By Sylvia Ostry
From The Centre for International Studies
Abstract: After the Second World War, the memory of the disasters of the Great Depression, the failure of international cooperation, and the rise of totalitarianism provided a powerful catalyst to create a new architecture of international economics and policy. A main feature of this architecture was the international trading system first housed in the 1947 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and then, in 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO). The trade system rules of 1947 were transformed by the eighth round of GATT negotiations, the Uruguay Round, which shifted the focus from the border barriers inherited from the Depression to domestic policies and institutions. This new focus is a key part of ongoing globalization, the tightening of linkages that is fed and now led by an ongoing transformation of information and communications technology. There is in most countries today a feeling that one’s independence is disappearing and that the future can no longer be shaped by one’s own political system.
The World Trade Organization: NGOs, New Bargaining Coalitions, and a System under Stress