This book is about the difficulties of an international organization at the center of multilateral trade governance when it comes to reforming itself. It talks to a broader global governance and international institutions literature by providing a conceptual framework about international organizations that oscillate between success and crises, staying on track or falling out of equilibrium. The story of the World Trade Organization (WTO) could also be the story of other international institutions.
After making the case for trade liberalization as a positive driver for growth and poverty reduction, Kent Jones outlines the many and increasing challenges that the WTO faces today. He then presents a constructivist-inspired framework (John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 1995) to guide his empirical journey through various institutions that constitute the WTO and episodes that have marked the organization’s history. He focuses on the concept of collective intentionality as well as constitutive and regulatory rules that guide actors’ behavior. Jones does a remarkably fine job in sketching the WTO’s major difficulties and challenges. He analyses the development of the organization’s institutional setting and how it has become inept at producing tangible outcomes. He unpacks many interesting and fascinating formal and informal institutions and shows how they have or have not changed and succeeded over time at adjusting to the growing number of challenges. The book concludes with a number of reform proposals on how to make the WTO again fit for its purpose.
Reconstructing the World Trade Organization for the 21st Century is valuable for any trade scholar and contributes to the ongoing reform debate through the depth, scope, and historical dimension of its analysis. Nevertheless, a number of shortcomings also need mentioning.
First, the outcomes and the performance are largely assumed to follow the mainstream trade literature; therefore, some of the substantive concerns raised by WTO members are not explored in more detail. These concerns are largely articulated through domestic discontent and mobilization. More attention to the international political economy literature rooted in domestic politics could therefore have strengthened or complemented the institutional analysis, in particular in relation to the causal origins of the crises, as well the existence of alternative transmission mechanisms.
Second, the framework inspired by Searle is quite complex, and therefore using it as a tool for analyzing and explaining empirical facts, raises the danger of compromising the theory’s determinacy and parsimony when it comes to explaining WTO institutional outcomes. There are many interrelated causal mechanisms postulated that make the testing of the framework an uphill battle. Given that the concepts focus on shared ideas and a constructivist understanding of how the world hangs together, more attention to mainstream constructivist work could have strengthened the analytical part and helped to distinguish it from other constructivist work (including John Ruggie’s work on “embedded liberalism,” one of the first constructivist-like accounts on the GATT system) that focuses on principles and norms that guide state behavior. Also, the development of testable implications could have been pursued.
Third, and related to the framework, the reader would have liked to see a bit more how this constructivist framework fares in comparison with liberal or realist explanations of international institutions. Given that the author is an economist, it is maybe not his main aspiration, but the political science audience would be curious to learn, for instance, more about how liberal arguments for whether “legalization has gone too far” differ from sociological accounts presented in the book (see, e.g., Judith Goldstein and Lisa Martin, “Legalization, Trade Liberalization, and Domestic Politics: A Cautionary Note,” International Organization 54 [2000]: 603–32). In addition, little discussion is found on the contribution by delegation theories (see, e.g., Darren Hawkins et al., eds., Delegation and Agency in International Organizations, 2006) or realist narratives (see, e.g., Daniel Drezner, All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes, 2007). More engagement with competing explanations would have allowed a better connection to the global governance literature and made a clearer contribution to that literature.
Fourth, given the multitude of challenges, the reader would welcome more guidance as to the role of different institutions that the author also classifies as hardware and software types, with their hierarchy and interrelationships. Which of the institutions matter more and why? This is particularly important for thinking about setting priorities in terms of institutional reform or the potential difficulties in disentangling some of the institutional mechanisms. Thinking hard about counterfactuals could further aid the evaluatation of the different roles that different institutions play (e.g., Manfred Elsig and Thomas Cottier, “Reforming the WTO: The Decision-Making Triangle Revisited,” in Governing the World Trade Organization: Past, Present and Beyond Doha, ed. Thomas Cottier and Manfred Elsig, 2011). For instance, is it easier to reform the consensus principle, the single-undertaking approach in trade rounds, secretarial support in trade negotiations, or selection procedures for committee chairs? What are the effects of reforming one set of institutions on other ones? Also, to what extent are some challenges more endogeneous to the WTO than others (e.g., institutional reactions to changing balance-of-power structures)?
Notwithstanding some of these limits, the contribution by Kent Jones will push our thinking about the forces promoting or hindering reform at the WTO. In particular, it provides fresh ideas about the path to take toward redesigning the WTO in order to regain its position at the center of global trade governance.
