zation of some 500 highly paid professionals, mostly lawyers, who work in a building in Geneva that resembles a stylish nineteenth-century chateau an interior of dark wood, plush leather furnishings, and floor-to-ceiling windows. Sitting alongside the Botanical Gardens just off Lake Geneva, the building feels more like a placid retreat than a working edifice. At a distance from the hurly-burly of domestic politics, government representatives and the WTO staff make significant decisions about international trade out of the public's view. It has no written bylaws, makes decisions by consensus, and has never taken a vote on any issue. It holds no public hearings, and in fact has never opened its processes to the public. Its meeting rooms do not even have a section for the public to observe its activities. And its court-like rulings are not made by U.S.-style due process. Yet the WTO today rivals the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in global importance, because it has a dispute settlement mechanism with enforcement powers. In the basic architecture of the current trading regime, three minimalist GATT principles continue to operate through the WTO. The first is the famous most-favored-nation status (MFN): Products traded among GATT members must receive the best terms that exist in any bilateral trading agreement. The necessity for an MFN clause arises because countries have bilateral trading agreements. So if the United States imposes, say, a 10 percent tariff on product X from country Y, it must use that same tariff on all other members of the earlier GATT and the present WTO. Today nearly all countries are either members of the WTO or would like to be. Twenty years ago, however, only a minority of nations were GATT members and the MFN concept had more force, because those outside of GATT could not receive MFN treatment except by specific bilateral extension. The annual congressional fuss over China's trade status occurs because ...
