Multilateralism is in Crisis

There is a crisis in multilateralism. No major new binding rules relating to international commerce have come into force in more than 20 years. Demands by some nations for rules in new areas are not being met. The negotiations in the WTO of trade rules and the negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to devise rules restricting the annual emissions of greenhouse gases have not been concluded. The US-led unipolar structure of the world economy has ended. The world is now multipolar. The biggest change in relative economic size is the emergence of a large and rapidly growing Chinese economy. Equally important, the US-led intellectual consensus, known as the Washington Consensus, that inspired post-Second World War multilateralism has ended. In the absence of a common or shared vision of the gains from binding multilateral rules for the world economy, multilateralism is stagnating.