Why governments have failed on global trading

The communication campaigns had multiple layers that needed decoding. For the close stakeholders - the transnational corporations - the message was clear. Governments said “we will do everything we can to make this work”. For the more distant stakeholders - citizens - the message was equally clear, but less able to be understood.

Governments said “we will do out best to apply your will to our policies - the will that says we want to help people in the developing world living in poverty and being torn apart by civil and other wars - but in the end we are only one government”.

“We can’t achieve much if we don’t get the support of the rest of the developed world”.

This message filtered downwards to be interpreted by citizens as a potential threat to their own well-being.

So they decided that while it was important to want to help people in the developing world, it could happen only if their government received the support it needed from the rest of the developed world.

After all, no one expects that living standards in the developed world should drop to achieve some success in raising the living standards of those in the developing world.

The position now is one in which we find national governments in developed countries attempting to argue two competing ideas: that globalisation of trade is still a good thing, and that regionalisation of trade is also a good thing.

The rhetoric of the global, however, is being outflanked by the actions of governments at regional level.

While the discussion about the potential for global success to be achieved as a policy goal of joint developed-country action, those same countries are rushing about their regions stitching up deals with their neighbours for cross border trade, to the exclusion of those they don’t like.

These actions are not the actions of countries intent upon the development of a global trading system.

They are the actions of public administrators who want to make friends with powerful transnational capital.

They are the actions of organisations, established to administer public goods and services, that have no idea how to move outside that frame and into a global sphere in which the rules of the game are so different that they might as well have been written by Martians.