Making the WTO 'more supportive of development'? The Doha round and the political rationality of the WTO's development mission.

AuthorAlessandrini, Donatella

Contents Abstract 1. Introduction 2. The 'Science of Development' and the' Development Mission' of the Post-War Period 3. From Post-War Development to Neo-Liberal Development 3.1 From rational economic behaviour ... 3.2 ... to failing institutional and social arrangements 4. The Neo-Liberal Transformation of the Multilateral Trading Regime 5. The 'Doha' Development Round: Towards a Softening of the Neo-Liberal Development Agenda? 5.1 Towards the Intensification of Neo-Liberal Development Rationality 6 Conclusion Endnotes References 1. Introduction

The establishment of the WTO in 1995 signalled a new era of international trade relations. The precursor of the WTO, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), had disciplined trade relations among states for over four decades. Since its outset, the GATT had had to confront the claims of its developing country members that its rules were unfavourable to their trade interests. As a result, several initiatives were undertaken between the 1950s and 1980s to take into account the specific problems developing countries faced within the international trading regime.

However, trade scholars have pointed out that the development--related trade activity of GATT resulted in an asymmetry of trade rules between developed and developing country members that did not address the source of the discrimination against the competitive exports of the latter (Hudec, 1987). According to mainstream trade literature, whereas the asymmetry of rules provided the legal basis for such discrimination, its underlying rationale must be traced back to the erroneous economic assumptions about development and the resulting counter--productive legal claims advanced by developing countries. To put it succinctly, by relying on trade protection as opposed to trade liberalisation and insisting on unilateral measures on the developed countries' part, developing countries failed to stop the discrimination against their competitive exports and consequently to develop their economies by means of liberal trade (Hoekman & Kostecki, 1995).

Thus, the entry into force of the WTO legal regime was supposed to have signalled the 'rational choice' by developing countries to abandon their failing economic policies and legal strategies and embrace a rules-based multilateral trading system endowed with an effective enforcement mechanism. By adhering to the same set of rules and the economic rationale they embody, namely the unquestionable belief in the universal beneficial role of trade liberalisation, developing countries would finally be able to demand and enforce compliance with WTO rules so as to enjoy the benefits its legal regime is supposed to generate.

Yet, soon after its agreements were operationalised, it became apparent that the benefits of multilateral trade liberalisation had not materialised as far as developing countries were concerned (Charlton & Stiglitz, 2005). The 'failure' of development within the WTO is imputed to the improper implementation of its rationale, and, in particular, to the less than full liberalisation achieved with respect to the sectors of interest to developing countries. Hence, the Doha Round (WTO, 2001) was meant to finally deliver the long-standing development promise of the international trading regime by addressing the reasons for the difficulty of developing countries to 'participate fully in the work of the WTO and to derive maximum benefits from it'(Moore, 2001a). Despite the fact that the Round has been fraught with many difficulties and suspended twice as a result of the 'irreconcilable' differences among its members, developing countries are called upon to behave responsibly, recognise the unprecedented opportunity offered to them and realise that the successful conclusion of the Round is 'a political must for development' (Lamy, 2007).

This article investigates the rationales behind the six-decades long 'failure' of the development enterprise of the multilateral trading regime. Trade scholars have acknowledged that both the GATT's and the WTO's selective trade practice has violated the development principles they have purported to promote (Hudec, 1997, Michalopoulos, 2001). Consequently, they have argued that international efforts should continue in order to finally redress the imbalances of the international trading regime. This underlies the so-called market access argument, according to which the multilateral trading system will deliver its development promise provided that WTO developed country members open up their markets to developing countries' competitive exports.

There is however another perspective from which to look at the 'failure' and the 'promise' of development within the current round of negotiations. The central argument of this article is that development has always occupied a central position within the multilateral trading regime. Taking the cue from Anghie's account of the Mandate System under the League of Nations (2000), the first part argues that development has been constructed as a 'science' functioning on the basis of a universal economic rationality and a linear and consequential reading of history that articulates a mutual reinforcing relationship between a 'civilising mission' and the furtherance of the interests of the major trading powers.

The second part brings the insights on the 'science of development' to bear on the Doha Round and contends that rather than implying a rethinking of the WTO's development rationale, its significance rests in the intensification of the ' political rationality' of development. The article does not advance any practical suggestions for reforming the WTO's development agenda. However, by taking leave from the urgent calls to resume negotiations, it contributes to a much needed reflection on the normative assumptions pervading the WTO's development agenda. In so doing it argues that any alternative to the current state of affairs needs to simultaneously challenge the three normative assumptions on which development operates and the interests it serves.

  1. The 'Science of Development' and the 'Development Mission' of the Post-War Period

    Trade has always been an essential underlying element of international law. Already at the time of Westphalia, the new system of sovereign rights over mutually exclusive territories was based on the acknowledgment that future quarrels between European sovereigns were to exert no influence on the right to trade of private actors (Arrighi, 2000:43). As Arrighi notes, 'The considerable freedom granted to private enterprises to organise commerce peacefully across political jurisdictions even in wartime ... marks the birth not just of the modern inter-state system, but also of capitalism as world system' (ibid., 44). The relationship between trade and the so-called civilising mission was a crucial aspect of the colonial enterprise of European states in the non-Western world: as Anghie (1999: 64) argues 'trade was an indispensable part of the civilising mission itself; the expansion of commerce was the means by which the backward natives could be civilized'.

    At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, it became apparent that colonies would soon have achieved independence. This meant that their vast economic resources would no longer be under the direct control of the imperial powers. A new means which enabled the latter to continue to operate in the territory of the ex--colonies was therefore needed in order to ensure their future access to natural resources: this means was soon to be provided by the emerging 'science of development'. Although the institutionalisation and professionalisation of development occurred in the immediate post-war period (Escobar: 45-46), its antecedents can be traced back to the Mandate System under the League of Nations. As Anghie (2000: 285) has pointed out, it was with the Mandate System that the 'civilised-uncivilised' dichotomy of international law was reconceptualised in economic terms and development as a scientific discipline first emerged. Economic backwardness, rather than racial and cultural connotations, made the people of the mandate territories unable 'to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world' so that for the League's members ' the well-being and development of such peoples form[ed] a sacred trust of civilization...' (League of Nations: Art.22). [emphasis added] At the same time, the promotion of the so-called well-being of natives was accompanied by another objective, that is, the utilisation by the mandatories of the economic resources of the mandate territories (Anghie, 2000: 278).

    The neutral character of the League, as opposed to the self-interested nature of the colonial powers, was therefore achieved through the resort to economic rationality and the establishment of a neutral body of experts, the Permanent Mandate Commission (PMC). The Commission was given the task to gather, analyse and elaborate a vast amount of information regarding different territories and several subject areas (ibid.: 280). The result was that the PMC could claim to be able to formulate neutral policies to be adopted in the different mandate territories. Thus, once the failure of so-called backward societies was established in supposedly neutral terms, economic rationality, which happened to be the privileged domain of 'advanced' countries, was posited as the means through which mandate territories could overcome their inability to 'stand by themselves' and achieve equal status in the international community.

    On this premise, the 'development mission' of the international community was deployed in the immediate post-war period. This enterprise relied on three normative assumptions borrowed from the experience of the Mandate System, namely: the positioning of a dichotomy between the status of developing and developed societies in terms of an economic gap, the reliance on economic rationality as the...

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