ABSTRACT
To understand the WTO as embedded within a specific historical and social context, this third chapter shows how since its creation the WTO has undergone a continual process of rearticulation. It exceeds any finite political structure and appears as what is described here — an uncertain political project constituted by a changing amalgam of social practices that each alters what the WTO means for those actors it impacts. Despite possessing a formal institutional structure, the WTO cannot be reduced to that structure, as this chapter shows. What is more, the purpose or function of the WTO is constantly subject to rearticulation as it buffets between the thunderous political storms that have enveloped its path. As the book argues overall, the WTO is not passively subject to external forces but is, rather, intimately tied into these social practices as constituting — and reconstituting — the conditions of possibility that made it a political project with being. This third chapter, then, draws heavily open the methodology developed in the Introduction to this book whilst advancing further by looking at both the formal and informal character of the WTO as an institution — showing that the WTO as a political entity exceeds a conventional legal-institutionalist model. Attention is placed on empirically observable practices attributed to the social practice of the WTO. These practices underline uncertainty in defining precisely what is meant by the ‘WTO’, exhibiting an open articulatory process.
