Monitoring Policy Making at the United Nations |
| ||||||||||||
Globalization and Its Discontents
Does the World Trade Organization want to replace the State Bar?
By George Kraw
National Law Journal
November 3, 1999
Most U.S. lawyers pay little attention to the World Trade Organization, a spider's web of trade treaty obligations overseen by a faceless international bureaucracy accountable chiefly to itself.
Attorney interest is likely to pick up if the organization gains a say in lawyer licensing and regulation of multidisciplinary practices, something that seems likely given current trends and the WTO's megalomaniac vision.
"We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among separate national economies," was how former Director-General Renato Ruggiero described the organization's role in a widely noted statement. "We are writing the constitution of a single global economy."
For lawyers, that may eventually mean having the WTO determine who can practice where and under what conditions. If the WTO were given jurisdiction over the provision of international legal services, it would be able to define what domestic regulatory schemes and local bar rules constitute "unnecessary barriers to trade in services."
Some international American law firms like the idea of an international authority that runs interference for them abroad, even if that also helps competing multidisciplinary practices. For corporate legal consumers, opening up practice areas such as arbitration, project financing or securities work to non-lawyers or foreign lawyers may be beneficial. And it's unlikely that the WTO or any other international agency is going to try to usurp the powers of federal or state courts to control which lawyers may appear before them. At least, not at first.
But the core question is whether the WTO is capable of overseeing the provision of legal services or broader trade policy issues in California, the nation or the rest of the world. Successor to GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the WTO is meeting in Seattle later this month.
These days, WTO bureaucrats from nations economically less important than Los Angeles County claim an exalted role in the New World Order. The current director-general, fulsome New Zealander Mike Moore, compares trade disputes to previous conflicts with totalitarianism and finds the world as "polarised" by economic issues as "it was once polarised by the Cold War." WTO critics are dismissed as selfish reactionaries.
But it's the WTO's arrogant, antidemocratic mind set, along with its studied indifference to personal liberty, that has created virulent opposition. To political opponents, the WTO is an environmental menace that props up evil dictatorships, ignores human rights violations, and swaps good paying jobs in developed countries for subsistence wage work in the Third World. The opposition mostly ignores the benefits of a globalized economy to economic growth. But even supporters of free trade -- as well as lawyers potentially subject to WTO jurisdiction -- should be concerned with the inherent unfairness of WTO procedures.
GATT relied upon voluntary compliance, but WTO has enforcement powers to impose trade sanctions. Closed tribunals hear challenges to trade-related national and local laws and regulations. According to the anti-WTO group Global Trade Watch, briefs from the public or non-governmental organizations are only accepted by WTO panels if endorsed by a national government. State attorneys general in the United States cannot participate in WTO challenges without the approval of the current administration. California, one of the world's 10 largest economies, has no say in the organization except through the federal government. Losers have only limited appeals within the WTO.
Once a decision is final, losing countries must obey or face trade sanctions. Under GATT, the United States could retaliate against unfair trade practices by imposing unilateral sanctions under the 1974 Trade Act. Now the U.S. is committed to use the WTO for dispute resolution and to enforce WTO decisions in federal courts.
Many Americans retain doubts about trade treaties in general and international enforcement agencies in particular. But WTO cheerleaders are gleeful about imposing a permanent world trade order that trumps traditional American political institutions.
"American trade policy is adrift and under siege," complains economist Marcus Noland in a recent edition of Foreign Affairs. Like many WTO supporters, he is eager to see opposition inside and out of the federal government overridden by an international treaty regime.
"Today, the American political class cannot muster the intellectual honesty necessary to prevent narrow special-interest groups from capturing trade policy for their own ends," concludes Noland. "In such an anarchic environment, international agreements constraining the abuse of trade policy for parochial purposes are the only way to commit [America and others] . . . to relatively enlightened open-market policies."
Such sentiments assume a competence for the WTO that other international agencies have failed to demonstrate. Heads of state, major media pundits and chiefs of multinational companies repeat the WTO mantra that "there is no alternative" -- TINA has become an acronym in Europe.
But vexing questions concerning the terms for China's membership and the relationship between developed and less developed countries in the organization remain unresolved. Over the longer term, the WTO may disintegrate into bureaucratic tribal warfare, played out with United Nations-style efficacy and efficiency.
Given a choice between a world trade regime run by international bureaucrats and a regulatory void, the United States should choose the latter. The worst response to national government trade barriers or out-of-date regulatory schemes is an entangling supranational system of more laws and regulations. By ideological predisposition and from bureaucratic self-interest, the WTO ignores the example of the Internet and other successes of the information age that have prospered in an environment of minimal regulation and oversight.
Meanwhile, the WTO has become a lightening rod for international opponents of globalization. This September, Berkeley's Ruckus Society invited activists to its "Globalize This!" Action Camp to prepare "mass-movement civil disobedience" for the upcoming Seattle confab. Much of what is planned mimics the worldwide June 18 "Carnival Against Capitalism" that protested a G-7 economic summit in Cologne, Germany and caused major rioting in London and other cities.
To date, the WTO has been more successful in stirring up a global, anti-modernizing, anti-capitalist opposition than in ensuring free trade or general prosperity. Trying to regulate lawyers will create a whole new group of waspish opponents. Perhaps the coming brouhaha in Seattle will lead to a more serious debate about the purpose, cost and ultimate need for a supranational trading regime.
George M. Kraw is a San Jose attorney.
More Information on Globalization
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C ß 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
