Will Asia’s push for globalisation be the beacon of light in these dark days of rising protectionism?
It’s a tragic irony that the nation most responsible for shaping the vision of global free trade is the same one intent on destroying it, 70 years later.
Whatever has been exciting you this week, I can lay a safe bet that it was not taking place in Buenos Aires.
As hundreds of trade ministers flew into Argentina from across the world for a World Trade Organisation meeting, marking the 70th anniversary of the creation of the post-World War 2 institutions that began the process of global reconstruction after two massive wars and the 20th century’s worst economic depression, the world’s attention was tuned elsewhere. Such is the indifference or antipathy to any discussion about the huge benefits of global trade liberalisation.
For that tiny band of participants and observers nurturing hopes that the Buenos Aires meeting would bring significant new trade liberalising initiatives, those hopes were unfulfilled, and their disappointments were unheard.
I had nurtured no hopes, but I was disappointed nevertheless. Because this should have been a celebration of all that we have gained from those visionary meetings late in 1947 at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, where 700 delegates from the 44 Allied nations gathered with a single purpose: from the ashes of three decades that had brought the world to the brink of self-destruction, to mould a culture of cooperation that could restore peace, stability and prosperity worldwide.
This was the meeting that fleshed out the Marshall Plan, and laid the foundations for the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank (then called the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development), and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
