ABSTRACT
There are two stories that almost all students and practitioners learn when they encounter the World Trade Organization (WTO) for the first time. The first is a story about the institution’s origins. More often than not the story begins with the tumultuous days of the interwar depression, wherein dark images invoking Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and the descent, first, into political extremism and, then, war provide the context for a discussion of beggar-thy-neighbour policies and the notorious Smoot-Hawley tariff. The story then moves onto wartime efforts to resurrect international trade and the ill-fated attempts to establish a trade institution— the International Trade Organization (ITO)—as the third grand post-war economic institution (partnering with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). Thereafter the story focuses on the rise of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)—a limited and originally a provisional agreement—as the primary multilateral means of liberalizing trade, before discussion is made of the Uruguay round and the GATT’s metamorphosis into the WTO.
