The Wto

This book explores the reasons for the collapse of World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings (as in Seattle in 1999 and Cancun in 2003) and the political conflicts that arose therein. Drawing from a body of literature concerned with how and why institutions emerge and change, and an analysis of the development of multilateral trade regulation that stretches from the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947 to the WTO's Hong Kong ministerial meeting in December 2005, the book argues that the political conflicts played out during ministerial meetings are the inevitable product of the way the institution was created and has since developed. It argues that the specific purposes for which multilateral trade regulation was created built into the institution an asymmetry of economic opportunity that has been extended and amplified through time. This asymmetry has come to shape the interaction of member states in such a way that contestation over the shape and direction of the tradeagenda - and on occasion the collapse of a ministerial meeting - are inevitable consequences. However, the rather than significantly disrupting the development of the multilateral trade regulation, the book explains why the collapse of ministerial meetings may actually have helped take it forward.

Rorden Wilkinson is Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Manchester