ABSTRACT
The establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 is supposed to have signalled the ‘rational choice’ by so-called developing countries to abandon the failing economic policies and legal strategies they had pursued for more than three decades. To put it succinctly, trade scholars argue that by relying on trade protection as opposed to trade liberalization and insisting on unilateral measures on the developed countries’ part, developing countries failed to obtain the liberalization of their competitive exports and consequently to ‘develop’ their economies by means of liberal trade. Conversely, by adhering to the same set of rules and the economic rationale those rules embody, namely the unquestionable belief in the universal beneficial role of trade liberalization, developing countries are finally able to demand and enforce compliance with WTO rules so as to enjoy the benefits its legal regime is supposed to generate. The significance of the WTO in relation to development seems therefore
to rest on the assumption that it brings to a close a past in which debates about the development dimension of the international trade regime have been informed by failing ‘emotional’, ‘irrational’ and ‘ideological’ claims. It is believed to inaugurate a new era in which past controversies, deriving from such ill-conceived claims, have been superseded by an international community founded on ‘reason’. This chapter aims to challenge this linear reading of the neo-liberal transformation of the development dimension of the international trade regime. Indeed, the entry into force of the WTO was the outcome of a complex interrelationship between different factors that cannot be accounted for in terms of a rational and linear historic process. Understanding how the ‘consensus’ on the trade and development ratio-
nale of the WTO emerged and consolidated would require a systematic account of the interplay among diverse and competing forces.1 However, this chapter will focus on one particular aspect of this relationship, namely the ‘scientific’ authority the neo-liberal transformation of development thinking conferred upon the development agenda of the WTO. It is on the neo-liberal
claim about the neutrality and rationality of its development analyses that this authority rests. This chapter makes two arguments in this respect: first, that neo-liberal theories and policies which have informed the WTO’s approach to development since 1995 are based on political assumptions about Third World societies which belie their alleged neutrality; and second, that the conditions for their possibility need to be traced back to the ‘scientific’ authority, and a specific modality, with which ‘development’ was endowed since its inception. The ‘science of development’ is premised on the unquestionable need for developing countries to rely on a universal economic rationality in order to replicate the experience of developed countries. Accordingly, its means can be constantly transformed to both reconceptualize the ‘failure’ of development and posit anew the ‘promise’ of its overcoming. The first part will therefore introduce the premises on which the devel-
opment framework of the post-war period was established. A brief analysis of the mandate system under the League of Nations and the normative assumptions underlying its ‘development mission’ will serve to contextualize the subsequent discussion on the development enterprise of the post-war international community. These assumptions informed both early development theories and the development activity of the international trading regime. The second part will present an overview of the theoretical shifts in development thinking and will contend that, despite the qualitative difference from earlier approaches to development, neo-liberal thinking is both linked with, and has displaced, earlier development theories. The nexus is to be found within the terms of the development framework set up at the end of the colonial era. Both the premise of development (that is, the representation of Third
World societies as ‘backward’) and the consequent norm (namely the need for developing countries to replicate the successful experience of developed countries) remained unaffected by the so-called neo-liberal revolution of development thinking. Rather, that ‘revolution’ reformulated the means through which to achieve the undisputable goal. A reconceptualization of the ‘nature’ of Third World societies, however, was essential in order to replace earlier approaches to development with neo-liberal development. The uncovering of neo-liberal assumptions about Third World societies is crucial to emphasize the continuity of the ‘development mission’ in neo-liberal claims even when they seem to repudiate the paternalistic attitude of early development approaches. The aim is to provide a critique of the normative assumptions permeating the WTO’s approach to development.
