Despite two world wars, a host of small and midsize wars, and the persistence of cultural and ideological disputes and geopolitical rivalries, the 20th century was in significant part marked by an internationalism consistent with the coordination of foreign trade and the rule of international law (law of nations), i.e., "the body of legal rules that apply between sovereign states and such other entities as have . . . status acknowledged by the international community" (Schwarzenberger & Cheng, 2001). Periodically renegotiated and expanded in meetings known as "rounds" since World War II, the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, or GATT, fostered the cross-national principle of trade without discrimination for signatories. Under that principle, member nations opened their markets equally and unconditionally to one another and agreed to deploy tariffs systematically (GATT). In the mid-1990s, at the conclusion of the Uruguay Round, signatories agreed to be bound by trade rules dealing with "foreign investment in manufacturing, trade and investment in services and protections for intellectual property (patents, copyrights and trademarks), and . . . so-called technical barriers to trade, which include consumer, environmental and workplace safety regulations" (Weissman 31). It was after the Uruguay Round, too, that GATT was subsumed by the World Trade Organization.
Ostensibly a mechanism of mutually beneficial international cooperation, the WTO nevertheless became and remains controversial. Ethical concerns about the economic gap between the have and have-not nations, i.e., between developed and developing countries, have been raised. Citing "capitalist influence" on most postwar trade and finance agreements, Morgan (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...