On 22-23 November 2019 Associate Professor Jessica Lawrence presented her paper titled “We Have Never Been ‘Multilateral’: The Rhetoric of Universal Values in International Trade Law” at the ESIL-SGH-ILS PAS Joint Conference on “The Crisis of Multilateral International Order: Causes, Dynamics and Consequences” in Warsaw, Poland.
Professor Lawrence’s paper challenged the narrative of multilateralism as embodying a false nostalgia for a time in which states had achieved consensus around a set of universal values. Instead, it argued that ‘multilateralism’ has always been a site of contestation in which universalist rhetoric has masked strong disagreements regarding the substantive content of international norms, and thrown a cloak of legitimacy over rules designed to further particular interests. Drawing on the example of the WTO, the paper argued that far from being an area of former consensus now in crisis, the ‘rules based multilateral trading system’ has long faced significant—even existential—challenges, from the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s to the collapse of the Doha round; the turn to regionalism and bilateralism; and the current Appellate Body debacle. Even where its normative authority did appear widely accepted, the illusion of consensus papered over a system full of loopholes, agreements to disagree, temporary workarounds, and conflicting interpretations. Rather than an organization of multilateral consensus based on universal values, therefore, the paper argued that the WTO should be seen as a historically contingent compromise for which universalism has been a rhetorical tool rather than a social fact.