In a punchy book, former World Trade Organization head Mike Moore argues for globalization, saying open trade forces competition and curbs corporate giants, writes David Plott in the Far Easter Economic Review.

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FEER Issue cover-dated June 05, 2003
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A World Without Walls: Freedom, Development, Free Trade and Global Governance, by Mike Moore. Cambridge University Press. $30

THERE ARE SOME WORDS that don’t need gravity to keep them on the floor. “Globalization” is one of them. It’s a clunky, dreadful word.

And yet, for all the clumsiness of the word, globalization–the spread of free trade and information, and the deepening interdependence of business and markets across the world–has over the past five decades significantly buoyed economic growth and overcome poverty. Not everyone will agree with that assertion, but those who don’t are wrong.

In A World Without Walls, Mike Moore, a former director-general of the World Trade Organisation, has produced an impassioned, and at times feisty, defence of free trade in improving lives and enhancing political freedom. He has also written an eloquent defence of the WTO, at a time when such multilateral institutions as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization find themselves embattled by critics or embroiled in internal feuding.

Moore defends the WTO without pulling punches at its bureaucratic absurdities, or the hypocrisy of some of its 144 member countries. “The WTO usually does the right thing the wrong way, and the long way,” he argues.

Moore, a lifelong labour activist and former prime minister of New Zealand, served as head of the WTO from 1999-2002, a period that spanned the disastrous riots at the WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle in November 1999, the launch of a new round of global trade negotiations at Doha in 2001 and China’s admission to the world trade body. He is an unabashed proponent of globalization, but this isn’t what gives this book its sometimes raw energy. Moore’s arguments in favour of trade liberalization, democracy, and good governance are largely derived from others–so much so that at times he seems to be doing little more than stringing together quotations from the vast literature on globalization.

What makes this work shine is Moore’s first-hand account of how the Seattle summit exploded in failure two months after he took up his post at the WTO, and how he spent much of the rest of his tenure as director-general muscling together the historic agreement at Doha to launch the current round of world trade talks. Those talks are aimed explicitly at addressing many of the concerns of developing countries about the benefits of free trade, and, in doing so, robbing the WTO’s many shrill critics of their case against globalization.

The conventional view of the Seattle summit is that the hotchpotch of anti-WTO protesters who rioted there were responsible for the embarrassing collapse of the trade meeting. “Seattle is now recorded as a victory for the anti-globalization movement,” writes Moore. “Nonsense. We didn’t need their help to fail, it wasn’t process or protest; we did it on our own.”

Moore argues that there were so many differences among WTO members, and such ill will between ambassadors from differing countries, that the Seattle meeting was doomed to failure anyway. The commitment needed to launch a new round of trade liberalization simply didn’t exist. In particular, rancour between rich countries and developing countries left over from the seven-year-long Uruguay Round trade talks had left deep misgivings among some developing countries about what they might get from a new round.

Nowhere were those divisions more obvious than in the acrimonious process that led to Moore’s selection as director-general of the WTO. The differences between rich and developing countries were so pronounced that Moore–who had the support of then-United States President Bill Clinton’s administration–failed to win a full six-year term. In a compromise deal that he describes as “slightly sordid,” he agreed to split the term with Thailand’s Supachai Panitchpakdi, who was favoured by developing countries. By the time trade ministers gathered in Seattle, there was too little time and not enough goodwill to forge an agreement on a new round of trade talks. The riots that blocked the meeting only added to the atmosphere of failure.

“With hindsight, it was probably just as well,” Moore says. “Seattle was a wake-up call for the WTO and we learned from the fiasco.”

It is at this point in the story that Moore comes into his own, both as a player in the subsequent events and as a chronicler of what unfolds. A pugnacious, barnyard intellectual whose consummate deal-making skills were central to the success of the Doha summit two years later, Moore describes the relentless horse-trading and political manoeuvring that led to the Doha agreement. A key to success was Moore’s own engagement in preparing the summit. He travelled 625,000 kilometres, visited 182 cities and met more than 300 ministers in the two years between the collapse of Seattle and the triumph at Doha.

A unique characteristic of the WTO, and what sets it apart from the World Bank, the IMF or even the United Nations, is that any agreement requires the consent of all 144 member countries. Moreover, its agreements are binding and enforceable. Objections from a single country can scupper a deal. “We have 144 handbrakes and one accelerator, which can only be used by consensus,” Moore writes.

This is perhaps why he focuses the harshest words in this book on the non-governmental organizations and other groups who argue the WTO and the Doha agreement are a defeat for democracy and developing countries. “This is a cruel self-serving lie orchestrated by selfish observers and self-appointed critics who need to maintain the rage of their supporters to raise funds to stay in business and on the front pages,” Moore writes.

In an ironic twist on the claim levelled by protesters in Seattle that the WTO is a stooge of big business, he says: “Pray for globalization if you fear big business. Open trade forces competition and curbs monopolies and corporate giants by exposing them to competition.”

Globalization may have other, more learned and polished advocates than Moore, but few with the same political skills and bare-knuckled ability to advance its cause in so vast an arena as the WTO.

In Moore’s hands, that clunky word is a cudgel for progress.

David Plott is deputy editor of the REVIEW

  

Posted on May 29th, 2003 by jl
Filed under: Intl Trade