The WTO: Already the Promised Land?
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Description
There are deep inequities in the current system—the most notable and justly notorious being the one rooted in an inequitable distribution of tariff reductions and other barriers (including subsidies) which continue to exclude agriculture to the detriment of many poorer economies (and consumers in the richer countries). There was a distinct political deception in the Uruguay process whereby important systemic reform was pushed and accepted as the multilateral ‘Single Undertaking’, whereas the actual negotiations of terms of trade was left to the usual multi-lateralized (MFNed) bilateralism where each state is on its own and which favours the rich consuming economies with plenty of trade leverage, at the expense of the poorer ones with less leverage or none at all. Two major issues must be tackled: (i) whether the World Trade Organization (WTO) has a ‘constitutional’ future and (ii) whether a global approach will prevail over a regional one. (i) Within the General Agreement on Tariff s and Trade (GATT) and, more recently, WTO the official mantra is still that it is an organization which belongs to its members which is taken to mean the governments of its members. Discourse of change of the WTO in the direction of constitutionalization cannot, to be normatively credible, decouple the legal from the political, the exercise of rights from the responsibilities of power. Only if the WTO develops its institutional framework could a constitutional future become normatively compelling. (ii) Regional Free Trade Area Agreements continue to offer significant political benefits which spill over beyond the partners themselves. They often comprise regional states with a history of conflict, even violence. When successfully concluded and implemented, they enhance a welcome stabilizing interdependence. In conclusion, although in the WTO there is much room for improvement (dispute settlement can be improved by introducing the power to remand cases back to panels; the Appellate Body can rid itself of its fetishistic textual hermeneutics and love of dictionaries; there can be a better system of sanctions which do not depend on trade leverage and which do not reduce trade rather than increase it; transparency, efficiency, and legitimacy can be improved) the WTO of today is Utopia Now. One should, however, eschew widening and deepening the constitutional which replaces the international.
Source Publication
Realizing Utopia: The Future of International Law
Source Editors/Authors
Antonio Cassese
Publication Date
2012
Recommended Citation
Weiler, Joseph H. H., "The WTO: Already the Promised Land?" (2012). Faculty Chapters. 1504.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1504
