Behind the Scenes at the WTO: The Real World of International Trade Negotiations, Lessons from Cancun.

AuthorGathii, James Thuo
PositionBook review

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE WTO: THE REAL WORLD OF TRADE NEGOTIATIONS/THE LESSONS OF CANCUN. By Fatoumata Jawara and Aileen Kwa. London: Zed Books. Updated Edition, 2004. Pp. vi, 329. Cloth, $58.95; paper, $19.95.

INTRODUCTION

Behind the Scenes at the WTO definitively exposes how the trade-negotiation process makes it possible for a few rich countries to dominate the trade agenda at the expense of all other countries. It is one of the first studies that authoritatively shows how trade negotiations have developed into "a game for high stakes, between unequally matched teams, where much of the game is played with few rules and no referee" (p. 50). The book attributes the deadlocked nature of the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations and the recent disruptions of the World Trade Organization's ("WTO") ministerial meetings to the secretive and noninclusive nature of negotiations and decisionmaking at the WTO. (1) Authors Jawara (2) and Kwa (3) base their conclusions on semistructured interviews with a broad cross-section of trade officials from all over the world who represent their governments in thirty-three missions at the WTO, on interviews with staffers of the WTO Secretariat, and on their own research. (4)

Through numerous examples, the authors show why developing countries in the past have been unable to prevail over the big trading countries at the WTO (pp. 150-83). The authors conclude that to be effective, low-income developing countries must either unite as a bloc (p. 182) or hang on to the hope that they will prevail by virtue of the strength or merits of their arguments (p. 150). By captivating their readers with the intrigues behind the scenes at the WTO, the authors introduce a welcome realism about how trade negotiations actually work (5) and how developing countries "find themselves locked in a vicious cycle of political impotence, unfair trading rules and weakening trade performance" (p. 182).

It is a book that the theoreticians of the WTO cannot afford to ignore because while it confirms much of the theoretical literature, it also adds significant insights. First, I will examine this literature before showing how Jawara and Kwa go beyond it. This literature, based on anecdotal evidence but primarily driven by theory, has sought to explain the disruptions and deadlock in multilateral trade negotiations, particularly since the collapses of the Seattle Ministerial meeting in 1999 and the Cancun Ministerial in 2003. The basic premise in this literature has been that the WTO faces a democratic deficit arising from lack of transparency in the negotiating process and lack of diverse participation of stakeholders within the WTO. (6) Previous scholarship on multilateral trade negotiations has similarly noted the "pyramidal bargaining" model of great power dominance; others have referred to it as "vertical multilateralism." (7) During the cold war, the United States supported multilateralism and international economic institutions as a strategy to persuade industrial nations to join a U.S.-led alliance in support of free markets and against the Soviet Union. (8) From this vantage point, multilateralism was not a commitment to cooperating on issues of third world development, but rather to establishing a U.S.-led commitment in favor of free markets and U.S. geopolitical interests.

In the late 1980s, when the United States enhanced its controversial [section] 301 unilateral powers to punish violators of its trade rights without recourse to the multilateral GATT framework, some scholars argued that this version of "muscular" or great-power leadership is permissible as long as it increases trade liberalization, even if such unilateralism is inconsistent with the letter and spirit of the WTO's compulsory dispute settlement system. (9) Thus multilateralism within the GATT was for the most part limited to what the United States regarded as its core values. In the absence of agreement among its allies, the United States often abandoned these values for outright U.S. leadership. Medium- and low-income countries that dissented from these values or rejected U.S. leadership often felt the brunt of U.S. will. (10)

Behind the Scenes at the WTO insightfully exposes how pyramidal bargaining works within a highly secretive organization in which decisionmaking processes are still dominated by its richest members: the United States, the European Union, Canada, and Japan (referred to as the Quad), just as in the old GATT (pp. 56-59, 149). Thus, decisions on important issues are made without broad-based consultation with the entire WTO membership (11) and the domestic constituencies of member countries. The decisionmaking process at the WTO is further hobbled by the fact that most of the least-developed countries are not even represented in Geneva, where these decisions are made (pp. 22, 274, 293). Even developing countries that have representation in Geneva are stretched too thinly to attend the more than one thousand formal and informal meetings, symposia, workshops, and seminars held under the auspices of WTO bodies to negotiate or discuss new or existing trade rules or disputes about the application and interpretation of these rules (p. 22). In this and many other ways, Behind the Scenes at the WTO exposes some of the theoretical literature's mythical depiction of the WTO as a faceless, bureaucratic, and technocratic institution. Behind the Scenes at the WTO also sheds new light by exposing the manner and extent to which the views of many in its membership are underrepresented, if not entirely absent from the table.

Ultimately, Behind the Scenes goes one step beyond the current theoretical literature on the nature of reforms needed at the WTO. The major premise in this literature has been that organizational and procedural reforms at the WTO will resolve its legitimacy crisis. Jawara and Kwa recognize that while transparency and organizational reforms are important for the legitimacy of the WTO, reform must also focus on the manner in which the WTO agenda is currently biased in favor of the interests of its most-developed members at the expense of less affluent members.

Behind the Scenes shows the tactics deployed by developed countries to inhibit developing countries from negotiating for more favorable rules or to incapacitate them from changing preexisting rules that are rigged against them, such as the rules in the agricultural sector. (12) These tactics include "divide and rule" strategies against coalitions opposed to developed-country interests, arm-twisting countries and pressuring delegates into submission, black-listing ambassadors opposed to the agenda of the Quad countries and the United States in particular, and drafting and directing texts while ignoring the views of developing countries (pp. xxxv-xlvi, 148-83, 272-76). These tactics help developed countries to push through their agendas over the objections of developing countries. By exposing these tactics, the book recognizes that power imbalances between powerful and less powerful countries in setting the agenda is a factor in the crisis at the WTO. Most simply put, it is not that developing countries are suspicious of freer trade, as a former Director General of the WTO has argued, (13) but rather that they are suspicious of the rigged and distorted nature of the decisionmaking process and its outcomes, which--contrary to what the WTO stands for--often look little or nothing like free-trade rules.

Like Jawara and Kwa's book, this Review proceeds from the premise that the ascendant analysis of WTO reform, which focuses on efforts to increase public involvement and to improve transparency and reduce secrecy, may be insufficient to counterbalance the dominant trade interests at the WTO that currently favor the richest countries in the world. (14) If undertaken in isolation from some of the pressing needs of developing countries, such as comprehensive agricultural reform, well-meaning transparency and participatory reforms will prove ineffectual to resolve the legitimacy crisis at the WTO. Indeed, if the trade agenda continues to expand into areas in which developed countries have a comparative advantage while leaving un-addressed outstanding issues within existing agreements that are currently inimical to the interests of developing countries, such expansions will likely erode the gains of any reforms aimed at the effective and full participation of developing countries and their citizens in the decision- and policymaking of the WTO.

Thus, while increasing public involvement and improving transparency are critical to give all WTO members fair representation in decisionmaking, there is an equally compelling case for addressing the bias by which the industrial and service sectors are more liberalized than agriculture and other sectors important to developing countries. It is my basic claim that organizational and procedural deficiencies at the WTO only partially account for the collapse of the ministerial conferences in Seattle and Cancun and the legitimacy crisis of the WTO in general. Substantive issues such as the exclusion of agricultural and commodity trade from the free-trade mandate of the GATT and WTO and the bias favoring sectors in which developed countries have a comparative advantage further exacerbate the legitimacy crisis of the global trade regime. I therefore join with Jawara and Kwa when they regard as interrelated and inseparable their proposals for reforming the negotiation framework by making it more transparent on the one hand, with reforms aimed at addressing substantive issues of interest to developing countries-such as development and access to essential medicines--on the other. As Ann Capling has persuasively argued, internal governance reforms are "intrinsically linked" to "developing country problems in the WTO." (15)

In Part I, I summarize the main themes in Behind the Scenes at the WTO. In particular, I focus...

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