Description
The WTO was once the centre of the liberal, globalising international order but has now entered a period of protracted crisis. The rise of China has disrupted established power relations and created mounting trade tensions (Hopewell 2020), precipitating a shift to protectionism within the US. Relatedly, the ideology that underpinned the WTO has been overturned, with a decisive shift toward greater management by the state of the economy and of production chains. These changes have threatened to render the WTO irrelevant, but international organisations do not suffer such a fate passively. Building on the turn to ‘open system’ analysis of International Organisations (Seabrooke and Sending 2015; Kranke 2022), this paper examines the strategies that have been put in place by the WTO secretariat itself and by sympathetic member states to shore up the multilateral trade system. These include: (i) the creation of alternative institutions to replicate the functions of the elements of the WTO that have been terminated by US action, notably the appellate body; (ii) suggestions for changes to WTO decision making procedures; (iii) the creation of the organisation’s first secretariat strategy; (iv) and a bolstering of the organisation’s narrative around inclusive trade. The paper concludes with some reflections on the likelihood of these strategies protecting the WTO from drifting toward irrelevance.
