The Law and Policy of the World Trade Organization Text, Cases and Materials

INTRODUCTION

The World Trade Organization was established and became operational on 1 January 1995. It is the youngest of all major international intergovernmental organisations and yet it is possibly – in spite of the challenges it currently faces – one of the most influential in these times of economic globalisation. As Marco Bronckers stated in 2001, it has ‘the potential to become a key pillar of global governance’. The WTO is also one of the most criticised international organisations. In the late 1990s, it was referred to as ‘un gouvernement mondial dans l'ombre‘. Civil society opponents of the WTO considered it to be ‘pathologically secretive, conspiratorial and unaccountable to sovereign States and their electorate’. In these early years of the WTO, developing-country Members considered the WTO to be a ‘rich men's club’ and objected to their marginalisation in WTO negotiations and decision-making. While parts of civil society remain highly suspicious of the WTO, and the participation of many developingcountry Members in WTO negotiations and decision-making can certainly still be improved, the criticism directed at the WTO is now primarily of a different nature. In recent years, developed- and developing-country Members alike have become disenchanted with the WTO for its apparent inability to bring longrunning negotiations on further trade liberalisation to a successful close and to agree on new rules addressing the challenges international trade is facing in the twenty-first century.

As discussed in Chapter 1, in March 2013 WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy compared the multilateral trading system to a computer, and noted that, while the ‘hardware’ of the system was sufficient, the ‘software’ was in need of an upgrade. This chapter deals with both the ‘hardware’ and some of the ‘software’ of the multilateral trading system. It discusses the distinctive features of the WTO as the principal intergovernmental organisation for international trade and successively addresses: (1) the origins of the WTO; (2) the mandate of the WTO, i.e. its objectives and functions; (3) the membership and institutional structure of the WTO; and (4) decision-making in the WTO.

THE ORIGINS OF THE WTO

The origins of the WTO lie in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade of 1947, now commonly referred to as the ‘GATT 1947’ but for almost five decades just referred to as the ‘GATT’.