Today’s title may be a strange proposition, but hear me out. The World Trade Organization (WTO) was a long time coming. Initially proposed as the International Trade Organization (ITO) at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, the ITO was to be the third leg of stool on which a rules-based international economic system would sit, along with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The latter two got off the ground, but the ITO never made it, largely because the U.S. Senate failed to ratify the Treaty of Havana that would have launched it. Nearly 50 years later, the WTO was founded by consensus as part of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations.
The words “by consensus” reveal where this column is going, and, fair warning, the beginning of a rant. The most important procedural feature of the WTO is the determination to act by consensus. That does not mean unanimity. Not everyone is required to explicitly vote “yes” on a matter, but members must approve or stay silent if consensus is to be reached. The WTO has procedures that permit voting, but they have not been employed. Achieving consensus has always been the operational goal.
The result has been few accomplishments over its 28-year life span. It has produced one major multilateral agreement—the Trade Facilitation Agreement in 2015—and two weeks ago it managed to produce vaccine waiver and fisheries agreements that were far short of their original ambition. Other accomplishments have been plurilateral agreements which have not involved every WTO member.
Trade agreement negotiations have tended to follow a predictable pattern: little progress is made until the last day or two when ministers face a deadline and “hostage-taking” becomes the norm. Members threaten to block progress unless they get what they want, and since any single country can bring down the entire agreement, those threats are credible. Occasionally, the problem children concede a point or two, but if there is a positive result, it is usually well short of what the proponents wanted.
Turning to the United States, one sees similar problems. In Congress, even before the party divisions became as narrow as they are now, both houses were moving away from deciding matters by voting and instead were moving them to the back room to be “worked out” by interested members and their staffs. The result is an informal process where a single legislator can hold up progress on important matters until their particular interests are satisfied. One need look no farther than the current efforts to pass privacy legislation or to resolve the outstanding issues in the China legislation now pending in conference. In both cases, well-positioned representatives or senators have put the brakes on long-overdue actions.
In my view, this is the antithesis of democracy. Rather than resolve issues by voting, which is what the founding fathers intended, we have devolved into seeking consensus. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she doesn’t go to the floor to lose, the result is that important things sometimes have to wait. She is missing the point—operating by de facto consensus is not democracy. It is handing over decisionmaking authority to the biggest obstructionists. Better in my view to go to the floor, win or lose, and move on. One of the reasons Congress’ public opinion rating is persistently lower than the president’s is that people perceive them as not being able to accomplish anything. Actually voting, with the opportunity to offer real amendments, will either produce results or identify more clearly who is responsible for the failure to produce them and in the process will reaffirm our democracy as it was intended to operate.
The executive branch is equally constipated due to a regulatory process that involves lengthy periods of public input and the tendency of Americans to litigate at every opportunity. When talking to foreigners, I often find myself explaining that in the United States anybody can sue anybody for anything—and usually does. The result all too often is a process that is never actually final—there is always another move to enable delay and plenty of people willing to make it. This is an example of the sore loser problem. Nobody likes to lose, but instead of accepting it gracefully and moving on, it is now customary to never give up—to appeal endlessly to higher and higher levels, clogging up the courts and ultimately dumping everything in the lap of the Supreme Court.
All this has produced a failing system of government that is proving itself incapable of dealing with the huge challenges we currently face. Congress has difficulty passing anything, and the executive branch has difficulty implementing anything. This fuels the fire of authoritarianism—people advocating simple solutions to complicated problems.
Part of the solution is to reaffirm the democratic process by abandoning consensus and bringing issues to a vote and resolving them. That means having winners and losers each time there is a vote, and those who lose will no doubt be unhappy, but I think over time that is the path to getting more things done and reaffirming our system of government. The path of consensus takes us down the WTO road, and we know that is not a path to success. End of rant.
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