New powers in the club: The challenges of global trade governance

International Affairs

Volumn 86, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 717-728

  Narlikar, Amrita ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77954104436     PISSN: 00205850     EISSN: 14682346     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2346.2010.00907.x     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. The acronym was coined by Goldman Sachs, Dreaming with the BRICs: the path to 2050, Global Economics paper no. 99 (New York: Goldman Sachs, Oct. 2003). Note, however, that the inclusion of Russia is contested: see e.g. Andrew Hurrell, 'Hegemony, liberalism and global order: what space for would-be great powers?', International Affairs 82: 1, Jan. 2006, pp. 1-19; S. Neil MacFarlane, 'The "R" in BRICs: is Russia an emerging power?', International Affairs 82: 1, Jan. 2006, pp. 41-57. Given, moreover, that Russia is not a member of the WTO, I will be focusing in this article only on Brazil, India and China, i.e. the BICs.
2. International trade statistics, http://www.wto.org.
3. Amrita Narlikar, International trade and developing countries: bargaining coalitions in the GATT and WTO (London: Routledge, 2003).
4. Amrita Narlikar and Diana Tussie, 'The G20 at the Cancún ministerial: developing countries and their evolving coalitions', The World Economy 27: 7, July 2004, pp. 947-66; Diana Tussie, ed., The politics of trade: the role of research in trade policy and negotiation (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2009); Andrew Hurrell and Amrita Narlikar, 'The new politics of confrontation? Developing countries at Cancún and beyond', Global Society 20: 4, Oct. 2006, pp. 415-33.
5. Gregory Chin, 'Reforming the WTO: China, the Doha Round and beyond', in Amrita Narlikar and Brendan Vickers, eds, Leadership and change in the multilateral trading system (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2009); Amrita Narlikar, New powers: how to become one and how to manage them (London and New York: Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2010).
6. Faizel Ismail, 'Reflections on the WTO July 2008 collapse: lessons for developing country coalitions', in Narlikar and Vickers, Leadership and change; Hurrell and Narlikar, 'The new politics of confrontation?'.
7. Andrew Cooper, 'The logic of the B(R)ICSAM model for G8 reform', CIGI Policy Brief in International Governance No. 1 (Waterloo, Ontario: Centre for International Governance Innovation, May 2007).
8. Hurrell, 'Hegemony, liberalism and global order'.
9. Ismail, 'Reflections on the WTO July 2008 collapse'; Amrita Narlikar, 'A theory of bargaining coalitions in the WTO', in Narlikar and Vickers, eds, Leadership and change.
10. Simon Evenett, ed., The unrelenting pressure of protectionism: the 3rd Global Trade Alert Report, 7 Dec. 2009, p. 3, http://globaltradealert.org/gta-analysis/unrelenting-pressure-protectionism-3rd-gta-report, accessed 20 Feb. 2010.
11. Simon Evenett, ed., Will stabilization limit protectionism? The 4th Global Trade Alert Report, 15 Feb. 2010, accessed at http://globaltradealert.org/gta-analysis/will-stabilisation-limit-protectionism-4th-gta-report, accessed 20 Feb. 2010.
12. In a recent study on deadlocks in multilateral negotiations, the hypothesis that deadlocks are a function of the balance of power was the most popular hypothesis of six that were analysed, and was confirmed by all the case-studies: see Amrita Narlikar, ed., Deadlocks in multilateral negotiations: causes and solutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
13. Amrita Narlikar and Pieter van Houten, 'Know the enemy: uncertainty and deadlock in the WTO', in Narlikar, Deadlocks in multilateral negotiations; Narlikar and Vickers, Leadership and change. Bernard Hoekman makes a related point: 'The move towards the creation of negotiating coalitions of groups of countries may reduce the number of "principals" but possibly at the cost of greater inflexibility and a higher risk of breakdown, especially in a setting where there is little time to consult. See Bernard Hoekman, 'Cancún: crisis or catharsis?', 20 Sept. 2003, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTRANETTRADE/Resources/Hoekman-CancunCatharsis-092003.pdf, accessed 18 Feb. 2010.
14. Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane, 'The legitimacy of global governance institutions', Ethics and International Afairs 20: 4, 2006, pp. 405-37 at p. 412.
15. For a conceptual treatment of legitimacy in terms of its fairness and efficiency components, see Amrita Narlikar, 'Moving beyond fairness: improving the legitimacy of the WTO', in Matthew Eagleton-Price, Emily Jones and Kalypso Nicolaidis, eds, Building blocks for a global trade ethics: a compendium of the Oxford Programme on Global Trade Ethics (Oxford: University of Oxford and German Marshall Fund, 2009), http://cis.politics.ox.ac.uk/materials/gte_compendiumOct09.pdf, accessed 18 Feb. 2010.
16. On the disengagement of interest groups and lack of leadership, see the Warwick Commission, The multilateral trade regime: which way forward? Report of the First Warwick Commission (Coventry: University of Warwick, 2007); Narlikar and Vickers, Leadership and change. Note that a vicious cycle links declining political will and institutional stasis in the WTO: constant deadlock and other inefficiencies make politicians reluctant to offer concessions in the DDA, and this declining political will further embeds the stalemate within the organization. Note further that the financial crisis exacerbates this vicious cycle. If politicians were finding it hard to legitimize their commitment to an inefficient organization before the crisis, they are hardly likely to embrace the idea of making concessions to preserve multilateralism in difficult economic times at home.
17. Discussions of this possibility predate the current debates by at least six years: in 2004, CIGI sponsored a conference in Oxford to discuss the implications of Paul Martin's idea of the leaders' level G20 with responsibilities for trade negotiations.
18. 'Global plan for recovery and reform: the communiqué from the London summit', 2 April 2009, http://www.londonsummit.gov.uk/en/summit-aims/summit-communique/, accessed 20 Feb. 2010.
19. Evenett, The unrelenting pressure of protectionism.
20. Geoffrey Allen Pigman, 'US trade policy and the rise of the big emerging economies', in Narlikar and Vickers, Leadership and change.
21. Paola Subacchi and Alexei Monsarrat, 'New ideas for the London summit: recommendations to the G20 leaders', Chatham House and Atlantic Council report, accessed at http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/13733_r0409_g20.pdf, accessed 18 Feb. 2010.
22. Richard Blackhurst and David Hartridge, 'Improving the capacity of WTO institutions to fulfil their mandate', Journal of International Economic Law 7: 3, 2004, pp. 705-16; Jeffrey Schott and Jayashree Watal, 'Decision-making in the WTO', International Economic Policy Briefs 00-2 (Washington DC: Institute for International Economics, March 2000).
23. Thomas Cottier and SatokoTakenoshita, 'The balance of power in WTO decision making: towards weighted voting in legislative response', Aussenwirtschaft 58: 2, 2003, pp. 171-214; Warwick Commission, The multilateral trade regime; Robert Lawrence, 'Rulemaking amidst growing diversity: a club-of-clubs approach to WTO reform and new issue selection', Journal of International Economic Law 9: 4, 2006, pp. 825-33; Manfred Elsig, 'Towards weighted voting: can we get a little help from the secretariat and critical mass?', in Debra Stegar, ed., Redesigning the World Trade Organization for the 21st century (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier Press/CIGI/International Development Research Centre, 2010).
24. Discussed in detail in Amrita Narlikar, 'Adapting to new power balances: institutional reform in the WTO', in Thomas Cottier and Manfred Elsig, eds, Governing the WTO: past, present, and beyond Doha, forthcoming 2011.
25. Narlikar, 'Adapting to new power balances'.