GPPi contributes to WTO Public Forum

In Geneva on 25 September 2012, GPPi Associate Director Thorsten Benner participated in the World Trade Organization Public Forum, which this year addressed the question ​“Is Multilateralism in Crisis?”

Benner contributed to a panel titled ​“Why Global Cooperation is Failing.” The panel was organized by Thomas Hale, a former GG2020 fellow currently at both Princeton University and the University of Oxford. Hale opened the panel with a presentation based on his forthcoming book Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When It’s Most Needed. (Hale co-authored the book with David Held and Kevin Young. It will be published by Polity Press in 2013). Roberta Piermartini of the World Trade Organization moderated the panel, on which Benner and Hale were joined by Carolyn Deere Birkbeck of Oxford and Mark Halle of the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

In his comments, Benner quoted John Ruggie in arguing that our understanding of multilateralism needs to go beyond the purely nominal take suggested by Robert Keohane: ​“What is distinctive about multilateralism is not merely that it coordinates national policies in groups of three or more states, but that it does so on the basis of certain principles ordering the relations among those states.” Ruggie said that a belief in ​“diffuse reciprocity” – or that cooperation will be repaid in the long run – is a critical precondition for multilateralism. The present malaise of multilateralism is to a significant degree based on an erosion of trust, which weakens diffuse reciprocity and leads to conflicts over the meaning of key norms such as sovereignty.