International Trade Norms in the Age of Covid-19 Nationalism on the Rise?

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International Trade Norms in the Age of Covid‑19 Nationalism on the Rise? Nicolás Albertoni1   · Carol Wise1  Received: 23 July 2020 / Accepted: 30 July 2020 © Fudan University 2020

Abstract Simultaneous with the rise of trade protectionism in the twenty-first century has been a resurgence in nationalist politics, most notably in the USA, the UK, and parts of the EU. These developments in international and US trade policy, including Washington’s launch of a full-fledged trade war against China in March 2018, have converged disastrously with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in November 2019 and the onset of a worldwide pandemic. Given the status of the USA as the world’s hegemon since 1945, what is new here is the effort of the Trump administration to abdicate US leadership, jettison longstanding alliances, and turn back the clock on the country’s close integration with the world economy. Already, greatly reduced flows of goods, services, and people have translated into radically reduced global growth, widespread business disruptions, and high unemployment. Remarkably, the White House has refused to recognize the severity of the pandemic and has undermined the precautions of the US science community. We argue that these multiple shocks constitute a major critical juncture on par with what the world community faced in 1945. However, in the twenty-first century we have seen that high levels of economic uncertainty and political instability have superseded the longheld notion that international interdependence would pull the world community through tough times such as these. Could the triple whammy of a destructive trade war, deadly pandemic, and secular decline of US leadership trigger a new generation of policy innovation and institution building on par with the post-1945 era? In terms of the global trade regime, it would be difficult to imagine a buoyant recovery of the world economy in the absence of a serious reckoning with the pattern of norm erosion that we identify here. Keywords  China · USA · World Trade Organization · Non-tariff barriers · Novel corona virus · Nationalism · Globalization

* Carol Wise [email protected] 1



Department of Political Science & International Relations, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

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N. Albertoni, C. Wise

1 Introduction On November 8, 2016, the seventy-year-old rule-based global trading system took its last breath—or at least this is what President-elect Donald Trump and his rustbelt base wanted the rest of the world to believe. It is true that the turn of the millennium marked a waning of the multilateral commitment to open trade, crafted as part of the post-World War II Bretton Woods order. The 1990s saw the completion of the Uruguay Round in 1994 and the incorporation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) into a newly created World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.1 Yet, the launching of the Doha Development Round in the immediate wake of the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks on the USA turned out to be a losing propos