GATT and Global Order in the Postwar Era

Abstract

In this interesting book, Francine McKenzie writes about an institution that was central to the making of a new international order after World War II: the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Through a concise, well-structured series of topical chapters, we learn about the political history of GATT from its origins in 1948 to its eventual dissolution within the World Trade Organization in 1994. McKenzie relies on an approach that is rich in primary sources and focuses on the links between international trade and international political relations. This allows her to provide a vivid description of “the way people have thought and talked about trade” (236).Readers of Agricultural History will be primarily interested in the last chapter, about “the agriculture challenge to GATT” (232). McKenzie portrays agriculture as “GATT's greatest failure” (232). Her analysis of agriculture in GATT goes back to the 1950s and 1960s, when first the United States and later the newly created European Economic Community (EEC) succeeded at implementing agricultural policies opposed to GATT's liberal principles. This gives McKenzie the chance to show us how difficult it would become to reintroduce agriculture in the pro-trade agenda, which eventually happened during the turbulent Uruguay round of the late 1980s and early 1990s.As elsewhere in the book, the analysis is finely nuanced. The United States and the EEC (and, within the latter, France in particular) are given the major roles that they deserve, but this does not prevent us from perceiving the important role that other states played in some critical junctures, for instance Australia as a promoter of the “Cairns group” that pressed for agricultural liberalization from the mid-1980s onward. McKenzie credibly portrays GATT as a flexible organization. Quite often we find it unable to impose its agenda on states, but it manages to establish a certain kind of normative authority: even those countries that deviated from GATT principles wanted GATT to certify their deviation as a justifiable exception to the rule. This is one of the ways in which trade liberalization came to be widely accepted as the default policy.Some of the limitations of the book are, in this reviewer's opinion, transparently presented by the author when she explains her purposes. The focus is on international governance, not on its economic and social effects. The epistemology borrows some concepts from political science but not much, since the author is focused on those forces that really mattered to policy makers. This imposes some limits. In the “clash between those who had faith in free trade and those who feared it,” the author seems to be on the believers' side, but the foundations of her position are not very explicit (290). A long tradition in political economy, from Friedrich List in the nineteenth century to Ha-Joon Chang today, has questioned the classical position that free trade must always be the default policy. It would have been interesting to assess which of the pro-trade arguments defended by GATT were solid and which were not, as well as the way in which different contexts probably required different recipes. It would have also been interesting to see the author engage with the historical institutionalist approach to political science that has been fruitfully applied to the history of agricultural policy by Adam Sheingate. Yet it would be unfair to criticize McKenzie for not doing what she is transparently saying that she will not do. In social science (as in trade policy), one size does not fit all.Perhaps a different kind of issue is the bias toward Anglo sources. These are sources that allow McKenzie to capture perspectives from the Anglo world and from GATT itself, but not as much from other countries and organizations. I am thinking of France and the European Economic Community in particular. How different would the international history narrated in this book have been if French- and German-language sources, for instance, had been used more extensively?Notwithstanding these drawbacks, the book will undoubtedly be of great interest to agricultural historians. Alongside its general virtues, it provides researchers interested in agricultural policy with something that is fundamental: the bigger picture. The world of agricultural politics is so complex and multifaceted that specialists are always in danger of losing themselves in the maze. But the maze can be understood in a better way if, as McKenzie consistently does in this book, agriculture is positioned within a more general view of collaboration and conflict between states and emerging patterns of international governance.