Kristen Hopewell

The characterization of the US as a liberal hegemon seeking to uphold free-market capitalism against the illiberal state capitalism of China and other emerging powers has become commonplace, along with the attendant notion that American economic openness has been exploited by the unfair trade practices of other states. Given their dominance in US political discourse and role in shaping contemporary policy-including fueling Trump's trade wars and aggressive unilateral trade actions against all of the US's major trading partners, his attacks on the WTO, and talk of a "new Cold War" between the US and China-these claims are in need of far greater scrutiny. In this article, I challenge the stark dichotomy frequently drawn between American "free-market capitalism" and the "state capitalism" of its emerging challengers, arguing that this forms part of a strategic narrative deployed for political purposes, including

Agriculture has been a key issue of North-South struggle at the WTO. Emerging powers like China, India and Brazil have portrayed themselves as leaders of the Global South, crusading to make the trading system fairer for developing countries. This article analyzes three cases – the cotton dispute, subsidies and public stockholding – that have been at the center of WTO negotiations and dispute settlement on agriculture since the collapse of the Doha Round. While presenting themselves as champions of the developing world, I show that the emerging powers have been advancing their own interests, often at the expense of other developing countries.

President Trump is widely seen as instigating a dramatic reversal of 70 years of US trade policy and abdicating the American hegemon's traditional leadership role in the multilateral trading system. Trump has threatened to withdraw the US from the WTO, abandoned trade multilateralism for aggressive unilateral actions that are in blatant violation of WTO rules, and jeopardized the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism by blocking appointments to its Appellate Body. Trump's policies are commonly attributed to the surge of populist anti-trade sentiment under his presidency. As this article shows, however, both the crisis in the multilateral trading system and the American hegemon's turn away from the WTO-including abandoning multilateral trade negotiations and blocking Appellate Body appointments-originated prior to Trump. This shift in the US orientation towards the multilateral trading system cannot, therefore, solely be attributed to the rise of populism under Trump. It is also a reaction to the decline of the US's institutional power-its power over the core institution and rules governing trade. Amid the rise of China and other emerging powers, the US's ability to dominate global trade governance and write the rules of global trade sharply diminished, leading to an erosion of American support for the multilateral trading system it once led. While realism has fallen out of favour in IPE, understanding recent dynamics in the trading system requires revisiting its core insights.

The existing liberal international economic order was constructed during the era of American hegemony and heavily shaped by US power. How is the rise of China affecting global economic governance? This article analyzes the case of export credit, which has long been considered a highly effective international regulatory regime and an important component of global trade governance. I show that the rise of China is profoundly altering the landscape of export credit and undermining its governance arrangements. State-backed export credit is a key tool of China's development strategy, yet I argue that an explosion in China's use of export credit is eroding the efficacy of existing international rules intended to prevent a competitive spiral of state subsidization via export credit. The case of export credit highlights a fundamental tension between liberal institutions of global governance and the development objectives of emerging powers.

This article shows how China's rise has radically altered the politics of one of the most prominent and controversial issues in the global trading system: agriculture subsidies. Agriculture subsidies depress global prices and undermine the competitiveness and livelihoods of poor farmers, and therefore have been long seen as a symbol of the injustice of the trading system. The issue has traditionally been understood in North-South terms, with developed countries seen as the perpetrators of harm and developing countries as innocent victims. In this article, however, I challenge this prevailing conception of the agricultural subsidies issue, arguing that it is now out of date and no longer corresponds with the emerging reality. A momentous but underappreciated change has taken place, largely beneath the radar of IPE scholarship: China has emerged as the world's largest subsidizer, profoundly transforming the global politics of agricultural subsidies. From a North-South battle, WTO negotiations on agricultural subsidies are now primarily centered on a conflict between the US and China. While reducing subsidies remains a pressing concern for developing countries, efforts to negotiate new and strengthened disciplines at the WTO have been thwarted by an impasse between the two dominant powers.

How are rising powers affecting global governance? This article analyzes their impact on an important but understudied area of global governance at the intersection of trade and environment: export credit. State-backed export credit agencies (ECAs) play a major role in financing large infrastructure and energy projects, particularly in developing countries. Many of these projects carry significant environmental implications, yet there has been little scholarly attention to their governance. Since the 1990s, global governance of the environmental practices of ECAs has been progressively expanded and strengthened via the OECD Arrangement on export credit and Common Approaches for environmental and social due diligence. Recently, however, there has been a dramatic increase in export credit provision by rising powers, such as India and China, who are not members of the OECD nor subject to the Arrangement or Common Approaches. In this article, I argue that existing governance mechanisms have not caught up with the rapidly changing landscape of export credit. Drawing on the case of India's financing for the Rampal coal-fired power plant in Bangladesh, I show that the problem of environmental governance for export credit increasingly extends beyond the advanced-industrialized states of the OECD. In a context where nearly half of all export credit is now provided by countries outside the OECD, I argue, existing governance mechanisms are no longer sufficient. The failure to cover the large and growing volume of export credit provided by the emerging powers represents a major gap in the established system of environmental governance for export credit.

The recent election of President Donald Trump, propelled in part by a surge of anti-trade sentiment that blames “unfair trade” for the current economic and social ills of the United States, has put the future of the US-led liberal international economic order in doubt.  This article argues that, in seeking to criticize Trump’s agenda and the danger it represents, there has been a tendency to fall back on a largely fictitious vision of the past – a romanticized image of the pre-Trump liberal international economic order and the US’s role within it.  In fact, the US’s commitment to liberal principles has always been partial, selective and self-serving, with US leadership experienced by many as coercive rather than benevolent.  In short, in the realm of trade, “America First” is far from new.  Yet, ironically, Trump’s plan to “Make America Great Again” is most likely to do precisely the opposite by accelerating American decline.  If Trump were to follow through with his most extreme threats, such as withdrawing from the WTO and other existing trade agreements, the consequences would be profoundly damaging to the US.

The much hyped rise of the " BRICS " (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) has lately been met with equally fervent declarations of their demise. Amid slowing growth in many of these countries, the prevailing view now appears to be that the rise of the BRICS was little more than an illusion. In this article, however, I contest this assessment by arguing that the emerging powers were never solely, nor most importantly, merely an economic phenomenon. Instead, I show that emerging powers – specifically Brazil, India and China – have become an important political force in the global trading system and had a profound and lasting impact on the World Trade Organization (WTO). Contrary to the widespread assumption that these countries are too diverse to ally, I argue that the emerging powers displayed a remarkable degree of unity and cooperation, working in close concert to successfully challenge the dominance of the US and other established powers. As evidenced by the collapse of the Doha Round, the collective rise of Brazil, India and China substantially disrupted the functioning of one of the core institutions of the liberal economic order created under US hegemony.

India is frequently cast as a troublemaker and blamed for the breakdown of the Doha Round. This article provides a critical re-reading of India’s trade policy and its position in multilateral trade negotiations. It challenges the widespread characterisation of India as a recalcitrant spoiler, intent on derailing trade liberalisation at the WTO. It shows that with the emergence of its highly-competitive, export-oriented services sector, India became one of the leading advocates of global services trade liberalisation in the Doha Round. Yet, not unlike the traditional powers, India’s offensive trade interests are also combined with significant defensive concerns in agriculture.

For most major economies, state-backed export credit is a core element of industrial policy and their strategies to boost exports and economic growth. Surprisingly, however, at a time when its competitors are increasing their use of this policy tool, state-backed export credit has become the subject of a hotly contested political battle in the US. As a result of opposition from the Tea Party, the US Export–Import Bank was forced to halt its lending operations for five months in 2015 and subsequently limited to financing only the smallest transactions. In this article, I show that the disruption of export credit is undermining the competitiveness of key US industrial sectors and encouraging the movement of advanced, high-value-added manufacturing overseas. The case of export credit therefore presents an important puzzle: Why is the US moving in the opposite direction of other states and taking steps that undermine its economic interests? I argue that the internal US attack on export credit is fueled by the prevailing market fundamentalist ideology that has obscured the role of an active state in fostering the US’s economic success. This article demonstrates how the rise of a powerful anti-state movement is hindering the ability of the US to conduct effective industrial policy and maintain its economic primacy in the
face of growing global competitive pressures.

This chapter analyses the case of Brazil to show how its recent development experience both confirms and defies the expectations of Prebisch's theory. Brazil has become one of the largest and most competitive agricultural exporters in the world. This has been translated into political influence on the global stage and enabled it to secure prominent roles in global economic governance. Contrary to Prebisch's expectations, agriculture has provided an important source of economic growth and development. Yet in accordance with Prebisch's theory, technological innovation has played a critical role in Brazil's development – although not in manufacturing but in agriculture.

Brazil has emerged as an agro-export powerhouse: from being a net-agricultural importer and food aid recipient as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, it has now become the world's third largest agricultural exporter, after the US and EU. What is more, Brazil's new role as a major agricultural trader has provided an important foundation for its enhanced status and influence in global economic governance, as an emerging power and one of the BRICS. This paper analyzes how such a remarkable transformation was brought about. I argue that Brazil's emergence as an agricultural powerhouse was the result not of its natural factor endowments, but extensive intervention on the part of the Brazilian state that had the effect of constructing a new comparative advantage. This transformation was propelled by state-driven innovation and related policies that opened up massive new areas of the country to agriculture, enabled it to shift to producing goods in direct competition with the world's dominant agricultural exporters, and generated significant gains in productivity and competitiveness. The irony is that the intention of these policies, initiated in the 1970s, was to foster industrial development in Brazil as part of its import-substitution industrialization program, yet they wound up having precisely the opposite effect – transforming Brazil into one of the world's dominant agricultural powers.

Concerns about the legitimacy and accountability of international institutions have prompted a sizable literature on the potential of civil society to help democratize global economic governance. Attention has primarily focused on the institutional factors impacting civil society participation in global governance. In this article, however, I point to the existence of yet more fundamental barriers operating at the level of discourse. I use critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze the discourse of the World Trade Organization (WTO), focusing on a key text in which it attempts to engage directly with the concerns of civil society, supported by a broad range of additional data sources, including documentary materials, interviews, and observation. Drawing on the case of the WTO, I argue that the discourse of global governance institutions can itself act as an ‘invisible barricade’, preventing the meaningful inclusion of civil society in policy debates and deliberations.

The 1999 Seattle protests, which brought thirty thousand people to the streets in opposition to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and set off a series of other protests against the multilateral economic institutions, helped spark significant academic interest in global civil society and its potential to act as a transformative force in global economic governance.  In this article, however, I argue that many of the civil society actors that have sought to engage with and influence the WTO have been transformed in the process.  They have both become more technocratic and increasingly moved toward advocating positions that accord with the neoliberal trade paradigm.  I draw on Bourdieu’s field theory to explain why and how this transformation has occurred.  I argue that, in order to understand these changes among parts of civil society, we need to see multilateral trade governance as a social field, which civil society actors enter into as they seek to impact outcomes at the WTO.  The case of the WTO challenges existing theories that conceive of global civil society as an exogenous force that acts upon the institutions of global governance, showing instead that global civil society is not in fact independent or autonomous but shaped and influenced by the institution it targets.

New powers, such as China, India and Brazil, are challenging the traditional dominance of the US in the governance of the global economy. It is generally taken for granted that the rise of new powers is simply a reflection of their growing economic might. In this article, however, I challenge this assumption by drawing on the case of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to show that the forces driving the rise of new powers are more heterogeneous and complex than suggested by a simple economic determinism. I argue that these countries have in fact taken different paths to power: while China's rise has been more closely tied to its growing economic might, the rise of Brazil and India has been driven primarily by their mobilization and leadership of developing country coalitions, which enabled them to exercise influence above their economic weight. One important result is that Brazil and India have assumed a more aggressive and activist position in WTO negotiations than China and played a greater role in shaping the agenda of the Doha Round. Thus, although the new powers are frequently grouped together (as the ‘BRICs’, for example), this masks considerable variation in their sources of power and behaviour in global economic governance.

The existing international economic order has been heavily shaped by US power and the US has been a key driver of globalisation and neoliberal economic restructuring, prompting speculation about whether the rise of new developing country powers could rupture the current trajectory of neoliberal globalisation. This paper analyses the case of Brazil at the World Trade Organization (WTO), a core institution in global economic governance. In the last decade, Brazil successfully waged two landmark trade disputes against the US and EU and created a coalition of developing countries – the G20 – which brought an end to the dominance of the US and EU at the WTO and made their trade policies a central target of the Doha Round. Brazil's activism has been widely hailed as a major victory for developing countries. However, I argue that rather than challenging the neoliberal agenda of the WTO, Brazil has emerged as one of the most vocal advocates of free market globalisation and the push to expand and liberalise global markets. I show that Brazil's stance has been driven by the rise of its export-oriented agribusiness sector. This case demonstrates that business actors from the Global South are becoming significant new protagonists in global economic governance; they are taking the tools created by the states and corporations of the Global North – in this case, the WTO and its neoliberal discourse – and turning them against their originators. At the same time, their interests are being wrapped in and advanced through a discourse of development and social justice and a strategic mobilisation of the politics of the North-South divide.

This paper examines the Brazilian case in an effort to shed light on how state-business relations have been transformed in the contemporary era of globalization. Brazil has long been considered the archetype of “dependent development”, having served as the inspiration for the classic theory of the relationship between states and capital in the semi-peripheral states of the developing world. Since the theory of dependent development was initially formulated in the 1970s, however, both the Brazilian political economy and the global context in which it is situated have changed dramatically. The paper shows how the emergence of a highly competitive export-oriented agribusiness sector in Brazil has prompted the expansion and internationalization of domestic capital, leading to the emergence of an independent, private sector lobby with considerable influence on the Brazilian state. Driven by the rise of Brazilian agribusiness, the state and capital have allied together to aggressively pursue the expansion of markets for Brazilian exports, specifically through dispute settlement and negotiations at the WTO. These findings challenge conventional understandings of state-business relations in emerging economies such as Brazil.

The US-China trade war instigated by President Trump has thrown the multilateral trading system into a crisis. Drawing on vast interview and documentary materials, Hopewell shows how US-China conflict had already paralyzed the system of international rules and institutions governing trade. The China Paradox-the fact that China is both a developing country and an economic powerhouse-creates significant challenges for global trade governance and rule-making. While China demands exemptions from global trade disciplines as a developing country, the US refuses to extend special treatment to its rival. The implications of this conflict extend far beyond trade, impeding pro-development and pro-environment reforms of the global trading system. As one of the first analyses of the implications of US-China rivalry for the governance of global trade, this book is crucial to our understanding of China's impact on the global trading system and on the liberal international economic order. on this title 30 June 2021 Expires

The world economic order has been upended by the rise of the BRICS nations and the attendant decline of the United States' international influence. In Breaking the WTO, Kristen Hopewell provides a groundbreaking analysis of how these power shifts have played out in one of the most important theaters of global governance: the World Trade Organization.

Hopewell argues that the collapse of the Doha Round negotiations signals a crisis in the American-led project of neoliberal globalization. The U.S. has historically pressured other countries to open their markets, while maintaining its own protectionist policies. Over the course of the Doha negotiations, however, China, India, and Brazil challenged American hypocrisy in the realm of trade. They did so not because they rejected the multilateral trading system, but because they embraced neoliberal rhetoric and sought to lay claim to its benefits. By demanding that members of the WTO live up to the principles of "free trade," these developing states caused the negotiations to collapse under their own contradictions. Breaking the WTO probes the tensions between the WTO's liberal principles and the underlying reality of power politics, exploring what the Doha conflict tells us about the current and coming balance of power in the global economy.