In bad times, trade gets political

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1088889,00.html

In good times, trade is strictly for anoraks. Officials who labour over the agreements are like medieval monks working for years on their Latin bibles, speaking a language no one understands. But in bad times, trade gets political. Then talk is not of tariff peaks and quota reductions but of trade wars and tit-for-tat protectionism.

The spat over steel is only part of a broader crisis of the multilateral trading system, and indeed of multilateralism itself. On December 15, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) will meet in Geneva to see what, if anything, it can salvage from the trade liberalisation talks that stalled in Cancun two months ago. The omens are not promising. Bush is in re-election mode and French protectionism is in the ascendancy within the EU.

For those who see the WTO as an evil organisation, this is all to the good. Blocking the trade talks means rolling back the dark forces of globalisation, right? Wrong. The WTO has its flaws, but it is a forum where the weak can seek redress against the strong when the rules are broken. To be sure, the US and the EU hold more sway at the WTO than Zambia or Costa Rica, but that's life.

Economic strength means power and influence; always has done. Brussels and Washington often use their clout in a naked and cynical way, but are more circumscribed in the one-member, one-vote WTO than they are at the IMF and World Bank, where voting is proportionate to wealth. The alternative to the WTO is the law of the jungle, and as such the post-Cancun crisis is not just about trade; it is about whether there is a future for multilateralism.