Negotiations in the World Trade Organization: Design and Performance by Michal Parizek

Author:Michal Parizek [Parizek, Michal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Globalization, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780429748752
Google: lzn3DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 49781316
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-10-10T11:26:38+00:00

4 Complexity problems

Multilateral negotiations are characterized by a tension between the effective need for the multiplicity of interests to be represented, and the need to manage the complexity of the negotiations. On the one hand, international negotiations need to be complex. They need to include many, possibly all, of the members of an IO to maintain the legitimacy of its decision-making process. And they need to deal with multiple issues to enable linkages and trade-offs where positions on individual dimensions are not compatible. On the other hand, this leads to the burgeoning of the negotiation complexity and, in turn, to the need to manage this complexity and gradually reduce it, over the course of the negotiations.1

For any political process, it is essential that all relevant interests are articulated. In chapter 3, I have discussed the problems of interest articulation in the Doha Round. At the same time, in political process it is necessary that the interests get, in due course, aggregated into a manageable number of coherent negotiable positions. The complexity and variety of the different actors’ positions needs to be reduced through mechanisms of aggregation. One key mechanism of interest aggregation in multilateral negotiations is negotiations groupings and coalitions, formal and informal alliances among members with similar interests. In domestic political systems, interests are aggregated by interest groups and by political parties who represent citizens with shared views on political problems. In international political system and in negotiations this interest aggregation function is performed by groupings of states that emerge over the negotiations to defend their shared interests with more power. In this chapter, I study how the interest aggregation function is performed in the Doha talks.

I show that the way coalitions have worked in the Doha talks is severely dysfunctional. Due to the inter-governmental modus of interest representation in the Doha talks, and due to the multiplicity of areas joined in the single undertaking of the negotiations, member governments have incentives to create coalitions that resemble, in their functioning, interest groups rather than political parties. They form coalitions of particular claims, not of comprehensive positions. In the course of the negotiations, these coalitions then often dissolve. As such, the coalitions are unable to effectively aggregate their members’ interests in a way that would reduce the complexity of the negotiations.

The chapter is built in the following way. First, I discuss the problem of negotiations complexity—its desirability on the one hand and the need to manage and reduce it on the other hand. Second, I argue that the governmental representation leads to coalitions being formed in a very specific way, oriented at particular claims instead of comprehensive positions. Third, I show how such coalitions tend to dissolve when confronted with the need for trade-offs and issue-linkages in the bargaining process.

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