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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
The Coincidence In Time of The Commemoration of the First World War and the end of the negotiations of the Uruguay round of the GATT Treaty has not only a clear symbolic but also a chastening meaning. Above all, even above its economic significance, it has a political meaning already familiar to the readers of this journal, but which now can and must be fully explained as we look at the 550 pages of text signed by the 117 members of the new World Trade Organization (WTO).
Now, of course, before we take it for granted that everything has been finalized we should realize that, on the one hand, the treaty must be ratified (like the Maastricht Treaty) and that there may be some doubts about President Clinton's power to persuade the irate Hollywood celluloid-makers and about Premier Ministre Balladur's ability to influence unconvinced French farmers that the treaty was such a great French success, not to speak of the reservations of many developing countries.
1 Alone among learned journals of politics, and long before the media (with the exception of the Financial Times) we paid much attention to these negotiations which at the end reached the headlines because of their ‘cliff‐hanging’ sensationalist appearance. Thus at the end of 1990, after the collapse of the Brussels conference of December of that year we sounded the alarm‐bell of the economic and political consequences of this set‐back. In our Winter issue of 1991 I wrote that the nations of the world ‘… should have finalized the Uruguay Round with a treaty which, for the first time in history would establish the few universal rules of freedom of trade required by interdependence, instead of leaving the negotiations, for the “protection” of their “national interests”, to continue in a veritable Tower of Babel of incoherence’. In our issue of Summer 1991 we published a complete study by (now Sir) Nicholas Bayne on CATT and the Uruguay round negotiation. Later, in the issue of Winter 1992 I wrote, discussing the diversionary style of media (news) that: ‘My order of priority of the current news in November, December 1992 would be Number One GA J 7’ and in the Spring issue in the list of political developments and events of the last three months, priority should be given to Number One GATT.