Governance Failures: UN Law and WTO Law Fail to Protect Sustainable Development

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 2 explains why the post-1945 human rights revolution and international economic law revolution have failed to prevent the trade wars and geopolitical rivalries described in Chapter 3. The member-driven governance dominating United Nations (UN)/World Trade Organization (WTO) legal practices does not—and cannot—effectively protect human rights, rule of law, and global public goods (PGs) (like public health, climate change mitigation, and sustainable development) as long as power politics is not more effectively constrained; just as authoritarian power politics (e.g. in the UN Security Council) prevents effective protection of human rights through UN law, so do regulatory capture of economic regulation (e.g. in the United States and Bretton Woods institutions) and authoritarian blockage of WTO consensus decisions prevent limitation of market failures, governance failures, and constitutional failures in multilevel economic regulation. The neo-liberal Washington consensus is increasingly challenged by the more cosmopolitan Geneva consensus and ordo-liberal Brussels consensus. The totalitarian Beijing consensus imposed by China’s communist party monopoly entails systemic geopolitical rivalries that challenge the post-1945, US-led, UN and Bretton Woods systems. The citizen-oriented UN Sustainable Development Agenda reflects the ordo-liberal Geneva consensus and requires collective actions by democratic alliances aimed at civilizing and ‘constitutionalizing’ UN and WTO power politics by stronger protection of human and constitutional rights of citizens.