Reconciling Regionalism and Multilateralism: Towards Multilevel Trade Governance

Abstract

Much ink has flowed on the question of the relationship between regionalism and multilateralism. There is still, however, no definitive answer. So the debate goes on. Is regionalism a substitute or a complement to multilateralism? Put another way, is regionalism a building block or a stumbling block to multilateralism? The re-invigoration of regionalism in developing countries over the past decade has given a new twist to the old debate. Developing countries are increasingly turning to regionalism as a strategy for development (UNCTAD, 2005). But their regionalism is part of a multilevel strategy which needs to be synchronised with their national development plans aswell as their efforts to achieve development friendlymultilateral trade rules in the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Developing countries are increasingly concerned about how to achieve coherence between development, regionalism andmultilateralism. Themultilateral trade system (MTS) is currently in a state of flux as the outcome of the Doha DevelopmentAgenda is yet unknown. Nevertheless, the regional trade agreements (RTAs) that are currently being negotiated all depend on WTO rules. Moreover, the policy space that developing countries need to carry out their national development plans, is increasingly determined by the market access rules of the WTO. In short, developing countries are faced with an increasingly complex, multilevel process in which they are trying to combine trade and development (Abbugatas, 2004). The concept ofmultilevel governance (Marks et al., 1996) emerged in the European Union (EU) where it was used to explain the increasing complexity of policy making in the 1990s. It was a period of upheaval resulting from the far reaching structural change that was uprooting many traditional policy practices across Europe. As a consequence of that change a new model of multilevel governance (MLG) began to take shape that challenged the traditional state-centric model. Has the experience of the EU generated a hypothesis that could be generalised to other systems of governance? That question has received growing interest in the academic literature. “Is there Room for the Multilateral in Multilevel Governance?” McGowan (2001) asked, and explored the emergence of multilevel governance in three sectors of the new trade agenda. The conference on “Globalisation, Multilevel Governance andDemocracy”, held at Queen’s University in Canada (2002), explored comparative aspects of MLG in regional and global governance. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which has worked extensively on regulatory reform since the 1990s, has now produced a study onMultilevel Regulatory Governance that for the first time concentrates on the