Regionalism and the Problem of Representation in the WTO

The WTO’s system of consensus-based decision making has come under increasing stress in recent years, especially in the wake of high-profile breakdowns in negotiations at the Seattle and Cancun ministerial meetings, culminating in the suspension of the Doha Round altogether in July 2006.This chapter sets out to evaluate proposals to address the problem of large membership representation in the WTO by moving towards a formal system of regional groupings in “greenroom” meetings. Such meetings, in which a limited number of WTO members are invited to attend, have developed as a result of the unwieldy nature of plenary meetings of the WTO’s 151 member countries. The European Union is currently the only example of formal regional representation inthe WTO, and provides a possible model for improving bargaining efficiency...