Causes Of World War Research Articles

Notes from the Editors, February 2023

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 As C. Wright Mills wrote in 1958, "the immediate causes of World War III are the preparations for it." This month's "Notes from the Editors" situates Mills's in a contemporary context, with a New Cold War in full swing and imperial powers pushing us ever closer to a Third World War.

Power-Tricks is the Game: Influence of European Dynasties swallowed in World War I?

The First World War (WWI) remains one of the most devastating occurrences in human history, resulting in the death of millions of people. The great deal of intricacies it harbours, however, have prompted continuous engagement by historians and academics even after a hundred years (Mulligan, 2016). This paper therefore aimed to examine micropower and how such forces, beyond the traditional causes of World War I, made the four years (1914-1918) war inevitable. Using data from both primary and secondary sources, the paper concluded that European dynasties were not only swallowed by the drive of nationalism, alliances, arms race, diplomacy and individual decision making, but also the myth of their thrones which had greater influence than just a mere family connection.

РАБОТЫ П. СОРОКИНА ПЕРИОДА ВТОРОЙ МИРОВОЙ ВОЙНЫ: ОПЫТ СОВРЕМЕННОГО ПРОЧТЕНИЯ В РОССИИ И США

The article attempts to analyze the experience of the present-day perusal in Russia and the United States of the works of outstanding sociologist P.A. Sorokin, written by him during the Second World War. P.A. Sorokin, a well-known Russian-American sociologist, has always attracted the attention of the scientific community with his extraordinary works that have opened new ways of development for social sciences. One of the issues of interest to the scientist was associated with the identification of the nature and essence of wars. The sociologist substantiated the relationship between the war and the subsequent militarization of society; viewed the fact of depletion of the nation’s “biological fund” as a result of the war; using concrete material, he demonstrated the relationship between wars and revolutions. Defending a sociological approach, the scientist suggested that a specific event should be correlated with the analysis of the war phenomenon as a whole. In his book “The Crisis of Our Time” (1941), P. Sorokin showed that the cause of World War II should be sought not in the peculiarities of totalitarian leaders, but in the disorganization and value disorientation of both international and internal relations of states after the previous war. In the book “Russia and the United States” (1944), P. Sorokin substantiated the idea of close cooperation between military allies as a necessary condition for maintaining a long post-war peace. All of Sorokin’s books have caused and still cause an ambiguous reaction in the American sociological community: from full acceptance to the rejection of his “marginal thoughts”. Our domestic discourse is built on the idea of preserving Sorokin’s heritage (Russian and American), deep study and popularization of his sociological concept.

International origins of Austria-Hungary

This article examines the emergence of Austria-Hungary from the perspective of uneven and combined development (UCD), which unifies social and geopolitical modes of explanation. It argues that UCD can explain the ‘paradoxical’ role of Hungary, a relatively backward society that was at the forefront of the 1848 revolutions and the political reorganisation of the Austrian Empire in 1867. However, it maintains that potentials of UCD have not been realised even in recent UCD interpretations of the Monarchy due to declinist assumptions. The article argues that the international management of UCD via the Concert of Europe inflated Austrian power, but could not prevent sociopolitical change, laying the ground work for its later deflation. The Austrian Empire also faced the challenge of revolutionary Hungary. The article demonstrates that its intersocietally generated peculiarities resulted in the gentry initiating the transition to capitalism to counter the geopolitical threat of industrialising Austria and arrest its social decline. Despite defeating Hungary and introducing capitalist social relations, the strength of Austrian dynasticism prevented the emergence of a hegemonic bloc and political stabilisation. It was this political weakness rather than economic backwardness that might better explain its expulsion from Germany in 1866. The article then turns to a comparison of the political economies of Prussia/Germany and Austria-Hungary and questions the overemphasis on Austro-Hungarian backwardness. By offering a new interpretation of Austria-Hungary, the article contributes to a rethinking of nineteenth century international relations and the long-term causes of World War 1.

USSR in World War II

The article offers an overview of modern historical data on the origins, causes of World War II, the decisive role of the USSR in its victorious end, and also records the main results and lessons of World War II.Hitler's Germany was the main cause of World War II. Nazism, racial theory, mixed with far-reaching geopolitical designs, became the combustible mixture that ignited the fire of glob­al conflict. The war with the Soviet Union was planned to be waged with particular cruelty.The preconditions for the outbreak of World War II were the humiliating provisions of the Versailles Peace Treaty for the German people, as well as the attitude of the "Western de­mocracies" to Russia after 1917 and the Soviet Union as an outcast of world development. Great Britain, France, the United States chose for themselves a policy of ignoring Moscow's interests, they were more likely to cooperate with Hitler's Germany than with Soviet Russia. It was the "Munich Agreement" that became the point of no return to the beginning of the Second World War. Under these conditions, for the USSR, its own security and the conclusion of a non-aggression pact with Germany began to come to the fore, defining the "spheres of interests" of the parties in order to limit the advance of German troops towards the Soviet borders in the event of German aggression against Poland. The non-aggression pact gave the USSR just under two years to rebuild the army and consolidate its defensive potential and pushed the Soviet borders hundreds of kilometers westward. The signing of the Pact was preceded by the failure in August 1939 of the negotiations between the military mis­sions of Britain, France and the USSR, although Moscow took the Anglo-French-Soviet nego­tiations with all seriousness.The huge losses of the USSR in the summer of 1941 are explained by the following circum­stances: before the war, a large-scale modernization of the Red Army was launched, a gradu­ate of a military school did not have sufficient experience in managing an entrusted unit by June 22, 1941; the Red Army was going to bleed the enemy in border battles, stop it with short counterattacks by covering units, carry out defensive operations, and then strike a de­cisive blow into the depths of the enemy's territory, so the importance of a multi-echeloned long-term defense in 1941 was underestimated by the command of the Red Army and it was not ready for it; significant groupings of the Western Special Military District were drawn into potential salients, which was used by the Germans at the initial stage of the war; Stalin's fear of provoking Hitler to start a war led to slowness in making the most urgent and necessary decisions to bring troops to combat readiness.The Allies delayed the opening of the second front for an unreasonably long time. They, of course, achieved outstanding success in the landing operation in France, however, the en­emy's losses in only one Soviet strategic operation in the summer of 1944 ("Bagration") are not inferior, and even exceed, the enemy’s losses on the second front. One of the goals of "Bagration" was to help the Allies.Soviet soldiers liberated Europe at the cost of their lives. At the same time, Moscow could not afford to re-establish a cordon sanitaire around its borders after the war, so that anti- Soviet forces would come to power in the border states. The United States and Great Britain took all measures available to them to quickly remove from the governments of Italy, France and other Western states all the left-wing forces that in 1944-1945 had a serious impact on the politics of their countries.

SOCIO-ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WORLD WAR II

SOCIO-ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WORLD WAR II

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Reviewed by: Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic Abdella Abdulkadir Abdou Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2016) In the last several years there has been an explosion of mainstream economics literature on inequality including writings by Branko Milanovic who spent decades at the World Bank and is author of the The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 2012). His new book, Global Inequality is an excellent complement to Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), a work which has boosted the momentum for a focus on inequality. Milanovic's timely short book examines changes in inequality focusing on the period since 1988, a period he refers to as a "high globalization" era. He explains the evolution of inequality within advanced economies, an income convergence among nations, and the interaction between them using concepts such as global inequality, Kuznets waves, the elephant curve, the global middle class, global plutocrats, and citizenship premium in five concise chapters. The analysis focuses on three social classes: the global middle class (urban residents of China and other emerging economies), global plutocrats, and the middle class of advanced economies. "High globalization" benefited the first two classes, and harmed the last group. Key developments include: the high growth rate in Asian economies which boosted convergence and helped the rise of the "global middle class," the weakening of the middle class in advanced economies, the rise of the share of the top 1% in global income and wealth, and the associated rise of inequality in advanced economies. These trends are captured by the "elephant curve" (Figure 1.1: 11) showing the cumulative percentage income gain of the three classes. Using household surveys of income of nations the figure shows that between 1988 and 2008 the real income of the global middle income rose the most, followed by the global plutocrats, while the income of the global upper middle class (the advanced world's middle class) remained stagnant. Milanovic captures this reversal of fortune for the middle class of advanced [End Page 314] countries by the novel concept of Kuznets waves. Historically, inequality rose in the West during the industrialization decades, and started declining in the first half of the 20th century. Kuznets claimed that industrialization caused both income and inequality to increase initially, but eventually increases in income accompanied reduced inequality. This relationship, the Kuznets curve, became the conventional wisdom in economics until inequality started rising in the last quarter of the 20th century. This development led Piketty to reject the claim that the Kuznets curve captured some natural tendency of capitalism, and posited that the decline in inequality experienced by the West was caused by exogenous shocks of the two world wars and the economic policies shaped by them. Milanovic's comment on Piketty is twofold. Firstly, he contends that the causes of World War I were not exogenous to the economy, and instead the war can be explained by rising inequality and class conflict. He refers to Hobson, Lenin, and Luxemburg to explain how increased inequality within industrialized countries led to imperialism and war. The war unleashed the forces of "the socialist movement, the Russian revolution" and caused the destruction of capital. (98) Consequently, inequality began declining in the 20th century as captured by the original Kuznets curve. Once these conditions reversed, inequality stared to rise again undergirded by globalization and technological revolution. Secondly, this means that increased inequality at present could generate political forces that would bring about another decline in inequality, i.e., a new Kuznets curve, hence the idea of Kuznets waves. Milanovic argues that inequality can decline for both malign (war, civil conflict, epidemics) and benign (labour movement, education, demographic and technological changes) reasons. The second wave of decline in inequality can be caused by any combination of these forces. He summarizes long-term data on changes in income and inequality and the movement of Kuznets waves for six advanced economies in an illuminating manner. (Table 2.2: 88) Unlike Piketty who avoids the...

The Origins of World War II in Contemporary Russian and British Historiography: A Trajectory of Interpretations

This article focuses on the peculiarities of the most arguable aspects of the causes of World War II in contemporary Russian and British studies. Relying on the concept of historical memory, the author analyses the motives behind the prewar policy of appeasement carried out by London, and the meaning of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact concluded between the USSR and Germany in 1939. As countries that had won World War I, Great Britain and the Soviet Union were prepared to concede when it came to Hitler’s expansionist ambitions, which has survived in the memory of Russian and British societies as a reason for the major war conflict of the 20 th century. Referring to a large number of resources, the author concludes that the topic of reasons for World War II which has a history of over 70 years is not only still topical in the 21 st century but also finds new unexpected interpretations of the prewar 1930s. The fact that there are still varying interpretations of the events that had a traumatising influence on the historical memory of Russian and British societies, proves that the topic in question in still relevant and politicised. The comparison of the two historiographic traditions of the interpretation of the most ambiguous aspects of prewar history calls for close attention from contemporary Russian and foreign historians and historiographers.

Peace through law: lessons from 1914

The theme ‘peace through law’ has engaged the continued attention of states and international law scholars. But despite changes in the normative and institutional structures since the beginning of the 20th century, wars are still with us. This essay revisits the rich reflections of the times on the causes of World War I and asks whether more international law could have prevented the war.

What can International Relations Theory learn from the origins of World War I?

World War I is a foundational or critical case for theories of international relations that address the causes of war. They include balance of power, deterrence, power transition theory, and rationalist models of decision making. Recent historical work on the underlying and immediate causes of World War I raises serious problems for all these approaches. Among other things, they highlight the importance of context, how it is understood by leaders, their motives and assumptions, and their tendency to exaggerate the constraints acting on them, the freedom of other actors, and their ability to predict events and control risks.

Dueling Visions for the Postwar World: The UN and UNESCO 1949 Conferences on Resources and Nature, and the Origins of Environmentalism

In 1946, at the behest of President Harry S. Truman, the United Nations (un) announced that it would hold a conference “to consider the conservation and effective utilization of natural resources.” The impetus was the belief that among the primary causes of World War II was Germany's and Japan's desperation to secure scarce materials and a growing postwar fear that other industrialized nations—including possibly the United States—would soon find themselves in similar straits. “The real or exaggerated fear of resource shortages and declining standards of living has in the past involved nations in warfare,” said Truman in a letter calling for the conference, sent to the U.S. representative to the un's Economic and Social Council. He concluded that “conservation can become a major basis of peace.” Three years in the making, the United Nations Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources (unsccur) was finally held in 1949 at the un's temporary headquarters in Lake Success, New York.1

In Defence of War:

<i>In Defence of War:</i>

Mezhdunarodnyi krizis 1939 goda v traktovkakh rossiiskikh i pol´skikh istorikov (The International Crisis of 1939 in the Works of Russian and Polish Historians) (review)

M. M. Narinskii and S. Dembski, eds., Mezhdunarodnyi krizis 1939 goda v traktovkakh rossiiskikh i pol'skikh istorikov (The International Crisis of 1939 in the Works of Russian and Polish Historians). 480 pp. Moscow: Aspekt Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-5756705799. As interest in the Soviet experience of World War II continues to gather steam, it was perhaps inevitable that the tumultuous year spanning the period between the Munich Conference and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact should become a focus of discussion once again. The diplomatic history of that period has been enmeshed, as few other topics were, in the framework of the Cold War propaganda conflict. The defining battle of its historiography was launched when the Allies brought to light documents captured from the German Foreign Ministry. Published in January 1948, Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939-1941 was a carefully arranged and selected collection illuminating the scope of cooperation between the USSR and Hitler's Germany. (1) The implication of this material was that, in the run-up to World War II, the Soviet Union acted as a disruptive influence in international affairs and shared a substantial degree of blame for causing the war. The USSR wasted little time in responding by launching its own historiographical broadside. In February of the same year, the Soviet Information Bureau published a communique titled Falsifiers of History, singling out the Western policy of appeasement as the main contributing factor in Hitler's rise to dominance of Central and Eastern Europe. (2) Within the Soviet bloc, the version established by Falsifiers of History persisted until the 1990s as the defining framework for interpreting the causes of World War II. Western historiography, however, was in fact both more polyphonous and more volatile. Thus A. J. P. Taylor, in the course of his revisionist account of the interwar years, sympathized with the Soviet view that Stalin was essentially committed to the collective-security approach and was forced into accommodation with Hitler only by the machinations of the Western appeasers. (3) His modern heirs, for example Geoffrey Roberts, to this day maintain that--governed by ideological as well as realist concerns--the Kremlin had been genuinely committed to the ideals of collective security. (4) This school of thought, in turn, was problematized by the postrevisionists of the late 1970s and 1980s, such as Jonathan Haslam, who envisioned Stalin's foreign policy as the product of ruthless realpolitik adaptation, based on pure self-interest, with the Soviet Union's security as the ultimate touchstone. (5) Neither long-term plans nor ideology guided Stalin's actions; rather, all possibilities were considered as they presented themselves. This approach currently reflects the dominant Western view on this issue. It is not without its critics, however. Scholars who give considerably more weight to the ideological features of the Soviet decision-making process have taken the lead in countering it. The so-called German school and historians like Ernst Topitsch argue that an ideological mindset framed Stalin's policy, the core of which was provocation of war between the capitalist states. These historians postulate that the Non-Aggression Pact was the culmination of a concerted effort on Stalin's part to woo Hitler and to reestablish Soviet-German post-Rapallo cooperation. (6) This conception then presents Stalin as the key architect of the conflict, with the Pact as a blank cheque issued to Berlin. The Western debates over war guilt reached their apogee with the Icebreaker controversy. This polemic followed Viktor Suvorov's suggestion that the German attack on the USSR was essentially a preventive measure that preempted an imminent Soviet invasion. (7) Largely dismantled by historians like Gabriel Gorodetsky and David Glantz, Suvorov's thesis today occupies a marginal position in Western scholarship, although it remains relevant for the wider Western public and among some scholars in post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. …

1914 in world historical perspective: The ‘uneven’ and ‘combined’ origins of World War I

The causes of World War I remain a topic of enormous intellectual interest. Yet, despite the immensity of the literature, historiographical and IR debates remain mired within unhelpful methodological dichotomies revolving around whether a ‘primacy of foreign policy’ versus ‘primacy of domestic politics’ or systemic versus unit-level approach best account for the war’s origins. Given that this historiography is the most prolific body of literature for any war within the modern age, it reveals a much deeper problem with the social sciences: how to coherently integrate ‘external’ and ‘internal’ relations into a synthesized theory of inter-state conflict and war. Drawing on and contributing to the theory of uneven and combined development, this article challenges standard interpretations of the war by distinctively uniting geopolitical and sociological modes of explanation into a single framework. In doing so, the article highlights how the necessarily variegated character of interactive socio-historical development explains the inter-state rivalries leading to war. Contextualizing the sources of conflict within the broad developmental tendencies of the Long 19th Century (1789–1914) and their particular articulation during the immediate pre-war juncture, the article seeks to provide significant contributions to recent debates in IR and historical sociology, as well as those concerning the relationship between history and IR theory.

The games of July: explaining the Great War

C. Zagare combines a deep command of historical scholarship and the sophisticated skills of an applied game theorist to develop and test a theory of why deterrence failed, catastrophically, in 1914. . . . Zagare concludes with sage advice on how to avoid even more cataclysmic breakdowns in a nuclear world.---Steven J. Brams, New York UniversityZagare's deft study of the origins of the First World War using his perfect deterrence theory uncovers new insights into that signal event and shows the value of formal theory applied to historical events. A must-read for those interested in security studies.---James D. Morrow, University of MichiganThrough an exemplary combination of formal theory, careful qualitative analysis, and lucid prose, The Games of delivers important and interesting answers to key questions concerning the international political causes of World War I. Its well-formed narratives and its sustained engagement with leading works in IR and diplomatic history . . . make it a rewarding read for security scholars in general and a useful teaching tool for international security courses.---Timothy W. Crawford, Boston CollegeTaking advantage of recent advances in game theory and the latest historiography, Frank C. Zagare offers a new, provocative interpretation of the events that led to the outbreak of World War I. He analyzes key events from Bismarck's surprising decision in 1879 to enter into a strategic alliance with Austria-Hungary to the escalation that culminated in a full-scale global war. Zagare concludes that, while the war was most certainly unintended, it was in no sense accidental or inevitable.The Games of July serves not only as an analytical narrative but also as a work of theoretical assessment. Standard realist and liberal explanations of the Great War are evaluated along with a collection of game-theoretic models known as perfect deterrence theory.Frank C. Zagare is UB Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo.Cover illustration: Satirical Italian postcard from World War I. Used with permission from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries.

Carl Von Clausewitz (1780–1831) and Cholera: The Cause of World War II?

Here it is proposed that, by killing Prussian Major General Carl von Clausewitz before he could complete the work on his military text On War, cholera strongly influenced the nature of World War I (1914-18) and, by direct extension, contributed to the cause of World War II (1939-45).

Rebuilding the Foundations of Offense-Defense Theory

The relative ease of attack and defense-the offense-defense balance-is a widely used planatory concept in international politics, playing an important role in literatures ranging from war causation and alliance formation to the determinants of system structure, the importance of relative gains from cooperation, or the causes of World War I. Yet the concept of the balance itself remains radically underdeveloped theoretically, clouding the predictions of the numerous theories that rest upon it and undermining rigorous empirical work on the many hypotheses these theories imply. I address this problem by presenting and testing a systematic theory of the balance that emphasizes military strategic and tactical choices as its key determinants, by contrast with orthodox offense-defense theory's focus on technology. This new theory outperforms the orthodox view and has broad implications for international relations theory.

Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler's Strategy of World Conquest

Scholars frequently portray World War II as an epic morality play driven by a villain (Hitler) and a sinner (Chamberlain). This book offers a fresh approach, combining both the attributes of states and the structure of the international system to explain the origins and causes of World War II. Central to the analysis is the argument that the structure of the international system was tripolar - with Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States as the three central powers - and not multipolar and that this needs to be considered in any examination of the antecedent causes and crucial events of the war. Recognizing that both systems and human agents make history, the author presents an amended balance-of-power theory, a balance-of-interests theory - that distinguishes great powers by their relative material strength and the value they place on the status quo. This systems framework is used to examine and explain the dynamics of tripolar systems; how states respond to threats and opportunities; Hitler's strategy of global dominion; and the foreign policy strategies of the other major powers before and during the war.

Of War, Humanity and Justice: International Law After Kosovo

When, in 1945, the founding fathers of the United Nations laid down the Charter rules governing the use of force, their paramount concern was the prevention of inter-state violence, acts of aggression and armed invasions which had been the cause of World War II. This is made clear in the language of Article 2 para. 4 (All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force ...), by the focus on self-defence as the sole exception to the unilateral use of force, and, more cogently, by the collective security system embodied in Chapter VII of the Charter. This system is controlled by the veto power of the five permanent members of the Security Council. Whether or not today this system is adequate for maintaining order in a world that has undergone profound transformations since 1945. It is clear that at its inception it was not intended for it to cope with crisis involving large scale violations for human rights within a given state's boundaries. For this type of situation, the Charter does not provide an explicit exception to the general prohibition of armed force. It recognizes domestic jurisdiction (Article 2 para. 7) as a shield against intervention in internal affairs by the Organization, with the sole exception of Chapter VII enforcement measures. It also recognizes the obligation to promote human rights (Arts 1 para. 3 and 55 lit.(c)) as a matter of duty to cooperate individually or collectively with the Organization

GATT and the Environment: Reconciling Liberal Trade Policies with Environmental Preservation

I. INTRODUCTION With the passage of the Uruguay Round(1) of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)(2) and the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO),(3) there has been much debate over what role, if any, the WTO should play in reconciling tension between liberal trade policies and environmental protection.(4) In the words of the WTO Committee on Trade and Environment, the multilateral trading system must be able to apply [the principle of] non-discrimination(5) while ensuring that countries can implement domestic environmental policies appropriate for their social, political, economic and environmental preferences.(6) Many environmentalists, however, argue that the very premise of the WTO, that of free-trade,(7) directly conflicts with environmental preservation and protection.(8) Furthermore, they argue that the most troubling aspect of the Uruguay Round and the WTO is that the new legalism of the WTO(9) will diminish the effectiveness of United States environmental legislation(10) by allowing the WTO the final say over what domestic legislation is or is not GATT legal.(11) This article analyzes the interplay between the principle of non-discrimination and the need for a comprehensive system for environmental protection. Part II examines the principle of non-discrimination in the WTO and the WTO's new dispute resolution process. Part III explains some of the domestic forces that corrupt the multilateral trading system by influencing domestic environmental regulations in the direction of protectionism. Part IV analyzes how trade and the environment interplay within the WTO, paying particular attention to some recent GATT/WTO panel decisions: the Reformulated Gasoline Case and the Tuna-Dolphin Case. Finally, this article concludes with the observation that, despite the criticism levied against the WTO the new legalism of the WTO is a blessing in disguise for environmentalists because it is only through the principles of non-discrimination and legalism that environmental concerns can be shielded from political forces that use environmental protection as a guise for protectionism. In effect, the Uruguay Round will allow national decision makers to focus on the real and important concern of protecting the environment. II. THE GENERAL AGREEMENT ON TARIFFS AND TRADE Some scholars have suggested that the collapse of the world economy and ultimately the cause of World War II arose from the nationalistic sentiments and economic protectionism that existed during the 1930s.(12) As such, one of the primary purposes behind the creation of many of the post-World War II international organizations was the prevention of this type of nationalistic protectionism.(13) GATT, in particular, was adopted(14) to address specific issues thought to hinder the free flow of goods between countries.(15) The original agreement addressed both overt governmental interference(16) as well as individual corporate actions(17) believed to be counterproductive and injurious to the world economic order.(18) Although the original GATT agreement and subsequent rounds of negotiations addressed a variety of Issues,(19) essentially three basic principles underlie GATT: (1) trade should be conducted on the basis of non-discrimination,(20) (2) markets should remain open and any protection afforded domestic industries should be accomplished exclusively through overt measures such as tariffs and import quotas,(21) and (3) violations of the principle of fair trade should be adjudicated exclusively through GATT.(22) These substantive benchmarks are also largely premised on a liberal notion of free-trade.(23) The method by which free-trade is accomplished is through the harmonization and containment of the domestic barriers to the free-flow of goods.(24) In essence, the GATT was created to facilitate economic integration to further the ultimate goal of convergence by adopt[ing] rules of international behavior and . …