We started Monday off with a welcome breakfast, during which we met the other 40 or so program participants. Participants are here from various governments, private sector companies, other degree programs, NGOs — you name it. In just ten minutes, and with coffee and croissant in hand, I spoke with two people from different branches of the Indian government, a woman from Australia who teaches and researches global health policy and patents, two Ph.D. students from Germany, a man from Korea doing a MA in Public Affairs in Paris, and a woman from Burkina Faso who works in banking. And that’s only a small sampling — truly an interesting and diverse group of people.
Manfred Elsig's Lecture in Auditorium AJF
Monday morning’s lecture by Manfred Elsig dealt with the politics of the World Trade Organization. Any organization has internal politics, and understanding the organizational structure and culture of the WTO is essential to learning how and why things work – or sometimes don’t work. We covered main international relations theories and how they relate to the role and function of international organizations. We then looked at the creation, operation and effects of the multilateral organization and challenges from a political perspective.
Key points were the following:
- looking at the WTO as a case study in how an international organization works
- why multilateralism (as opposed to bilateralism, unilateralism, or other)
- how decision-making works
- the performance of the organization
- Input and Output legitimacy
In the afternoon, we gathered in our business attire (required for all IO visits) with our passports (also required) and walked next door to the WTO for a lecture on the structure of the WTO and how negotiations actually take place. We sat in the main assembly room, the second largest one at the WTO for negotiations, and a negotiation had in fact just concluded that morning. We talked about why country representatives sit in certain places or have more delegates than other countries, how chairs of negotiation committees are chosen and maintain the proceedings, how the dispute settlement mechanism works, how the delegates’ personalities affect negotiations, translation, and much more. This is room is not often open to people outside of negotiations, so the setting gave even more context to the discussion.
Janeace sitting in for a US Delegate to the WTO
Inside the WTO main assembly room
We ended the evening with a lakeside dinner at the school. They cafe had drinks, great salads and lots of grilled meat and sausages for us, so combined with the great weather, it gave us lots of time to meet more people, talk about the first day, debate the viewpoints we’d thus far encountered (is the Doha Round a failure, is it salvageable, do we conduct an early harvest, etc.) and just enjoy the Geneva sunset – with views of Mt. Blanc and the French Alps in the distance!
Mt. Blanc and French Alps in distance
