Dylan Geraets

Global governance through trade: an introduction

It has become a commonplace to say that the multilateral institutions which have been set up since the end of the Second World War are currently facing a severe crisis. After the end of the Cold War, everything had looked so promising: an era of international cooperation dawned, in which the United Nations (UN) received a new boost; a great number of multilateral treaties were concluded (from the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol) and important new international institutions saw the light of day (from the World Trade Organization (WTO) to the International Criminal Court). In Europe, the European integration process yielded new highlights, with the Maastricht Treaty’s creation of a European Union (EU or Union), which deepened the internal integration through the gradual implementation of an Economic and Monetary Union, and made the EU a more cohesive international actor, pursuing a set of norms and values on a global scale (Wouters et al., 2012). However, the optimism of the 1990s seems to have ceded to the pessimism of the new millennium. With the emergence of powerful new players with very specific characteristics like China, India and Brazil (Keukeleire and Hooijmaaijers, 2014), reinforced by the global financial crisis and the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area, we seem to have evolved from the bipolarity of the Cold War, over the unipolarity of the 1990s, to some kind of multipolarity or, according to some, interpolarity (Grevi, 2009), in which both Europe and multilateral organizations are confronted with significant challenges. The multilateral system is facing severe challenges, with regard to the negotiation of new rules and the enforcement of existing rules. First,