Plurilateralism and Free Trade Agreements

Plurilateralism has often been discussed as an alternative to multilateral trade agreements concluded through single undertaking/Uruguay Round-style trade negotiations. However, single undertaking-style multilateral trade liberalization is no longer a feasible approach to sustained progress in international trade liberalization, and as such, plurilateralism should not be compared to this conceptualization of multilateral trade liberalization. Plurilateralism should instead be assessed alongside the primary method of trade liberalization of the past 20+ years - free trade agreements (FTAs). This assessment is particularly salient now, when the combination of events such as Brexit, COVID-19 and Russia's invasion of Ukraine with the ever-increasing urgency to combat climate change, have given rise to repudiations of the Washington Consensus model of trade liberalization in favor of more State involvement and in pursuit of broader goals, as illustrated by the Cornwall Consensus. Meanwhile, although even single topic WTO multilateral negotiations have struggled to conclude, most WTO members are participating in plurilateral Joint Statement Initiative negotiations, and significant experimentation with inclusivity provisions, climate initiatives and digital trade regulation, among other focuses, is occurring outside the WTO in FTAs and non-WTO plurilateral endeavors. This article demonstrates that the WTO tools available are inadequate to operationalize international economic cooperation to achieve modern objectives and perversely make it easier for Members to form discriminatory external agreements rather than internal inclusive ones such as the JSIs. It also discusses possible next steps for JSIs given the challenges in incorporating them into the WTO.