Leadership, Deliberative Trade Policy, and Civil Society: The Hegelian Approach

In international trade policy, leadership matters a lot, as it is most evident in the recent failure to complete the Doha round. However, there is a lack of efforts to update the theory of trade policy leadership, which mostly continues to be cast in the terms of Kindleberger’s classical theory of hegemonial leadership. This theory does not fit squarely with the new contexts of so-called ‘new trade policy issues’ (environment, standardization, intellectual property rights etc.). The paper develops a new approach based on recent advances in applying principles of Hegel’s philosophy on international relations. Reference to Hegel is a productive endeavour because many contributions to international trade law and institutions are grounded in Kantian views on international order and freedom. To render this philosophical perspective operational in economics, I relate it to Amartya Sen’s recent distinction between ‘transcendental institutionalism’ and ‘realization focused comparisons’ in institutional change, representing the Kantian and the Hegelian viewpoint, respectively; I argue that real-world trade policy is actually a process of ‘realization-focused comparisons’, for which I have coined the term ‘deliberative trade policy’. Then, Hegelian analytical categories such as ‘recognition’ and ‘civil society’ can be applied on analysing trade policy as a process of mutual exchange of market access rights embedded in a global civil society where governments are privileged, but not exclusively relevant actors. I describe the basic institutional structures and the resulting interaction patterns of deliberative trade policy. Against this background, I sketch the role of ‘ideational leadership’. My empirical workhorse is the recent trade policy controversies and unresolved issues in regulating international trade in genetically modified organisms and products in which issues of consumer concerns, radical uncertainty about future consequences of technological change, and regulatory externalities loom large.