by Nicola Bullard^*

April 2001

Last week in Brussels, European parliamentarians moved one cautious step closer to setting up a mechanism for "parliamentary scrutiny" of the World Trade Organisation.

The proposal to "launch a conference in Qatar on strengthening parliamentary scrutiny of the WTO" was included in the Chairman's statement following a two-day seminar organised by the parliament's Committee on External Trade, Research and Energy and attended by parliamentarians from the EU, Europe and 23 developing countries, and a handful of NGOs.

Although the name of the seminar was encouraging -- Trade Development and Democracy: the need for reform of the WTO – the main purpose of the meeting was to push the proposal to establish a WTO parliamentary body first mooted by the European parliamentary delegation in Seattle in 1999. However, things did not go as planned.

Kobsak Chutikul, recently elected to the Thai parliament and a seasoned Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, opened the seminar with a diplomatic but surgical attack on the legitimacy of the WTO, honing in on the WTO’s failure to ensure "fair sharing in the benefits of the system."

While agreeing that parliamentarians can help bridge the "legitimacy gap" by disseminating understanding of the trade agenda and its implications, he argued that the WTO must "answer the questions about its own legitimacy and that of the current multilateral trading system that have been posed by national groups as well as transnational civil society before a new round can be successfully launched." And, he warned, even if the WTO is able to deal with some of its internal decision-making processes, we risk ending up with "a massive Green Room, still divorced from the reality of the world".

He was equally dismissive of reform proposals which amount to little more than "tweaking the WTO website" and training developing country negotiators, asking whether this would "lead to effective participation." People, he said, are looking for new international rules of democracy and insisted that the "search for new trade rules has to be convincing to transnational civil society."

But while Mr Chutikul diplomatically challenged the legitimacy of the WTO both in terms of its form and content, the next speaker, Mike Moore, assumed the posture of a pugilist.

The WTO director-general -- who says he is neither a director nor a general, but merely the servant of his "shareholders" -- believes that trade liberalisation and the WTO are forces of "good" in the world. To prove the point, he misleadingly conflated the social and economic advances of the past 50 years with the "undoubted benefits" of the WTO. Protectionism and high tariffs, he argued, are the forebears of the "twin tyrannies of fascism and Marxism" and without the international institutions the world would be "less stable, less predictable and more dangerous." What's more international institutions "enhance the authority of the sovereign state" and, in any case, "even if we did away with the WTO we would not do away with globalisation."

Having made the case for the WTO in much the same terms that the Catholic sisters terrorised us about Godless Communists, he then made a strong plea for increased resources for the WTO.

"I do not dream," he said, "of having the budget of the World Wildlife Fund, which is three times ours. But perhaps some governments might care to give the same amount as they give to some NGOs."

"Although our translation needs have increased by 120 percent, our budget has only increased by 20 per cent," he lamented. Which does rather beg the question of just how Mr Moore plans to handle the shopping list of new issues that might result from a new round when the present workload is beyond the budget.

EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, who got the pre-dinner speaking slot, also seems to think that the WTO is working. Internal processes, he said, are more participative and representative, while external transparency can be measured by the public availability of documents, the improved website and regular consultations with NGOs.

On the new round, Lamy said the EU is proposing an agenda "relevant to the 21 Century". The only glitch it seems is that developing countries still need to be convinced that a new round will meet their interests and the US must be persuaded to support a round that will have "development concerns" at the core. Given the US's unwillingness to consider the concerns of developing countries in the Kyoto negotiations, their recent bail-out from that multilateral process and Bush's rush into right-wing isolationism, the Commissioner has his work cut out. Maybe Lamy is hoping that his personal friendship with US Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick, and his efforts to buy-off the least developed countries (LDCs) with the fraudulent "Everything but Arms" proposal will shift the balance in his favour, but the triangulation will be tricky.

At the end of his dinner speech, Commissioner Lamy invited questions, but none came. Maybe everyone had heard the answers before.

Apart from the big name speeches, there were two sessions of five-minute statements which were interesting and varied: far more varied, I imagine, than the organising committee had hoped.

All developing country parliamentarians expressed deep reservations about the current trading system, citing imbalances in the rules, lack of attention to implementation and unequal sharing of benefits. Many spoke warmly of civil society's efforts to raise awareness of trade issues. Most were politely -- and sometimes genuinely -- interested in the proposal to set up some kind of parliamentary forum.

Mr Tayel, president of Egypt's parliamentary economic committee asked whether reform is "at the level of the WTO or at the level of propaganda?" while the delegate from Turkey noted that trade is not an end in itself. The vice president of the Greek parliamentary committee on trade and production described Seattle as "a warning to those who are using trade for their own advantage." Could this be the start of an interesting Eastern Mediterranean alliance?

Amongst the EU parliamentarians there were few surprises. The right wing parties (with the exception of the rabid nationalists and a few sensible "small l" liberals) and most of the Social Democrats are gung-ho liberalisers who believe that the system is basically sound, that trade is good for the poor and that all we need is a little more transparency and democracy, parliamentary involvement and the participation of "reliable NGOs that we can work with."

Among the few who dared to challenge the dogma that "trade brings sunshine and happiness" were Green politicians Caroline Lucas from the European Parliament and France's Marie-Helene Aubert. Both said that a parliamentary forum was premature and that in any case the role of parliaments is to control, rather than oversee, the WTO. Caroline Lucas was unambiguous in her opposition to a new round.

Of the non-government speakers, Mr Watt of the World Federalists of Canada made an assessment of a parliamentary or civil society forum, weighing the risks of co-option against the benefits of bringing in a broader agenda. At least, he said, it could be a catalyst for further reforms. The ICFTU made its plea for social principles to be incorporated into the rules. On behalf of Focus, I called for a complete overhaul of the system, questioning the assumed benefits of export-oriented trade and the role of TNCs and financial markets. The chairman thanked me for these "interesting" views.

The International Parliamentary Union was not represented: maybe they were too busy preparing for their own conference on the WTO in Geneva in June.

At the end of the seminar there was no consensus and the chairman was forced to prepare his own statement, which was nonetheless presented to the media (by four European males) as the outcome of the meeting.

The Greens, Regionalists and other radical political groups were agitated about the undemocratic way in which the seminar was planned and the results conveyed to the press. Stephen Emmott, a policy adviser to the UK Green Caroline Lucas described it as an "exercise in political one-upmanship by some politicians, rather than any genuine attempt to bring the WTO under any workable form of democratic control." Obviously the European Parliament itself has a long way to go in terms of internal transparency and democracy.

How should we respond to this proposal?

If it stays in the hands of a cabal of right-wing European parliamentarians then it is going nowhere: after all, it took one and a half years simply to organise a two-day meeting. But even as this seminar showed, there are many views about trade, development and democracy, and there is a lot to be gained by having many and varied forums to debate the issues. The debate should continue, and it should be expanded to include a much wider representation of parliaments and political groupings. This would be a good thing. The risk is that a quick-fix parliamentary forum could be used to give the glow of healthy legitimacy to a sick institution. But I suspect that even the figleaf of a parliamentary forum – and especially one driven by the North – is far too small to cover the flaws of this particular international body.