Abstract
Reviewed by: Edelgard Mahant (mahant@glendon.yorku.ca ), Glendon College, York University
As someone who has reviewed over 70 books over the course of her academic life, I can say, without reservation, that this is a book I highly recommend to specialists as well as informed amateurs who, in the current world context, may well want to know more about the international trading system.
Two features make this book worth a full read from beginning to end. The author is extremely knowledgeable about her subject and has done an amazing amount of work to familiarize herself with the details of the Doha Round. She spent 15 months at the WTO, conducted 157 interviews, and spent more than 300 hours observing meetings at and about the WTO. (The WTO meetings themselves are not open to public or researchers.) She also seems to have consulted nearly all the English-language material directly relevant to her topic—everything from official documents to newspaper articles to background and theoretical studies.
This wealth of material does not make her book dull or hard to understand. The book is extremely well written and free of jargon. Although the subject matter is highly technical, this is a book that anyone with a reasonable vocabulary and knowledge of world affairs should be able to follow. Such a bridging of the gap between the academic and public affairs spheres is truly remarkable.
Hopewell sets out to explain the failure of the Doha Round of WTO negotiations, which began in 2001 and has not yet seen, and is now unlikely to see, a conclusion. She explains how the previous eight rounds of GATT/WTO negotiations were able to come to successful conclusions because the domination of the US, and later the US and EU, enabled those two trading entities to basically get most of what they wanted into each successive agreement, leaving only crumbs for other members—notably Third World countries such as India and Brazil.
But after China was admitted to the WTO and coincidentally the economies of Brazil and India grew at unprecedented rates, the US and EU were no longer able to play the dominant role to which they had become accustomed. In a sense, they were hoisted by their own petards. When developing countries such as China and India were able to successfully compete in manufacturing, the developed countries insisted on including trade in services in the Uruguay Round. Furthermore, the United States insisted on including agricultural products because American negotiators believed that the infamous European Common Agricultural Policy prevented the United States’ efficient, large-scale farmers from selling their products, notably to Europe and Africa.
By the time of the Doha Round, Brazil had become a major efficient producer of several agricultural products, and India had become an important exporter of services, while China was an exporter of manufactured products on a scale never before seen in the international economy. These three governments wanted in: they wanted to be able to take advantage of the WTO system, but the US and the EU did not, and do not, want to give up on their privileged role within that system. The result is deadlock, with no outcome in sight.
Using quotations from the interviews she conducted, Hopewell describes and analyzes the negotiations, with sympathy for the position of the governments of the three countries. Sometimes the reader almost feels as if she or he were part of the negotiating process. Yet Hopewell does not lose sight of the bigger picture. She manages to incorporate traditional international relations theory in her analysis: Brazil, China, and India have become more powerful and more skilled in negotiations; that is one reason for their success.
The current change in US trade policy after the election of Donald Trump makes it highly unlikely that the Doha Round will become unblocked. Hopewell’s book was completed before the 2016 US election, but her conclusions almost foreshadow what is happening now: more protectionism and more regional trade agreements, such as the CETA between Canada and the EU, instead of the overarching universal system to which the GATT/WTO aspired.
The subtitle of this book suggests a left-wing ideology, but by the time Hopewell completes her detailed study of the WTO, she appears to have become disabused of that ideology. As she herself writes, Brazil, China, and India do not want to “break” the WTO; they want to enjoy the benefits of the neoliberal system on which that organization is based, and which it has, however imperfectly, applied since 1948. Neoliberalism won, and if only governments practised it with some concern for their citizens and those of other countries, the standard of living of the world’s peoples should continue to rise. Yet this is at the time when the US government appears to be abandoning the ideology it has espoused for so long. Who knows what will come next?