Trade, Competition Law and the WTO : reconciling the Universal Aspirations of the Liberalised Trading System

Details

Supervisors

Coppens, Philippe

Faculty

Faculté de droit et de criminologie

Degree label

Master [120] en droit

Abstract

ABSTRACT International trade law has for a long time struggled with the idea of incorporating competition rules into the international trading system to help harness markets that transcend state borders. From the very inception of the triumvirate that sought to break away from the mercantilist and imperialist aspirations that brought about great suffering all over the world throughout the early twentieth century, there has always been debate about the appropriate form of international economic regulation needed to restore, secure and maintain peace and prosperity for all. Though this objective has meant and still means different things depending on what part of the globe one is situated, the undeniable desirability of such a mechanism is still to be matched to its feasibility in delivering on the task. It is a challenge that requires a strong sense of community and solidarity which is currently lacking in contemporary international relations, remarkably more so in international economic law, where instead, ideas about interpersonal comparisons of welfare are shunned and replaced by ‘more’ structured ideas bound in rational economic considerations based on efficiency rather than improving the net aggregate expected welfare of the members of our global society. ‘Ideas’, O’Brien and Williams (2010) say, ‘are thoughts about how the human, human-made and natural worlds do or should operate.[…] At their most general, ideas are thoughts or mental pictures about the world works’. I contend that because ideas are out-there to be discovered, their discovery is best explained as a charitable act of our natural environment. Given that they do not come bound by any priorly defined inkling, their use ought to strive to replicate the original charitable act that is at the source of their discovery, with due regard to the equal proportion by which they are made accessible to all humans who share the natural environment within which they inhere. Our social organisational arrangements, abound with aggregations of ideas and knowledge that rather seek only to materialise concepts that suit a few and as a result, are ever in search of balance. Markets, just like governments, are prone to failures and therefore need regulations to help embed then into the societies that partake in them. This is what is currently lacking in our global liberal economy for which reason I posit that a multilateral competition agreement, preferably within the WTO, is vital to our common peaceful subsistence - as promised by liberal theories.