Abstract
The establishment of the WTO has been widely accepted as representing the legalisation of world trading rules. However, it is important to reflect on the limits of this legalisation thesis in terms of the WTO and trade
liberalisation. By locating trading disputes in a broader political economy of international trade, it is argued that
in conceptual terms it is difficult to establish the way in which the WTO dispute settlement system would have authority separate from and over the conventional international politics of trade policy relations. In particular, the credibility of the threat of WTO-sanctioned trade retaliation by a small or medium sized state against one of the great powers found to have transgressed the legalised rules is questioned. It is argued that case outcomes would largely be a product of domestic political institutions and policy processes and that inter-state negotiation in the old GATT style would remain an important mode of international trade policy co-ordination. Aggregate
data on WTO cases, brief studies of two high profile WTO disputes, US ’ Upland Cotton and EC ’ Sugar, and interviews with senior trade policy-makers in Australia all serve to suggest that negotiation in the shadow of litigation is the dominant mode of governing international trade.

Speaker biography
Carsten Daugbjerg is a professor at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Denmark, and currently Visiting Fellow at the School of Politics and International Relations, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University. His fields of research are agricultural policy reform, the farm trade negotiations in the WTO, private food standards in global trade, government interest group relations, and environmental policy, and he has published widely on these issues.