The Political Economy of Small African States in the WTO

Abstract

Small states have come to play an increasingly active part in multilateral trade negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO) such that small state activism has been a major contributory factor in the continuing delay in concluding the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) negotiations. This suggests that small states are no longer bit players and are instead key actors in the WTO. Through the formation of a range of alliances, small developing states have become central to the process and form of multilateral trade negotiations. In this article we highlight this increasing activism of small states through a study of the DDA cotton negotiations. We focus in particular on the activism and influence of four small developing African states; Burkina Faso, Benin, Chad and Mali in the negotiations. In order to explore whether size really ‘matters’ in the WTO system, our study demonstrates that while size has some relevance—since it creates unequal deliberative capacities—the major obstacle to effective influence is the persistence of protectionist policies in the cotton sector and the inability of the WTO to enforce its own liberal trade rules and obligations.