Thursday, May 19, 2005

Continental politics and global trade don't mix

Alan Oxley, the former Australian ambassador to the GATT writes in Tech Central Station about the risk Pascal Lamy poses to world trade the WTO. Namely that of lame, petty politicking.

«Last year Lamy wrote a paper on trade policy that accommodated the case for globalization and the case against. How do you do that? Create an incoherent idea and claim it does both. His idea was to allow national governments to set solemn international legal commitments to free trade aside where "collective preferences" of a nation, however determined, decree that should occur.»
It reminds me very much about what a commenter on David's Medienkritik said about heavy duty double-speak in the Berlin's SPD led government: That there was some matter that Schroeder and Fischer didn't agree on, and continued to, but Fischer was going on television to convince people that even though his position didn't change, that he and Schroeder agreed...

Now figure that out.

No comments: