If the weekend gatherings of world leaders in Canada is remembered for anything, it may well be the death knell they delivered to multilateralism as the cornerstone of the global trading system.
For all their insistence on working together to advance any number of global priorities – from maternal health to deficit control – G8 and G20 leaders proved incapable of paying anything more than lip service to the World Trade Organization’s nine-year-old Doha round of talks aimed at tearing down barriers to international commerce.
Previous summits had set a deadline for completion of negotiations by the end of 2010, but the G8’s final communiqué scrubbed any talk of deadlines and merely committed the seven G8 countries belonging to the WTO (Russia is not a member) to a “successful completion” of Doha.
The new absence of any deadline is an acknowledgment that the talks launched in 2001 – ambitiously aimed at extending the benefits of globalization to developing countries by knocking down farm subsidies and tariffs in the developed world and China – have been going nowhere.
Previous communiqués “have been full of hot air,” Brookings Institution fellow Paul Blustein wrote in a pre-summit commentary. But he warned that the failure to advance the Doha round would “expose the WTO to ridicule” and could signal its decline and eventual death.
“Some day historians might look back at 2010 as the year the global trading system died – or contracted a terminal illness,” Mr. Blustein wrote in a separate Foreign Policy article this year. “If [the WTO] can’t forge new agreements, then how long before it loses its authority to arbitrate disputes?”
Prime Minister Stephen Harper refused to concede the Doha round faces a fatal prognosis, telling reporters on Saturday: “I don’t think we can afford to say that. We’ve got to find a path over time to get to a successful conclusion.”
Mr. Harper pointed to the bilateral and regional free-trade deals Canada and other countries are pursuing as “a way of kick-starting the process while we see the Doha talks remaining stalled.”
But Mr. Blustein has countered that the “WTO’s centrality to the [global] trading system has already been weakened by a proliferation of bilateral and regional trade agreements in recent years.”
In a telling sign of where U.S. priorities lie, President Barack Obama announced in Toronto that his administration will ask Congress in early 2011 – or after November’s mid-term elections – to ratify a free-trade agreement with South Korea that was previously negotiated under George W. Bush.
The move is a contentious one, since many Democrats in Congress, labour unions and farmers have zeroed in on South Korean barriers to U.S. beef and auto imports to oppose the deal. The Obama administration hopes irritants can be eliminated by the time the G20 meets in Seoul in November.
China’s ambassador to the WTO, Sun Zhenyu, meanwhile, accused the United States of undermining progress in the Doha talks by making new demands and raising the bar for success. “Their new excessive request on an elevated level of ambition is in fact equivalent to a restart of the round,” Mr. Sun told Reuters on Saturday.
And in a speech in Toronto, WTO head Pascal Lamy pleaded for leaders to finish the “remaining 20 per cent” of the work needed to complete the Doha talks, but conceded that negotiators are “staring at each other waiting for the other side to move first.”
The failure of the Doha round would be ironic given Mr. Obama’s pledge to abandon the unilateral approach preferred by the Bush administration in its global relations.
“Despite making multilateralism a keystone of his foreign policy, [Mr. Obama] may preside over the marginalization of the most successful multilateral institution of all,” Mr. Blustein wrote in his Foreign Policy piece.
