Ideas, interests, and institutionalization: “trade in services” and the Uruguay Round

Abstract

After much deliberation, member governments of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) agreed to pursue a new regime for international trade in services as part of the Uruguay Round negotiations begun in 1986. The talks have produced a draft agreement—the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)—which, if ratified, could have important implications for the world economy. But when the question of trade in services first arose, most governments did not understand the issues or know whether a multilateral agreement would be to their advantage. If anything, their existing national interests and institutions seemed contrary to the goal of liberalizing trade in services. This article argues that an epistemic community of services experts played a crucial role in clarifying and framing the complex issue of trade in services and placing it on the global agenda. Through their analyses of the services issues and their interactions with policymakers, the epistemic community members were able to convince governments that international services transactions had common trade properties and that the liberalization of services through removal of nontariff barriers was potentially advantageous to developing as well as developed countries. In addition to fostering international negotiations within the GATT forum and helping states redefine their interests, the community members were instrumental in specifying a range of policy options to be considered. However, once governments understood their interests and domestic constituencies were mobilized, their policy choices were influenced more by power and bargaining dynamics than by continuing, direct epistemic community influence.

Instrument constituencies and epistemic community theory

“…In building groups with research interests in academia and policy institutes, placing actors committed to arms control throughout the US executive, and populating the US system with its members, the EC created an IC around the arms control idea. In the trade case, the Anglo-American EC persuaded the US government, which placed the issue on the problem agenda of GATT and used the threat of bilateral agreements to pressurize the other delegations (Drake & Nicolaïdis, 1992).…”

Paradigm shift in the global IP regime: The agency of academics

“…Yet, few case-studies have shown that networks of economists can also act like epistemic communities and mobilize their socially recognized expertise to influence policymakers (Drake and Nicolaïdis 1992;Ikenberry 1992;Verdun 1999;Chwieroth 2007;Kogut and Macpherson 2011). Unfortunately, studies applying the concept of epistemic communities to other fields of knowledge remain few and far between.…”

The EU-Thailand Relations : Tracing the Patterns of New Bilateralism

“…30 For constructivists, the term 'diffusion' is in fact far-reaching not only because norms but also strategies, beliefs, organizational models and practices can spread throughout the population (see also Barnett 2005). 31 The concepts of epistemic communities have been applied to a wide range of studies that investigates efforts dealing with environmental protection, the international management of whaling, the international food aid regime, the institutionalization of trade in services or the politics of banking regulation (see, for details , Haas 1992b;Peterson 1992;Hopkins 1992;Drake and Nicolaidis 1992;Kapstein 1992, respectively). 32 Constructivists provide a deeper meaning for 'learning' insofar as in the process of foreign policy making, 'learning' not only embodies -as held by conventional theorists -a state's adaptation to relevant constraints and imitation of successful models, but rather a dynamics of problem solving and communicative acts (Ruggie 1998: 868).…”