ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a novel political economy mechanism – what might be called the spaghetti bowls as building blocs mechanism and used to argue that systematic political economy forces may push the world up the last two steps to global free trade. It provides some thoughts on what the World Trade Organisation might do to help 'tame the tangle' of free trade agreements. To provide underpinnings for these thoughts and for the assertion that multilateralising regionalism is the way forward, a basic political economy framework for trade liberalisation. The chapter employs the framework to organise a line-sketch of post-war trade liberalisation. To understand juggernaut liberalisation of intra-industry trade, it is necessary to reach for the very latest trade theories, the so-called new-new trade theory. World trade in 1950 is hardly recognisable from today's perspective, as can be seen from the regional groupings that GATT chose to illustrate the network of world trade in its first statistical publication.
