One Very Big No: The WTO Stalemate in Cancún

Vol. 6, No. 3

November, 2003

by Soren Ambrose
50 Years Is Enough: U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice

With the collapse of the World Trade Organization's (WTO) September summit, Cancún looks destined to join Waterloo, Stalingrad, and Seattle as one of those place names that graduates to shorthand for a historic event. This event, the second of the institution's five summits to end in deadlock since its founding in 1995, will likely assume landmark status as the first time that the Global South (Asia-Pacific, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America) united to refuse the economic aggression of the wealthy Northern countries, and in particular the United States, the European Union, and Japan.

This is What a Little Democracy Looks Like

No one should confuse the WTO with a democratic institution. Its flaws, and in particular the unfair advantage that wealthy countries have in the negotiations, have been explored at length over its eight-year life. But some hope always flickered, particularly because the organization makes decisions through consensus of its 148-government membership. Practically speaking, apart from the U.S., which is becoming alarmingly adept at it, there is probably no single country that would feel able to alone face down the rest of the world to scuttle an agreement. But with sufficient mutual support, even a group of developing countries could stop the WTO.

This hint of democracy, of requiring the active consent of those who will be affected by an agreement, would be impossible to execute at, say, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose imposition of destructive economic policies on indebted countries helped set the stage for the WTO. (Indeed, a week after Cancún, at their annual meetings in Dubai, the two organizations refused to consider, at U.S. insistence, a proposal to slightly increase African representation on their boards.) But to say that the WTO is the most democratic of the multilateral institutions is more a reflection of the lack of democracy in international structures than a tribute to the WTO.

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