ABSTRACT
The academic identification of the concept of sustainability may seem like explaining how to unravel a complex tartan. Just as ‘sustainability’ began to be effectively translated from political discourse into legal principle in the European Union (EU), the EU was nearing the end of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. On the one hand, the Community was grappling with ways to answer some of the searching questions that environmentalists were asking through re-alignments consistent with emergent notions such as sustainability. On the other hand, the Community was seeking to adhere to a new, unified regime in relation to trade. The World Trade Organization (WTO) was set to become the ‘central, international, economic institution’. The enhanced Dispute Settling Mechanism (DSM) and the greater central focus provided by the new organizational structure in the Marrakesh Agreement was appreciated by certain legal observers. Involvement of people such as Peter Sutherland (the ex-EC Competition Commissioner) signalled perhaps that the supposedly neutral settlement of technical trade issues was undergoing a process of ‘juridification’. The full import of Marrakesh in legal terms arguably represented an effort to implode the legal regulation on global matters into the central focus of trade. To many, this represented a culmination of a neo-liberal agenda happening in various ways towards the end of the twentieth century. While political science discourse recognized the novelty and revolutionary nature of the WTO, legal thinkers, as ever, often saunter slowly behind.
