International Trade Agreements

Randall White, a political scientist, is also a Toronto-based economic
consultant and author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to Senate
Reform in Canada.

This short overview of the lately rather shaky institutional framework
for international trade is based on the 1991 Bissell lectures, at the
University of Toronto, given by Gilbert Winham, who teaches political
science at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.

The first chapter offers some very deep historical background, more or
less keyed to current concerns. Chapter 2 discusses the breakdown of the
international trade system in the Great Depression of the 1930s, as a
kind of object lesson for the present. The next two chapters focus on
the growth of the multilateral General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT) after World War II, culminating with the failures of the most
recent (and highly ambitious) GATT “Uruguay Round.” A final chapter
briefly discusses such things as the “revival of nationalism and
mercantilism,” the Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement, the somewhat
precarious recent expansion of the European Community, and the proposed
North American Free Trade Agreement—now that the postwar GATT
negotiating process has apparently reached some kind of limit.

Winham’s own biases remain with the “multilateral management” of
a “liberal trading system” fostered by the growth of the
“rules-oriented GATT regime” since the late 1940s. He both hopes and
expects that the failures of the Uruguay Round, and the apparent new
taste for less universal regional arrangements, will not lead to any
decisive destruction of what GATT actually has achieved. At the same
time, he recognizes that “the GATT regime is fundamentally
inconsistent with the combination of nationalism and neo-mercantilism
that is implicit in some of the current critiques,” especially in the
United States. Here as elsewhere, the inhabitants of the global village
have lately embarked on uncharted waters: we at least know that the
future will not be quite the same as the past.

The subject is complicated, and no one should expect to digest even a
short overview without some mental effort. But the book is refreshingly
written in plain English. The original lectures have been updated to
reflect events up to the early summer of 1992. Nonexperts looking for
some global background to the various trade debates of the past decade
should find the volume helpful.