Lecture by Prof. Karen J. Alter

The remarkable growth of international trade in goods and services over the past four decades was accompanied by another transformation: the development of increasingly specific legalised international agreements. The WTO and its Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) is often pointed to as the apotheosis of the trend toward “harder” legalisation of international arrangements in the realm of trade. The governance of the international monetary system, by contrast, became less legalised; international monetary agreements today are mostly ad hoc, non-binding “pledges” rather than deep contracts with strong obligations. This difference is puzzling because the two issues are inherently linked: gains won in trade negotiations can be undercut by currency devaluations, and currency manipulation is a widely acknowledged problem.

What explains the divergent legalisation trajectories in the governance of the international trade and monetary systems? The paper presented presented in this lecture —the theory chapter of an in-progress book— defines key concepts and develops an international legalisation benchmark for studying the divergent trends in regulating global trade and money. Our larger objective is to understand when and why states decide to create binding and enforceable global economic rules that apply differentially to some states but not others. The paper also explain the book’s mode of investigation which divides our analysis of legalisation choices into historical periods, so that we can investigate why long discussed proposals become newly interesting, and how major structural changes – the proliferation of new states in the wake of decolonisation, the rise of newly industrialised economies, the relative decline of American economic and political dominance, and the advent of financial globalisation – have influenced the processes of international legalisation in the trade and monetary realms.

REGISTRATION & PROGRAMME