Submission to the Adam Noel Darling Memorial Scholarship Fund
  

  
The Promise and Limitations of the World Trade Organization
submitted by Steven E. Hatley
Query: What role can and should the WTO play in constructing a global civil society?

The WTO surely represents the pinnacle of the attempt to bring civility to the relations
between nations under the banner of international law. The strength of the WTO is in the depth and scope of the commitments involved, whereby member nations have agreed to submit domestic trade policies and regulations to arbitration and harmonization within a multilateral setting. The economic goals behind this process are very clear: the formation of an open, competitive, and legally homogenous international economy with a free flow of goods and services across national boundaries. In short, the creation of a unified global market. Liberal economic theory assures us that this will provide a highly desirable outcome, allowing for the unfettered realization of comparative advantage, and yielding maximum consumer gain and efficiency of resource allocation.

Yet the opening lines of the Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization
suggest that there is also a political agenda, or at least a vision of one, operating within the WTO. These passages turn our attention to an array of goals to be achieved by an integrated multilateral trading system. These include full employment, higher standards of living, sustainable development, environmental protection, and helping the least developed countries to secure a share of the benefits of economic growth. A powerful mandate indeed! These are surely the issues that need to be solved ifglobalization is to proceed in a civilized manner. However, if the WTO is to live up to its economic promise, the international community must be very careful to refrain from burdening the organization with goals it cannot achieve. With this in mind, there are two questions that must be answered. To begin with, what do we mean by a global civil society,and how is it related to the WTO? Second, how can the WTO best handle its mandate and the problems facing global society?

A civil society is perhaps best described as one in which citizenship, as opposed to mere
power, upholds the functioning of a given polity. Citizenship has always had dual connotations. While the very concept of civic participation entails identification with and a sense of personal responsibility for one's own polity, it is the sense of accomplishment one derives from fulfilling civic functions that allows one to transcend narrow parochialism in the pursuit of more universal values. A global civil society then might best be described as one in which harmony has been achieved between the parochial and the universal aspects of citizenship. In the parlance of the age, it will be a society in which world citizens "think globally and act locally." 

The globalization of political, economic, and cultural relations made possible by revolutions in transportation and communications technologies over the past 100 years has certainly increased the civic connections between what were once remarkably divided cultures. But at the same time, this process has drastically increased the scope for frictions between cultures. Globalization is thus driven both by promise and threat: the promise of what Marshall McLuhan termed a "Global Village," and the threat that increasing interdependence could lead to higher levels of systemic conflict. 

We see then that globalization is not a single process but a set of often conflicting trends in international society. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc and a revolution in communications and information technologies cleared the way for a new era of global cooperation in the political and economic spheres. In 1989 newly global citizens watched with triumph as the Berlin Wall crumbled. But a mere five years later Sarajevo and Rwanda emerged as unpleasant reminders of another aspect of globalization: the renewal of long forgotten conflicts at the local level.

Any attempt to realize a global civil society must find a way to reconcile these conflicting
aspects of globalization. It must do so by recognizing that the impact of globalization differs
widely among citizens across cultural and economic groupings. Even mainstream liberal economists admit that the gains from trade are dispersed unevenly, that there are those who in the short term sacrifice their economic welfare for greater economic good. However, global citizenship would require that they do so across national boundaries. The current debate over Fast Track in the United States Congress demonstrates the difficulty of this for even the most affluent of the world's citizens. And yet, economic theory also assures us that in the long term, all economic actors benefit from free trade. The WTO could contribute most ably towards the development of a global civil society simply by bridging this gap and ensuring that open and competitive markets yield prosperity for all members, rather than engendering conflict. 

Clearly the leaders of the nations who negotiated the founding of the WTO recognized
these key economic truths. The power of the WTO mandate is that it is in many respects self-fulfilling. Nations have always wrestled with the problems of economic development,
employment, living standards, and environmental protection. But for the first time there emerged an international consensus that economic prosperity itself was the foundation with which to approach these issues, and that it is best achieved not through autarky and mercantilism but through open, competitive markets. Members express their faith in this logic by agreeing to bind their domestic trade and economic practices to a common set ofmultilaterally defined rules. No other global forum can boast of such obligations.

The qualification trade and economic practices must be emphasized. Member nations
proceeded from economic priorities in negotiating the agreements establishing the WTO. They did not ignore related problems such as labor standards and environmental regulations. These and other problems stem from the economic practices that make trade possible. They cannot be made peripheral items on the international agenda if we are to create the type of civil society outlined above. However, the WTO is a consensus-based organization, and the emerging consensus is that these issues need to be dealt with in other forums.

Nevertheless, it should be no cause for concern if the members express an unwillingness
to tackle these issues directly within the WTO. In order to accomplish its task the WTO must live up to its economic promise. Toward this end member nations and the advocates for free trade within them must sell this agenda to a diverse global public. In doing so they will have to address the full range of environmental, health, labor and other issues that have come up in the debate over free trade. But the WTO must first and foremost remain a trade organization. The explosion of WTO membership and ongoing accession negotiations attest to the fact that the greatest danger facing the WTO is not a lack of commitment from the international community, but the very real risk of taking on too many issues to continue functioning effectively on a consensus basis.

It is truly unfortunate that world leaders have not found it in their capacity to achieve
more substantial progress towards solving pressing environmental problems and agreeing upon basic standards for labor and human rights practices. But we should see this as no cause for alarm as far as the role of the WTO is concerned. The WTO should serve as a model for the multilateral organizations of the future that will be necessary if we are to address the full implications of globalization. But for now, by ensuring that member nations will be bound to non-discriminatory, market based economic practices in their international trade, the WTO is humanity's best hope for realizing the potential for global prosperity upon which solutions to these related problems can be established. For it is only through prosperity that citizens are able to transcend the struggle for economic security and search for solutions to broader problems affecting themselves as well as their global neighbors.