The Evolution of the Trade Regime: Politics, Law, and Economics of the GATT and the WTO

摘要

The title of The Evolution of the Trade Regime provides an implicit answer to an unasked question: Is this regime the product of evolution or intelligent design? The question is neither as flippant nor as unprecedented as it might sound. Dean Acheson quite deliberately entitled his memoirs Present at the Creation (New York: Norton, 1969), immodestly asserting that the post-war challenge was 'just a bit less formidable than that described in the first chapter of Genesis' (preface). The United States played an indispensable, if not omnipotent, role in the establishment of global order and the creation of international institutions. While these bodies had many distinct objectives, from mutual security to economic development and trade liberalization, they were all part of the same grand design. Like Acheson, the authors of hegemonic stability theory saw an intelligence, and a power, behind the design of the post-war trade regime. This core concept of political economy holds that an open trading system is a public good that will be underprovided unless a single country has both the motive (economic efficiency) and the means (political power) to provide it. Great Britain had played this role in the nineteenth century, and the United States took it up in the twentieth.