The ministerial process and power dynamics in the World Trade Organization: understanding failure from Seattle to Cancún

They came to the Cancún Ministerial, they saw, and they went home emptyhanded. In fact, in the last four years, between 1999 and 2003, two of the three ministerial conferences of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have ended in failure. Such a high failure rate of its apex body is one of the immediate causes for the declining credibility of the WTO. In the aftermath of Cancún, EU Trade Commissioner, Pascal Lamy, reiterated his view that the WTO is a ‘mediaeval organization’, while the US Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick, pointed to regional alternatives that the United States could and would resort to. In the furor surrounding (yet another) failed ministerial meeting, what is often ignored is the nature and functioning of the ministerial process itself as a possible influence on the sub-optimal negotiated outcomes. The most jarring brakes to the functioning of the WTO have been applied at ministerial meetings. The same was true of the predecessor institution of the WTO, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). For example, in the run-up to and through the Uruguay Round, at least three ministerial conferences collapsed under circumstances that were not entirely dissimilar from Seattle and Cancún in 1982, 1988 and 1990. It is true that disagreements in the preparatory process in Geneva contributed to the showdown at ministerial level and must be taken into account as a factor contributing to the failure. In this commentary I argue that the crescendo of the ministerial process itself exacerbates these differences in several ways, thereby rendering agreement among the differing parties even more inaccessible. While there are several ways in which malfunctioning ministerial processes can affect the overall functioning of the WTO, perhaps the