World trade body needs a new heart

One of the first pieces of advice I used to give students of photojournalism was to walk around their subject more than once. I advised them to lean into or away from the subject, crouch, think, shoot, then shoot again.

Much later, while standing on the edge of a putrefied heap of misery on a smouldering pile of garbage across the road from La Penitence Market in Georgetown, Guyana, I lost my nerve as a photojournalist.

I subsequently became more interested in and intrigued by what is captured within the frame of a photograph, and what is left out. The lesson, I guess, is that once you step out of the bounds of convention and tradition, you would be amazed at what you might find.

Let me start with a question. With all this talk about trade wars, tariffs, protection and counter-protection measures, one is tempted to ask: where is the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in all of this?

The question is, of course, somewhat rhetorical. The WTO is still around. People employed by the institution still do a lot of hard work, or so I am told by the most reliable among them.

But for most of the past 15 years, they have felt somewhat lost. The institution’s telos faces hurricane-level crosswinds.

Since those halcyon days when the Uruguay Round was completed and the WTO was established in 1995, its ethos has been lost in a flurry of events.

Like other institutions of global governance, the WTO seems to have become somewhat of a sideshow in the grand theatre of the “global war on terror”; the rise of Islamic State; wars against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria; the rise of ethnonationalism and crypto fascism; Brexit; the rise of Donald Trump; the increasingly febrile EU; the rise of China and India and the emergence of the Brics grouping; talk of a fourth industrial revolution, and of artificial intelligence (it really is just computational statistics); and the decline of liberal internationalism and the transformation of capitalism.

The WTO emerged from the successful conclusion of the Uruguay Round. But by the time member countries settled down for the next round of negotiations in 1999, the free trade that was a central pillar of globalisation had already begun to face serious headwinds. Protesters in Seattle in the US in effect shut down the WTO ministerial meeting that would pave the way for a new round of negotiations. The talks were moved to Doha in Qatar, where they would die….

Many reasons have been put forward for the slow death of the Doha Round. The one I want to submit is consistent with what we refer to in political economy as a “double movement”. This refers to the process of increased liberalisation or “marketisation” with a counter-movement for social protection against untrammelled markets.

Put another way, liberals pushed for increased global free trade (liberalisation) and a groundswell pushed back. One official story is that the Doha Round failed because the US and EU could not reach consensus on the agricultural proposals tabled at the time.

Walk around the issue and it may be clear that it was actually developing countries that blocked the Doha Round. Most poor countries could not see any long-term gains and were not prepared to concede further sovereignty over domestic policy-making. They pushed back. Something else happened — quietly. First, the original process that took five decades to complete and gave us the WTO was described by US government officials as “a rich man’s club” — and their biggest mistake was to “let poor countries in”.

Second, going back to the inter-war period, free trade was an arrow in the ideological quiver of US anti-communism that would later drive the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) process.

This was what I found during my doctoral research.

A generation later, and the “rich men” ( such as Trump or Boris Johnson) are gnashing their teeth and rearing their beastly bulking heads at “sh*thole” countries, and anyone who dares to be different.

While they’re frothing at the mouth, the ethos — those guiding beliefs of free trade and liberalisation — is spent. The telos of global free trade is lost.

What, then, will happen to the WTO? My guess is that it will remain a cornerstone of global governance. But first it has to be saved from those who created it. Or, as the Financial Times opined about the Doha Round in December 2015: “After a death scene so drawn-out it would have done credit to a Victorian melodrama, the curtain has finally come down on one of the longest-running farces in global policymaking… Having failed to save Doha in the WTO, its members must now save the WTO from Doha.”

I did not use the word “farce”, dear reader, I started on a tangent about photography.

WHILE RICH MEN ARE FROTHING AT THE MOUTH, THE ETHOS — THE GUIDING BELIEFS OF FREE TRADE AND LIBERALISATION — IS SPENT