What is normal trade law? The completion of the Uruguay Round in 1994 and the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) seemed to mark the achievement of normal trade law, both in the sense of normalizing regulation of international trade relations by legal norms and institutions and in the sense of a normal content of trade law involving significant international convergence rather than sovereign diversity. Both of these senses of normal trade law now seem to be under pressure. The stalemate at the WTO, the turn to preferential agreements and the more recent return of belligerent sovereign unilateralism all suggest the need to interrogate again the legal context in which global trade and investment is embedded. Going forward, trade law may need to emphasize less convergent substantive concepts such as exceptions, differential treatment, interface and variable geometry. But this may also be the moment to rethink whether normal trade law involves a return to a more open role for international politics (including negotiation, threats and conflict), as well as a normal role for law better understood through the frames of transnational law and legal pluralism.

The Concept of Normal Trade

Defining normal trade in international economic relations was clearly a contested and negotiated task during the era of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), with relatively thin international-level trade regulation combined with plural varieties of domestic market regulation, including in socialist states. The contested nature of normal trade was strikingly exemplified by US– China trade relations before 2000, which were significantly framed around the annual political maneuvering to grant the presidential waiver that would allow for the formal status of normal trade relations with China under US trade law. Normal trade relations involved the continuation of the most-favored-nation (MFN) treatment already extended by the United States to most of its trading partners, including all of the WTO– GATT membership. A major change in the character of the trade relationship between two distinct national economies therefore was marked when Congress passed legislation to grant China permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) in anticipation of the accession of China to the WTO in 2001. Similarly, Russia gained PNTR in 2012.