literature has analyzed the roles of an increasingly het- erogeneous set of actors and has made an ambitious effort to under- stand the relationships between globalization and new coalitions. As © 2009 University of Miami