The WTO Public Forum (this year’s version concluded a day ago) is among the positive consequences of the Battle of Seattle. That refers to the civil society protests around the 1999 Ministerial (Now it’s the subject of a feature film, though I haven’t see it yet).
The initial instinct of the WTO was to shut out non-governmental stakeholders in the Organization’s activities (big business of course had all along its well developed lobbying networks). Environmentalists and labour activists didn’t belong in the WTO’s corridors-they should take their complaints to national capitals. The WTO was a Member-driven organization, and that meant a closed shop of governmental delegates, with ministers and senior officials from capitals engaged at certain key points.
After Seattle, the shaken legitimacy of the WTO became a high profile issue for global economic governance; the Summit itself collapsed, for complex reasons, but the fractious atmosphere of resistance in the street resonated or dovetailed with the feeling among some nations, especially developing ones, that the Uruguay Round bargain was produced by largely shutting them out of real decision making-or pressuring them into accepting rules not suited to their economies. The marginalized on the outside gave a certain courage to the marginalized inside to hold their ground.
Perhaps no other single protest has had such a large impact on global governance in such a short time period. I was on the ground in Seattle, there as the collaborator of the Canadian human rights NGO. We were pushing the WTO to address its democratic deficit not in the streets but through meetings and discussions outside of, or on the fringes of, the Ministerial itself.
The protests got the world, and the WTO, to pay attention. But impact required more; it demanded ideas and expertise. Many civil society groups got the message. At the Cancun Ministerial in 2023, I found myself at a dinner of civil society WTO lawyers, a group that hardly existed a few years before-experts with knowledge and skills to pull apart panel reports and negotiating proposals, subjecting them to close scrutiny in light of human values that usually got short shrift within the corridors of the WTO. Sometimes, the Appellate Body listened; and as far as negotiating new the trajectory of the WTO as the juggernaut of neoliberal globalization started to slow down, as insiders and outsiders started to find overlapping concerns (such halting the expansion of intellectual property rights, where the WTO had already gone too far, cramping policy space to balance different interests-those of innovation, consumer welfare, human health and technology transfer for development.)
As an early response to the WTO’s legitimacy crisis, the Public Forum-the first version was in 2001-was of little interest to me. It appeared as a pure public relations exercise: let the barbarians in the gates one day a year then let them hold their peace. My view started to change when the World Bank and the UN High Commissioner for Human rights invited me to speak on panels they were organizing there. That was around 2008. The fact that these intergovernmental institutions were using the Public Forum to engage with the WTO in this way gave it a significance beyond a sop to civil society; the WTO’s relative isolation from other international institutions representing different values and interests was a symptom of its tunnel vision at the time, seeing its mission simply as liberalization, understood either in neoliberal economic terms or ordnoliberal constitutional terms.
In fact, the Public Forum has evolved into the world’s most open inclusive wide-ranging dialogue on trade and the global governance issues surrounding it. A couple of years ago, Alan Beattie, a top trade journalist, called it a “junior Davos.” I think Alan was intending that as praise but I would have said “mega-Davos”; unlike the posh event staged by the billionaire’s club across the lake in Cologny, you do not need to buy your way into the WTO Public Forum with money or power. It’s true that sponsorship brings with it some particular level of presence at the event-but these days even the Peterson Institute is sending open-minded and capable speakers such as Inu Malak, not simply shills for discredited neoliberal globalization.
Another notable evolution of the Public Forum is the intensive involvement and participation of the Director-General of the WTO. She is on the ground, in the sessions and in the corridors, all the time or as much as performing her other duties will allow. This year, the WTO’s Chief Economist Bob Staiger was also notably present. The choice of Bob for this role was brilliant (though a little disconcerting for me to think of him as that much younger than I am!-the retirement age for the Secretariat is 65).
As I discovered when I had the chance to co-author with him some years ago, Bob has a special ability to engage with non-economists at a high level of scholarly analysis. He deploys economics as an essential discourse for trade, but not a hegemonic one that locks out other perspectives and shuts down essential legitimacy questions that can’t be answered within classical microeconomic theory. (In another Substack, I’ll have lots to say about this year’s World Trade Report, which I reckon bears his imprint in many ways.)
So my proposal is to rename the Forum by removing the word “public.” “Public” initially signified a contrast with the main and serious business of the WTO, which happened behind closed doors. In a world where neoliberal globalization has been discredited by the awareness of its consequences and fractured by the return of intense geopolitics, a world without a hegemon, consensus is almost certainly going to be elusive. Under these circumstances, dialogue and deliberation become central to living together given our differences, and in the absence of any unifying ideology that could answer today’s essential questions-surrounding the global governance of AI, for instance.
In these circumstances, the
event that started at the margins of the WTO is now at the core of the WTO. The understanding of differences that results from the broadest possible dialogue, between all or almost all states and non-state an actors as well, is itself, in the current moment, a highly valuable global public good. For trade, the WTO, and especially its Forum, are the place for that.
I should end with a disclosure: I have a personal interest in the Forum. It is a place to reconnect and meet with the students I have taught, the people I have collaborated with, whether in academia, government, or civil society, over 30 years of working in this field. Some of these reunions are planned; many are spontaneous and even more joyous for that. It is pleasure to see how many are well-established in practice and scholarship, and to witness others be recognized as the garde montante of the epistemic community for global trade governance.
Thanks for this interesting post. I think it is noteworthy though how over the years the scope of the discussion at the Public Forum (or Forum :-)) have narrowed - there is less critical engagement about the fundamentals and objectives of trade liberalization than there used to be and the participants this year seemed particularly to lack diversity. Despite that though there were many opportunities for interesting and challenging conversations.