After Seattle: Free Trade and the WTO

After the debacle in Seattle at the WTO Ministerial meeting in 1999, when the member countries failed to launch a new round of multilateral trade negotiations, new challenges to both free trade and the WTO have acquired importance. The former can be met by confronting the conceptual confusions, unfounded fears and policy-design sloppiness that afflict many of the demands of the critics. The latter, however, require changes in the WTO's functioning. But a distinction must be made among three areas: trade negotiations, the secretariat's work, and the dispute settlement mechanism. Each requires a different treatment.     

海盗的发明——自助餐

北欧,斯堪的纳维亚半岛。几个世纪以前,这里是著名的海盗窝。每当一次出海凯旋,海盗们总会大摆筵席大肆庆祝。但,对海盗来说,当时就餐的繁文缛节只是有所耳闻,他们不习惯甚至不了解,相反,他们要的只是尽兴!于是撇开各种对束手缚脚,到摆满食物的桌子上自选、自取享用的方式,大受欢迎。最初这被上流社会排斥的就餐方式,在18世纪被法国得到兴起,并且迅速在欧美各国流传开来。之后的西餐业者将它文明化和规范化,便有了今天的＂自助餐＂,有时,也称冷餐会。     

The Liberal Party,Free Trade and the 1841 Election

It is a paradox that the Liberal Party's electoral defeat in 1841 attested to its underlying strength and vitality. This article focuses on the impact on party unity of the free trade measures advocated by the ministry in the months preceding its fall. The Liberal Party's bold electoral platform antagonised its protectionist MPs, a group previously overlooked in the historiography, but fell short of the demands of its radical wing for political reform. While all the ingredients for fragmentation existed, unity prevailed. Protestations of loyalty to the leadership could be heard from the mouths of Liberal MPs of all shades, from stalwart protectionists who coalesced around the ministry on traditional foreign policy grounds through to the most fervent radicals who celebrated its ‘new’ direction. Such findings of cohesion contradict accounts which have hitherto viewed the 1841 electoral defeat as evidence of the party's inchoateness. Indeed, this article shifts the historiographical narrative away from addressing why the Liberals lost to the more pertinent issue of why the losses suffered were not greater. In answering that question, both the sensitivity with which the financial agenda was presented by ministers and the flexibility of different sections of the Liberal Party in interpreting and presenting the free trade measures to the electorate are underlined. Above all, Lord John Russell is rehabilitated as a ‘popular’ leader and his importance in the development of the nascent Liberal Party is unearthed.     

Antichrist's Revolution: Some Anglican Apocalypticists in the Age of the French Wars

The article deals with the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century development of early modern English apocalyptic thought which permitted the identification of the Enlightenment and its political manifestations in Revolutionary France with the prophesied Antichrist. The importance of this phenomenon is discussed and a framework for further discussion of it, taken from general theories of apocalyptic, is provided. However, the article is chiefly concerned to go beyond existing, inadequate explanations of the phenomenon, which advert merely to the French wars and certain contemporary conspiracy theories, and seeks its origins and relationships in wider currents of British thought in the period and before. Notably, reference is made to the concern of the insular Counter-Enlightenment with rationalist christological heresy, the continuing vigour of the English tradition of apocalyptic exegesis and to contemporary renewed theological and pastoral emphasis on supernatural and dogmatic religion. However, popular thought is also adverted to and the phenomenon is situated within the history of the ideology of the British ancien régime. Throughout, the normality and acceptability of this apocalyptic thought in its contemporary setting is emphasized, implicitly suggesting a need to restrain historiographical emphasis on modernizing patterns of thought in treatments of the period.     

Free Trade Agreements and the Neo-Liberal Economic Paradigm: Economic,Ecological, and Moral Consequences

Abstract

Since signing and implementing the North American Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in the early 1990s, the United States has pursued other free trade agreements with nations in Latin America and Asia. The premise undergirding FTAs is that trade liberalization within the neo-liberal global economy produces economic growth and development among all parties, and reduces poverty in poor nations. We examine arguments of proponents of free trade and the neo-liberal economy— particularly those of Martin Wolf, author of Why Globalization Works— to test these claims. We explore alternatives that center on norms of ecological sustainability and social justice, holding these two as inseparable. The central moral question of how to achieve needed socioeconomic development in the Global South in ways that are both ecologically sustainable and socially just frames our analysis. We conclude by proposing five principles for an alternative, more sustainable and equitable economic paradigm.