The World Trade Organization and the turbulent legacy of international economic law-making in the long twentieth century

In "The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times" (Verso, 1994), Giovanni Arrighi argues that the history of capitalism is a history of cycles of capitalist accumulation dominated by a leading agency of capital accumulation in the form of a state. For Arrighi, every dominant cycle of systemic accumulation is characterised by a signal point when the profits derived from trade become so poor that money is switched from trade to mobile or investment capital. These signal points and their accompanying switches are autumnal and generally inaugurate a period of economic turbulence. They do not, however, spell the immediate end of the dominant regime of capital accumulation. Based on this account, which neatly rolls together a range of significant structural effects, the chapter constructs an argument about the creation and future of the WTO. This analysis of the implications of Arrighi’s work suggests that the current processes of world government formation, including those sustaining the WTO, are unlikely to survive the termination of the US period of dominance. Might this projected death of the WTO mark the moment in which the process of de-colonisation is truly completed?