What's wrong with Pascal Lamy?

What's wrong with Pascal Lamy?

Alan Oxley, former Australian Ambassador to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT - the precedessor to the World Trade Organization - WTO) doesn't think Pascal Lamy would be a good choice for head of the WTO: "Who Will Lead WTO?".

"It is also being put around that a Frenchman in charge of the WTO would be devilishly clever... In the "set a thief to catch a thief" vein, the argument is that a former French senior official will know best how to deal with the French. The Doha Round is running behind time and agreement is needed on the issue the Europeans have most trouble moving on - agricultural protection...

The whole idea is just too clever by half, just too European. The first flaw is that the French have not been the main problem in Europe on agricultural reform for at least a decade. Chirac always makes the biggest political play against trade liberalization (it always earns votes at home), but it is Germany that is the problem. Germany has many more small and inefficient farmers than France. Furthermore Lamy's background is in trade, not agricultural policy. In Europe, agricultural ministries call the policy shots.

But there is a bigger and much more serious problem. Lamy is a French socialist. Putting him in charge of the WTO would be like putting the fox in charge of the fowl house. Lamy did a dutiful job arguing in Europe the importance of the multilateral trading system, but you will not find one speech where he extols the virtue and wonder of free trade. All gut free traders do this. They are believers. Lamy is first and foremost a Eurocrat.

Instead he has made horrible speeches (they are all on his website) about how the multilateral trading system needs to be adjusted so it can advance ideas and values that are fundamentally inimical to the free market - creating the right to use the system to advance command and control environmental policies and to lever access to markets to require countries to adopt labor standards...

In Lamy's final year as commissioner he issued an astonishing post modernist tract arguing that at times, each member of the WTO needed the "room" to reflect "collective preference" in society to ignore basic WTO trade rules (by blocking imports Greens did not like and ignoring basic rules like treating every trading partner on equal terms). "

Of the others, Oxley says that only Carlos Perez del Castillo of Uruguay is a free trader.

Peter Gallagher reviewed a key Lamy speech this past fall: "Using trade barriers to safeguard 'values' ".

Comments

[r4i sdhc]

Hi,
As the world emerges from one of the worst economic crises in recent history, there is need for an organization that can provide measures of global governance. But that is a difficult task, raising issues of distance, legitimacy and power-sharing. Pascal Lamy, Director-General of the World Trade Organization, outlines the lessons that the world can learn from Europe.