nd bring down trade barriers.
The main critique of the WTO is that it bespeaks the economic gap between "have" and "have-not" nations, i.e., developed and developing countries. Citing "capitalist influence" on most postwar trade and finance agreements, Morgan (2000, p. 18) describes WTO's intent "to provide a structure which, by its utter flexibility, facilitates untrammeled capitalist activity everywhere, except in the few nations which have been able to build self-serving conditions into it." This has fostered controversy. The Seattle Round of 1999 was informally billed as WTO's "development round" and was intended to "close the gap between poor countries and the rich" (Flanigan, 1999, p. C1). The talks did not exactly collapse, but they were eclipsed by a public-opinion coalition of environmental and trade-union activists, as well as "repeated descriptions in Seattle of developing countries as employers of slave or child labor, low-wage exploiters of their own citizens and tools of corporate greed" (Flanigan, 1999, p. C1). Mass demonstrations slid into rioting and mayhem, a pattern of action that was repeated, with perhaps a bit less vigor, in Genoa, Italy, when the WTO met there in July 2001.
Thus the status of globalization in mid-2001, which was complicated by President George W. Bush's determination to reject and/or reverse US participation in international agreements dealing with global warming, missile defense, and domestic-industry protectionism (Cooper, 2001). Then came September 11, 2001, and suddenly global unilateralism was a thing of the American past, as Bush called for support from many nations for the US's war on terrorism. For the first time since the postwar constitution of NATO, Article 5 of the treaty that created the Euro-American alliance was invoked to declare that the attack on the World Trade Center was an attack not just on the US but on all of its NATO allies, and to effectively enlist European support...