Peter Gallagher

More commentary—this time from the Pres­i­dent of the U.S. Coun­cil on For­eign Relations—on the sig­nif­i­cance of the Copen­hagen meet­ing as one of the first signs of what­ev­er-it-turns-out-to-be that fol­lows the pax atlanti­ca

“Mul­ti­lat­er­al­ism in the 21st cen­tu­ry is, like the cen­tu­ry itself, like­ly to be more flu­id and, at times, messy than what we are used to.” Extract from Richard Haass in the Finan­cial Times

Haass pro­vides three pos­si­ble new con­for­ma­tions of mul­ti­lat­er­al­ism for the 21^st cen­tu­ry that seem plau­si­ble to me: ‘region­al­ism’ as in region­al trade agree­ments; ‘func­tion­al’ multilateralism—by which he means ‘coali­tions of the will­ing’ or the ‘crit­i­cal mass’ agree­ments that have been at the core of my recent work on agri­cul­tur­al trade agree­ments—and; ‘infor­mal’ mul­ti­lat­er­al­ism com­pris­ing exec­u­tive agree­ments on col­lab­o­ra­tion that fall some way short of treaties.

What these forms have in com­mon, that dis­tin­guish­es them from the form of mul­ti­lat­er­al­ism embod­ied in WTO, is that they are not ‘sin­gle under­tak­ing’ agree­ments of the kind that has so crip­pled progress in the Doha Round of nego­ti­a­tions. It’s past time that the WTO mem­ber gov­ern­ments got that idea.