Preliminary remarks

The riotous fiascos in Seattle, in London and Berlin on May Day and, more recently, in Nice at the summit of the European Union have at least one thing in common: some measure of popular disaffection with the workings of intergovernmental constitutions. It therefore seems appropriate and timely to raise certain issues of World Trade Organisation (WTO) institutional reform again. After all, such debates, both in governmental and academic circles, have all along accompanied the birth and lifetime of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and, of course, featured prominently immediately prior to, during and after the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations (UR). Furthermore, “constitutionalism,” underpinning a third liberal revival, “turning to Market Democracy,” has become part of building a new post-Cold War world which had produced both an age of uncertainty about basic goals and a shift in “world views” or simply “the mood of the time.” It also prompted some socio-economic engineering aimed at changing the socio-economic and socio-ecological context of a more complex and interdependent international economic order, a kind which had previously led to a resounding defeat for the draft Havana Charter and led to the claims made by some Developing Countries (DCs) at the time that “the apparent equality of the procedure can involve the most tremendous and unjust inequalities.”