Katrina Gulliver
Katrina Gulliver is the editorial director at FEE. She holds a PhD from Cambridge University and has held faculty positions at universities in Germany, Britain and Australia. She has written for Wall St Journal, Reason, The American Conservative, National Review and the New Criterion, among others.
This month marks the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the World Trade Organization. The WTO was created as a successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which had been in place since 1947. GATT was formed as a method of stabilizing and restoring trade after the Second World War.
But the global trade landscape had changed dramatically over the succeeding 50 years (not least the development of containerization for international shipping of goods). International trade had expanded massively and developing nations were becoming manufacturing hubs, keen to export.
The WTO was the culmination of years of talks and preparation, reflecting the ambitions of politicians to expand international trade, but also to make sure their own nations got the best deal possible. Its arrival was, however, not welcomed by all. The rounds of talks and summits for the organization’s early years were contentious, both within the discussion rooms and outside the buildings.
The third round of discussions in December 1999 in Seattle saw unprecedented protests. Rather than a routine international event, with diplomatic limousines and photo opportunities, there were scenes of chaos outside. These raucous protests would become known in the press as the “Battle of Seattle” – hardly the image President Bill Clinton had hoped to present to a global audience.
Passions were running high inside the meeting too. As the Wall Street Journal reported at the time:
Inside the WTO meeting, delegates from developing nations, including Pakistan, India and Brazil, threatened to block a new round of trade talks, refusing to sign any agreement to launch negotiations unless the US and Europe agreed to their demands.
Outside the meeting, Seattle police SWAT teams used tear gas, pepper spray, rubber pellets and billy clubs against protesters who blocked access to the WTO meeting, forcing the trade organization to cancel its opening ceremony. Later in the day, about 30,000 labor-union members marched in a display of anti-WTO fervor.
Horrified, Seattle Mayor Paul Schell instituted a curfew and called in the National Guard.
The protesters had support too: the International Longshore and Warehouse Union held work stoppages at the ports of Seattle, Tacoma, and Oakland. In Seattle, the protesters were supported by a number of NGOs, particularly labor rights and environmental groups, who had planned the protests for months. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) also held a rally. In London, simultaneous action by anti-WTO activists included attacking police, and a train station was shut down.
In retrospect, the WTO planners should have seen it coming. Anti-globalist feelings had been building up steam in the 1990s. Two years before the Seattle talks, there had been similar protests at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Vancouver.
Anti-WTO sentiment brought together disparate groups, from workers’ rights campaigners and right-wing nationalists to environmentalists (and any number of other hangers-on). It’s a fascinating artifact of that moment in political shifts to see anti-WTO protesters waving the Gadsden Flag.
But the WTO was the result of years of working towards liberalizing trade, spurred on further by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Of course it did not create ‘free trade’ everywhere (if it had, there would be no need for such an organization to exist). It was there to promote free-er trade, while also allowing members to push for particular national protections. (In a world of truly free trade, there would also be no ‘trade talks.’) We can be cynical that it is just another talking-shop of rent-seekers, as so many other international agencies seem to be. But it has brought more countries into networks of international markets.
In 2001, China would join the WTO, probably the biggest shift in global trade for decades, as Asia became the world’s manufacturing center – a fact that is still causing economic ripples throughout the West. Today, the WTO has 166 members, accounting for 98 per cent of world trade.
It hasn’t removed the issue of national tariffs, protectionism, or concern about globalization (from all political angles). An ongoing sticking point, for example, has been agricultural subsidies in the EU and the USA. But it marks a step in the long road of international trade that started when the first ships headed out in the Classical world, to trade goods around the Mediterranean. Today all of us can buy things produced across the globe: and our daily life is based on this level of access and cooperation.
Happy Birthday, WTO.
This article was originally published by the Foundation for Economic Education.
