Knox & Kotiaho: Beyond Competing Liberalisms: The WTO as Class Project

Robert Knox (London School of Economics) & Paavo Kotiaho (Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights) have posted Beyond Competing Liberalisms: The WTO as Class Project (Social and Legal Studies, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Of course, not every mention of 'materialism' yields the same kind of critical insight into the dialectics of historical processes. For all its undeniable sophistication and complexity, [Andrew] Lang’s concept of 'materialism' [in his World Trade Law After Neoliberalism: Reimagining the Global Economic Order (2011)] seems somehow shallow and fundamentally technocratic. The vision of international legal history it encourages us to develop is one populated by planners and policy makers responding to a series of external events. There seems to be very little space left for the discussion of the underlying structural social processes, such as the transformations in the global division of labour and the massive transfers of wealth, property, and political power that were implemented as part of the neoliberal turn. In other words, there seems to be no space left for the question of class struggle and its impact on the international political processes. And that, in our view, is why in the end Lang’s argument, despite all its depth and power, comes across as notably less convincing than it otherwise could have been. In this brief note, we would like to supplement Lang’s account of international trade law’s experience of the neoliberal turn by offering an alternative account grounded in a decidedly different sense of the causal relationship between the 'ideational' and the 'material'.