ABSTRACT
The Millennium Round of global trade negotiations—which were to be launched at the 1999 meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle—never made it into the new millennium, becoming perhaps the only casualty of Y2K. Some believe that the round failed for timing and procedural reasons and can be put back on track. 1 Negotiators speak bravely of a new round, even while recognizing the loss of momentum, as did US Deputy Trade Representative Richard Fisher recently, when he said, ‘[w]ell, I wouldn’t say it is a forceful momentum, but we have not regressed since Auckland, and in between we have had these Seattle meetings which were not the most successful ever …’ (Reuters, 2000). But others see Seattle as a major turning point, as ‘the end of the era of trade negotiations conducted by sheltered élites balancing competing commercial interests behind closed doors’ (Mazur, 2000).
