The World Trade Organization is headquartered, like its predecessor, the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trades, in the placid Swiss city of Geneva. These days, however, the WTO is more often associated with Seattle, Washington, and the images that come to mind when the organization is mentioned aren't bureaucrats, lakeside cafes and customs forms, but anarchists, tear-gas-filled streets and shattered store windows.
It has been a difficult childhood for the WTO. The organization was scarred at birth by a bruising fight over its first director general; efforts to launch a new trade round have stalled; delegates and representatives have become public enemy No. 1 for an assortment of protesters against globalization who take to the streets at every meeting of international economic institutions.
Going by appearances, the enemies of globalism are in the ascendant. The survival of the liberal, free-trade paradigm better known as the Washington consensus is by no means assured. That explains the mood in Brunei, where leaders of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum met this week to reinvigorate their group and push the integration agenda -- but ever so cautiously for fear of seeming indifferent to the social costs of globalization. No wonder the statement from the ministers' meeting supporting a new round of trade talks was sprinkled with phrases like "the importance of supporting the poor and vulnerable." When it comes to world trade and the WTO, everyone is walking softly these days.