Last week’s trade fiasco in Seattle likely marked a turning point for the World Trade Organization, away from elite rule and toward more democracy.
Perhaps it opened a road to oblivion.
It won’t happen overnight, but if the WTO is to survive as the trade rule setter and arbiter, it will have to change.
Traditionally, WTO and its predecessor, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, was a club of nations in which the richest traders set the rules. Everyone had a say, but in the end, the United States, the European Union, Japan and a handful of others really called the shots.
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Think back to the 1993 GATT agriculture deal. After seven years of talks, the Americans and EU sat down in London, agreed to a deal that allowed them to keep subsidizing a lot and told the rest of the world if they wanted a new GATT, this was it. Grumbling all the way, other countries signed on.
There was some of that again this time in Seattle as the Americans and Europeans huddled over breakfasts to cut deals on wording for agriculture and biotechnology.
But in the end, much of that was sidetracked and out-shouted by other voices.
On the street, tens of thousands demanded that the trade impact on people, national sovereignty and the environment be taken into account.
Inside, poor and developing countries banded together to demand that they be given more than a token voice. To varying degrees, those messages were heard.
The tough question now is how, or if, the WTO can be reformed to satisfy critics.
American trade representative Charlene Barshefsky, who chaired the Seattle meeting, offered contradictory messages about both the problem and the solution.
At one point, she seemed to suggest the problem was that the old elite brokering system no longer is appropriate but nothing had been created to replace it.
At other times, she seemed to suggest that too many countries (presumably smaller countries), insisted on getting their way and everybody could not be accommodated.
So now, the issue of WTO reform becomes as important as the substance of the next negotiation. In Geneva, director general Mike Moore will have to wrestle with process as well as substance. And there is no guarantee he will succeed.
It is almost certain the more than 100 developing country WTO members would not allow it to evolve into a United Nations model where everyone has a voice in the general assembly but all the real decisions are made in the exclusive security council.
Is it realistic to expect more than six score member countries with different interests to find a general text broad enough to satisfy everyone and yet detailed enough to constitute rules to live by?
Increasingly, countries may turn their trade liberalizing energies to regional deals involving fewer countries with more manageable numbers and fewer conflicting interests.
The proposed free trade zone of the Americas is one prototype. The expanding European Union is another.
The recently announced EU free trade deal with Mexico illustrates how those regional blocks can be creatively expanded without the need for One Big Agreement.
