This piece provides an accessible summary of my PhD project. It avoids most of the theoretical assumptions and analytical complexities, but highlights the real-world relevance of my work. Happy to talk about it more. Should there be any questions, please let me know.
Trade policy has recently gripped public attention in many countries. In the UK, Brexit has educated voters and policy-makers alike about the global ties of the British economy. Across the Atlantic, President Trump has styled himself as a “Tariff Man” and escalated tensions with US trade partners. Together, these developments have drawn attention to the overlapping international rulebooks that underpin cross-border business.
It is easy to take the positive effects of trade agreements on our daily lives for granted. Few UK consumers still find it surprising that over half of their food and nearly all of their clothes are imported. But not all benefits are so obvious. This is particularly true for the most inclusive trading arrangement, the World Trade Organization (WTO), which looms as a fallback option in the Brexit debate. It is ultimately the WTO that holds the global trade system together. Its ‘multilateral’ rules provide the baseline to which 164 states have committed; every other trade agreement represents an addition to the WTO.
This is why it is important to understand how the daily work in the WTO has kept trade flowing and growing since the organisation’s establishment in 1995. By creatively adapting the multilateral rulebook, its members have jointly addressed a multitude of challenges ranging from how to reap the benefits of digitalisation to protecting meat-eaters from mad cow disease.
Sadly, the WTO’s contribution is not well recognised in either the public or academic debate. Observers naturally focus on the rare ‘poetry’, the headline-grabbing multilateral trade negotiations, and ignore the organisation’s everyday ‘plumbing’. Most of this routine is cumbersome and unglamorous, involving information-sharing, monitoring and implementing what was agreed.
But what seems like mundane technical work from the outside can provide results with far-reaching implications. The constant discussions between diplomats and experts in the WTO ultimately determine the legitimate scope of domestic regulation in the global economy. Much of trade law is too unspecific to be readily applicable to real-world trade problems. The consultations in WTO committees thus play a key role in interpreting the rules and classifying the world economy into enforceable trade issues.
My project explores exactly these perennial activities that make the member states comply with ambiguous or contested trade rules. I investigate how arguments are made, disagreements are framed, knowledge is generated, and ideas and worldviews are legitimated in the WTO’s committees.
This foray into the WTO’s under-explored administrative hinterland is now more important than ever. Conflicts about the application of certain rules, for example, the special treatment of developing countries, have become more salient as dynamic economies like China have gained in influence. Similarly concerning is the US decision to block the appointment of new members of the WTO’s dispute settlement body (DSB), the judicial arm of the organisation. The Trump administration accuses the DSB of overstepping its mandate by defining rules and obligations that exceed the scope of specific cases. If this blockade is not overcome soon, it will leave WTO committees as the only venues to resolve trade disputes.
I respond to these challenges by exploring the deliberative and interpretive processes – the continuous plumbing – that have sustained and stabilised the multilateral trade system for the last decades. Existing accounts tend to write off this regular work as a bit of a nuisance in the present and largely irrelevant in the long run. My research counteracts this trend and stresses the importance of everyday trade governance.
With calls for a modernisation of the trade system growing louder, it is important to better understand the basic processes that determine the WTO’s relevance for real-world commercial exchange. The G20 leaders declared in December 2018 that the multilateral trade system “is currently falling short of its objectives.” But any reform that aims at “investing more resources into the work of some [WTO] committees” while “deactivating those that are running idle”, as the European Commission suggests, must proceed from an informed and unbiased assessment. My research offers precisely this information by exploring committees’ contribution to the functioning of the WTO.
The existing multilateral trade system is certainly imperfect and does not reflect all interests equally. However, by exploring the debates and negotiations in the WTO, my project highlights the positive effects that a relatively stable multilateral rulebook has provided for international trade, economic development and political stability. Especially in times of rising protectionism it is important to provide this evidence and academic support for multilateral solutions.
No international organisation exercises as broad an influence over national policies in as many countries as the WTO. But although the benefits of its abstract rules on daily lives are sometimes hard to pin down, we would certainly miss the multilateral trade system. As the WTO’s Director General remarked: “If the WTO did not exist, it would have to be invented.”
Fabian Bohnenberger 