ABSTRACT
In September 2004, the then European Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy organized a conference on ‘Collective preferences and global governance: What future for the multilateral trading system?’. In his keynote address, Pascal Lamy stressed that whatever its benefits, international market opening also had a destabilizing impact on the economic and social fabric, and potentially on societal choices. He argued secondly that while efforts had been made to develop accompanying measures to deal with the effects of market opening on industry and employment, the threat to societal choices had so far not received proper attention. The challenge, in his view, was to design an open trading system that everyone accepts and that safeguards legitimate social choices.
