Future analysts, trying to understand how the institutional carapace of the neoliberal global trading regime crumbled at the beginning of the twenty-first century, will be tempted to start with the Brexit/Trump era. But Boris Johnson and Donald Trump entered the scene late in the process. Others may point to the nongovernmental organizations that were elevated to global fame by the “Battle in Seattle” in 1999. But the ability of civil society to disrupt the institutional machinery of neoliberalism was only episodic. Kristen Hopewell’s meticulously researched, analytically lucid new book directs our attention to the complex agendas of a different set of actors: a group of politically and economically savvy international negotiators representing countries with newfound economic and ideological bargaining power: Brazil, China, and India.
Hopewell’s analysis is more than a cogent interpretation of a particular episode of struggles over trade rules. It gives us a foundation for revitalizing stale debates concerning how to think about geopolitical conflicts over the rules of the international political economy. The conflicts the author chronicles are not between “free traders” and “protectionists” or “nationalists” and “globalists.” Instead, they are conflicts among national actors who construct and defend negotiating positions that weave together “free trade” and “protectionist” elements to reflect their comparative advantage in different sectors. That the United States and other developing countries construct their definitions of what constitutes free trade to maximize the interests of the capital based in their countries is not news to researchers on global trade rules. Shifting the focus to the interaction of Brazil, China, and India with the traditionally dominant economic powers offers a fresh vantage point.
The author makes it clear that condemnations of the emerging powers as being “anti-free trade” are primarily self-serving political rhetoric. Negotiators from the emerging powers did not challenge the World Trade Organization and the “rules of the game” proposed in the Doha Round because they were opposed to free trade. To the contrary, as efficient exporters in different sectors, they had gained a stake in free trade and wanted to take advantage of the WTO’s formal commitment to an open trading system. Discovering that they could sometimes be the beneficiaries of free trade made these countries unwilling to allow the traditional dominant powers to impose their own self-serving definition of the rules that constituted “free trade.”
The second step in Hopewell’s analysis reflects the national-global, multilevel character of her research. It is an important complement to her proposition that the emerging powers are free traders in the same way that the traditionally dominant powers are. By looking carefully at the roles of Brazil, China, and India in global trade and their bargaining positions, she is able to show that their own specifications of the idea of “free trade,” while they come closer to reflecting the general interests of the Global South, are, like the positions of the traditional powers, also derived from their own national interests. While it was to their political advantage to portray themselves as the instruments of the economic agenda of the Global South, they play this role only insofar as the general agendas of the Global South are consistent with the specific agendas of their own politically important domestic groups.
The contrasting cases of Brazil and India illustrate the point. India is happy to support free trade in services, but defends its agricultural sector fiercely against the threats posed by openness to imports. Brazil became the hero of the Global South by winning WTO victories against the European Union sugar subsidies and U.S. cotton subsidies that disadvantaged agriculturalists from the Global South. Brazil’s ability to win this victory was derived from its willingness to take a politically audacious position, but it also depended on the confidence of Brazilian private agribusinesses that they would be major beneficiaries from a victory, and on their consequent willingness to marshal full-scale technical support in the negotiations (pp. 112–17). Not surprisingly, the distribution of eventual benefits was tilted toward agribusiness interests rather than poor cotton farmers in Benin or Chad. In short, while the political successes of the emerging powers may redound to a certain extent to the Global South as a whole, they continue to reflect domestic national interests for these new actors.
Hopewell demonstrates why an understanding of national political and economic dynamics is essential for grounding an analysis of negotiating conflicts in the WTO. At the same time, her analysis provides a springboard for thinking about the institutional future of the global political economy as a whole.
One way of thinking about the decay of global neoliberal institutions is as a case of the evaporation of hegemony in the Gramscian sense of hegemony as applied to the global system by Robert Cox, Giovanni Arrighi, and others (pp. 27–28). Hegemony in this sense is more effective and less costly to maintain than simple domination. The ability to exert coercive power (domination) is part of hegemony, but hegemony requires, in addition, that the global agendas of dominant nations be credibly perceived by less powerful nations as delivering positive externalities and thereby serving a more general interest.
The United States (supported by its allies) dominated the global political economy in the second half of the twentieth century, but it also exercised a substantial degree of hegemony. The double myth that global institutions were, in fact, delivering nationally neutral “free markets” and that these free markets maximized the returns to all players was contested but also accepted in surprisingly large measure. Hopewell demonstrates how the erosion of domination undermines hegemony, reinforcing in turn the erosion of domination. The evaporation of hegemony sets the stage for even the leader of the dominant power to abandon the shared mythology and thereby give up whatever positive externalities the system might have delivered, increasing instability and the cost of governing the system.
Reflecting on the evaporation of hegemony makes China’s place in Hopewell’s analysis particularly interesting. She underlines that China was forced to give up a great deal to be accepted as a member of the system of neoliberal global governance. She also points out that while China has more actual economic leverage than either India or Brazil, it has used its leverage in a quieter way in the course of struggles over the WTO, eschewing the role of “rabble-rouser” and avoiding rhetoric that would draw additional attention to the massive effects of its manufactured exports.
Reading Hopewell’s Chapter 6 on China, one cannot help thinking that it sounds like the behavior of a country exploring the possibilities of constructing hegemony. Even if this is true, there is, of course, no reason to believe that even the most sophisticated strategy can surmount the chaos likely to ensue as the current system of hegemony declines in the direction of ineffectual efforts at domination. Nonetheless, the author’s fertile insights into a path that might lead in the direction of a new hegemony nicely complements her analysis of the decay of the existing system. Regardless of how the uncertain future of global governance institutions plays out in the coming decades, carefully perusing Hopewell’s brilliant Breaking the WTO should be part of the preparation of anyone hoping to understand the current bases of future trajectories.
