Welfare and Democracy on a Global Level: The WTO as a Case Study

Abstract

One aspect of globalization is the shift of the venue of policy-making from the national to the regional and the international arenas. Willingly or grudgingly, national legislatures agree to share policy-making and monitoring powers with regional or international institutions. This has resulted in a process of “legalization of world politics”,² as outcomes at the supranational level are shaped less by the informal and opaque bargaining among governments that characterized inter-governmental dealings so far, but increasingly more by structured decision-making processes at the supranational prescriptive, monitoring and dispute-resolution levels. US laws aimed at protecting endangered species,’ Canadian laws aimed at protecting Canadian air quality,’ or French laws restricting trade in products containing asbestos fibers’ are being challenged, reviewed, and sometimes rejected as violations of supranational norms by international or regional institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

I thank Orit Dubrovsky for excellent research assistance.

See the special issue of 54 International Organization, Summer 2000.