WTO Needs creditability in order to modernize.

Director of international law at CIGI from April 2014 to February 2020. Oonagh has a B.F.A. (Hons.) from York University (1977). She obtained her LL.B. from Osgoode Hall Law School (1981) and was called to the Bar of Ontario in 1983. She obtained an LL.M. from the University of Ottawa (1990), a Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) from the University of Toronto (1994) and an M.B.A. from Queen’s University (2007). She has taught various courses in the Faculty of Law (Common Law) and Telfer Business School at the University of Ottawa and in the Department of Law at Carleton University. “Modernizing the World Trade Organization: A CIGI Essay Series” Centre for International Governance Innovation.

4 Modernizing the World Trade Organization Today, the WTO is experiencing a crisis of legitimacy — its Appellate Body (AB) effectively shut down by the United States blocking consensus on new appointments — and hegemonic trade wars seem to have replaced the steady pace of diplomacy and reasoned argumentation. The WTO finds itself struggling to respond effectively to the challenges of rapid economic, political, social, technological and environmental change, seemingly lacking the infrastructural resilience needed to weather today’s geopolitical storms. The global trading system, which only a few years ago was being lauded as the model of effective multilateralism, now seems locked in an out-of-date governance paradigm, in need of a new program of work with which to start to break impasses and address the urgent and encompassing challenges of the twenty- first century. Part of the WTO’s challenge is figuring out just how to start such a reform initiative when there are such strongly opposing factions to be drawn into consensus. This essay series grows from earlier work done by CIGI on the WTO: a consultation on the Canadian government’s Ottawa Group initiative on WTO reform3 and two essay series on reshaping trade through women’s economic empowerment4 and mainstreaming gender in trade agreements.5 Launched as the AB was about to become non-functioning in December 2019, this series casts its net more broadly than the dispute settlement issues while acknowledging that the WTO’s challenges are all deeply interconnected. The essays explore the potential for more comprehensive WTO reform to imagine a new program of work and a way to embark upon that work, and thereby to help invigorate discussions for the next Ministerial Council meeting. The growing trade tension has sparked important conversations at the WTO and in nations’ capitals about potential WTO reform. Both the European Union6 and Canada with the Ottawa Group7 (comprised of Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, the European Union, Japan, Kenya, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore and Switzerland, and notably not including China, India and the United States) have put forward ideas for WTO reform, as have others. Canada’s discussion paper focused on improving the monitoring of existing rules, safeguarding and strengthening the dispute settlement function, and modernizing trade rules for the twenty- first century. This series looks at the issue of reform and modernization from a variety of angles. While some contributors focus on how to keep the lights on in dark times, others offer ideas on how to restart productive negotiations, how to reform and restore the rules-based dispute settlement system (DSS), how to make trade more inclusive, whether to narrow the WTO’s focus to trade basics to leave more flexibility to nations for their own development, and how to update and reshape the WTO to deal with today’s interconnected global challenges.