Global Trade Governance Research Articles

Hard Choices, Soft Law: Voluntary Standards in Global Trade, Environment and Social Governance by John J. Kirton and Michael J. Trebilcock

Hard Choices, Soft Law: Voluntary Standards in Global Trade, Environment and Social Governance by John J. Kirton and Michael J. Trebilcock

Japan and the European Union: shared foreign policy interests

Japan and the European Union (Reiterer (2004b) 2:33–42) are both interested in enhancing their international standing in order to overcome their perceived status as economic giants but political dwarfs. While the reasons for this endeavour as well as the inherent characteristics of the actors involved—a traditional nation state as compared to the most advanced integration structure world-wide—are quite different, both entities see themselves primarily as civilian powers (Whitman (2006) 11(1):1–15) without neglecting the need to endow themselves with a military capacity in order to be more effective and credible on a world-wide scale. The ‘EU is emerging as a key regional actor in certain global affairs, particularly in such areas as finance, trade, environment and development, and current policy is directed towards enhancing the role of the European Union in the global governance system. To this end, the European Commission is actively engaged in such issues as the global governance of trade, the protection of human rights, the promotion of democracy, strengthening of regional and global security communities, and encouraging regional integration in other parts of the world.’ (Farrel (2005) 10(4):452–453)—all areas, except the latter task, where the EU and Japan could potentially cooperate closely. Before identifying shared foreign policy interests between the EU and Japan, I will first bring to light some of the interests the EU has in East Asia in general; secondly I will chart the major Japanese foreign policy interests which will allow me to map out areas of potential common interest and concern.

Hard Choices, Soft Law: Voluntary Standards in Global Trade, Environment and Social Governance

Hard Choices, Soft Law: Voluntary Standards in Global Trade, Environment and Social Governance, John J. Kirton and Michael Trebilcock, eds., Global Environmental Governance Series; Aldergate: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004, pp. xviii, 372.This book sheds considerable light on the new forms of “soft law” governance (voluntary standards and informal institutions) that are emerging out of the confluence of rationally calculated interests, intersubjectively shared norms, and entrenched structures of power in the global economy. It benefits greatly from the analytical framework and meticulous exposition provided by the editors, John Kirton and Michael Trebilcock, whose introductory chapter repays close reading. The remaining chapters of the book are grouped in four sections.

Book Review: Hard Choices, Soft Law: Voluntary Standards in Global Trade, Environment and Social Governance

Book Review: Hard Choices, Soft Law: Voluntary Standards in Global Trade, Environment and Social Governance

Investment as the Achilles Heel of Globalisation?: The Ongoing Conflict between the Rights of Capital and the Rights of States

Efforts to extend global trade and investment governance seem at an impasse. Many disputes, including over investment rules, the focus of this article, and continued controversies over inequality and fairness in the global economy have contributed to the collapse of various trade and investment initiatives. Especially in the investment area, the collapse of mulilateral initiatives has led to bilateral “solutions” – the number of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and investment chapters included in bilateral or small group free trade agreements has increased. These are frequently depicted as evidence that the investment protection goals of the capital exporting states, especially the US, are being achieved by bilateral means. However, this article shows that while the bilateral route does enhance capital's rights at the expense of state autonomy, the process is far from an inexorable, linear progression. There has been more contestation and the results are more uneven than is often conceded. In particular there is considerable variation in the contents of BITs and most continue to leave space for states to design economic development policies and retain some leverage over the uses of foreign investment. The US model of investment protection may have made inroads but in its full form it is the exception rather than the rule. The struggle between relative rights of capital and of states remains intense and is one of the central factors that explain the impasse in extending the reach of global economic governance institutions.

The ‘nature’ of environmental services: GATS, the environment and the struggle over the global institutionalization of private law

The article traces the contradictions in the current phase of the formation of Global Trade Governance via an inquiry into the discourse surrounding environmental services. The analysis elucidates the inadvertent politicization of environmental services, which paradoxically emerges within a context of attempts to insulate and depoliticize the Trade in Services agenda more generally. It provides an interpretation of this dynamic from a political ecology perspective. As a site of profound definitional problems, the Trade in Environmental Services discourse reveals deep-seated contradictions lodged in social relations with nature. The contradictions are explored via a critical deconstruction of the very concept of ‘environmental services’, which aids the identification of sites of political engagement vis-á-vis the substantiation of ‘global modernity’ through economic integration. The developmental logic of capitalist modernity expands into areas where its contradictory nature becomes, once more, tangible, the subject of a social experience of detrimental forms of relations wit nature, and thus subject to political struggle. The article concludes by illustrating the argument with examples from the Environmental Services Trade agenda.

Locked In? Canada's External Constitution under Global Trade Governance

The negotiation of supranational trade regimes may well be considered by historians as one of the most pregnant developments which brought the twentieth century to a highly polarized close. At one pole, the specialized community of trade experts hailed the treaties that set up global and continental institutions as giant steps forward in establishing the universal rule of economic law, with a direct, trade- and investment-expanding impact on the world's economy (Jackson 2000; Trebilcock and Howse 1999; Ostry 1997). Global theorists who welcomed the cosmopolitan possibilities opened up by globalization embraced the new realities with enthusiasm and imagination (Held 1995). At the other extreme, the prime consequence of economic liberalization was seen in its power-constraining effects on the world's nation states. Environmental non-governmental organizations, for instance, took to attacking the World Trade Organization (WTO) or North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as powerful forces sapping the capacity of national policy regimes to achieve ecological sustainability (Shrybman 2002). In the minds of the identifiable political minority that is overtly hostile to globalization, a deep distrust of global institutions segues to a sense that, as mouthpieces for the United States, they release transnational corporations (TNCs) from democratic control (Klein 2000). As they come to grips with the vast array of issues raised by globalization, two groupings of social scientists have an established claim for our attention. International relations (IR) scholars address the trade-offs states make when signing treaties. In return for a necessary loss of formal sovereignty, governments calculate that they extract specific benefits from participating in the new continental or global organizations (Pauly 1997; Gilpin 2000). Major discrepancies between the autonomy lost and the benefits expected could depend on where a particular state is located in the global hierarchy. Hegemonic states might increase the scope of their authority if the rules further their interests, while peripheral states might find their plight worsened if they are deprived of their legislative capacities to extract benefits from foreign capital. These IR interests overlap with those of political economists who study the interactions between states and markets, assessing the extent to which corporations might have increased their autonomy from governments and how this shift of structural capacity might have impinged on the disparities between the very strong and the very weak. (Strange 1988). Situated within this general debate, this article takes Canada as exemplary of states in the middle of the power hierarchy that can be called semi-peripheral since they are neither fully dominant nor fully dominated. To understand how the special characteristics of semi-peripheral countries such as Canada have been affected by the intergovernmental economic agreements that transformed the meaning of global governance in the 1990s, we first have to differentiate the old from the new in the international political economy. Old was the way that international relations have always been determined by the power disparities--structural, financial, military, scientific, and ideological--that differentiated those who made the rules by which the rest of the world operates from those who had to follow them. Old also included the world order comprised of hundreds of international organizations (IOs) established by intergovernmental treaty to deal with specific transnational functional problems. Some of these IOs formalized the power ascendancy of the United States in the global distribution of forces, a situation that was particularly true of the major international financial institutions (IFIs) that made up the Bretton Woods system (Moon 2000, 343). Canada's semi-peripherality in this second half of the twentieth century could be seen in its ambidextrous behavior, illustrating the broad border zone it occupied between the very strong and the very weak. …

Governing global trade: international institutions in conflict and convergence

Cohn's topic of global trade is of enormous and proliferating interest. He provides a good background from 1945 to the present and on core contemporary themes such as civil society participation and the domesticisation of the trade agenda. Whilst there is a wealth of literature on policy-oriented aspects such as negotiating rounds, there are few that provide the careful, comprehensive historical overview that this work offers and none that do so with reference to international institutions such as the G7, Quad, OECD, and UNCTAD as well as the WTO in global trade governance. This seminal work has been awarded the British Columbia Political Science Association Weller Prize for 2003. Cohn's political science background will appeal directly to a university audience and a broader public policy market. It is also suitable for those interested in trade in the cognates of economics and law. This work's theoretical framework embraces and synthesises the major approaches in the field of international relations and will be appropriate for the dominant schools of realists and liberal institutionalists alike. It could therefore be apt for courses on international relations theory or international political economy taught in a theoretical mode. This book reinforces and broadens the focus of all previous works in The G8 and Global Governance series.

The World's Trader, the World's Lawyer

Europe's position in the world is analyzed in relation to a specification of globalization into five global processes, whereby Europe stands out as the central node of global flows of trade and capital and as the region of uniquely high transnational entanglements, as an area of transnational normativity. The historical background and inter-relation of foreign trade and trans-polity law within Europe, both in early modern social theory and in post-Second World War institution-building, are highlighted, as well as the spread of European law to other continents. The concepts of position, role, and identity should be distinguished. This historical and current position of Europe in the world is little expressed in the roles that contemporary European leaders want to play and in contemporary formulations of European heritage and identity. This is due partly to a nostalgic misjudgment by former great power politicians, but largely because of the delimited position of conventional trade and law in Europe, and of the actual but untheorized transformation of trading traditions into socially embedded trade and of the legal tradition into democratic international normativity. It is finally argued that these European practices of trade and law in fact correspond to many current critical views on global trade and global governance.