Jose E. Alvarez

The WTO as Linkage Machine

The contributors to this symposium, both principal authors and commentators, ably demonstrate that there are indeed “overarching constructs” linking the subdisciplines of international law. All of the writers here assume that linkage issues arise for the World Trade Organization, as they have with respect to a number of other intergovernmental organizations, precisely because centralized, quasi-autonomous institutions maybe relatively effective vehicles for the promotion of interstate cooperation between rational, egoistic state actors. All of them assume, as scholars of international relations and economists have long recognized, that many international regimes are linkage machines by their very nature. It is important to recall why this is so in order to consider when or how an organization’s attempts at linkage may fail.

International Organizations: Then and Now

International organizations (or IOs)—intergovernmental entities established by treaty, usually composed of permanent secretariats, plenary assemblies involving all member states, and executive organs with more limited participation—are a twentieth-century phenomenon having little in common with earlier forms of institutionalized cooperation, including those in the ancient world. The story of how, shortly after the turn of the last century, the Euro-American lawyers that dominated the field of international law sought to transcend the chaos of war by “moving to institutions” has been told elsewhere and needs no repeating here. David Kennedy, Martti Koskenniemi, and David Bederman, among others, have described the disparate individuals, separated by nationality, juridical philosophy, and competing “idealist”/“realist” schools of thought, who nevertheless shared a messianic, quasi-religious, and coherent “internationalist sensibility” that sought to institutionalize multilateral diplomacy with a view to promoting civilization and progress. Kennedy locates the move to international organization in turn-of-the-century reformist aspirations for parliamentary, administrative, and judicial mechanisms that, in the Victorian language of the day, would convert “passion into reason.” By the time this Journal was established, the Congress of Vienna’s concert system had provided a model for an incipient (albeit only periodic) pseudo-parliament; diverse public administrative unions and river commissions suggested the possibilities for international administration and even the interstate pooling of funds; and the Permanent Court of Arbitration presaged an international judiciary.