The WTO Founded

2005

Delegates at the WTO Ministerial Conference, Hong Kong, December 2005. Place: Centre William Rappard, Geneva (headquarters); negotiated through the Uruguay Round 1986–1994, concluded at Marrakesh, April 1994 Figures: Peter Sutherland, last GATT director-general and first WTO chief · Renato Ruggiero, second director-general · the trade ministers of 123 GATT contracting parties signing the Marrakesh Agreement on 15 April 1994 From GATT to WTO The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade had operated since 1948 as a provisional treaty framework, never the institution its drafters intended (the 1948 Havana Charter for an International Trade Organization had failed to win US Senate ratification, the same reef on which the League of Nations had broken in 1919; see [[treaty-of-versailles-1919]]). The Uruguay Round, opened at Punta del Este in 1986 and concluded at Marrakesh in April 1994, replaces the provisional GATT with a permanent World Trade Organization. The new body has 123 founding members, a director-general, a secretariat in Geneva, and (decisively) a binding dispute-settlement mechanism. The WTO's mandate is far wider than tariffs on goods. The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) covers banking, telecommunications, education, and health. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) sets minimum patent and copyright standards globally, with major consequences for pharmaceutical access in the developing world. The Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMS) constrains domestic-content rules. The Westphalian state's regulatory sovereignty over its own economy has, Binding Dispute, Eventual Paralysis The Dispute Settlement Body's Appellate Body, a standing seven-member panel, issues binding rulings that member states accept by default unless all members vote to reject (the so-called negative consensus rule, which makes rejection mathematically nearly impossible). Member states accept that their domestic regulations, when challenged as trade-distorting, can be overturned by a panel sitting in Geneva. The most ambitious institutional encroachment on Westphalian economic sovereignty ever attempted is, for fifteen years, the operative law of world trade. China accedes to the WTO on 11 December 2001, the largest single shift in the global division of labor since the British abolition of the Corn Laws. The Doha Development Round, opened the same year, deadlocks and is never concluded. The United States, from 2017 onward, blocks all Appellate Body appointments; by December 2019, the body lacks a quorum and ceases to function. The WTO survives as a forum and a rule-book; its enforcement teeth, the feature that made it different from the GATT, have been quietly drawn. The unipolar moment that created the institution and the unipolar moment that hollowed it out are the same arc. Video: World Trade Organization commemorative film marking three decades since the WTO began operations on 1 January 1995, succeeding the GATT under the Marrakesh Agreement. Ambassadors and director-general staff reflect on its founding. The subject dates from 1995; this photograph was taken in 2005.