After 1945, the United States took unprecedented levels of responsibility for leadership of the capitalist world economy, offering the dollar as the anchor for world currencies, championing free trade, and setting the standard for the consumer society, to which most other countries aspired. Related to that, it also acted as pacesetter in the adoption of petroleum-based fuels. For three decades, the system championed by America seemed to work well, not least for the West Germans and the Japanese. Suddenly, however, everything changed. US President Richard Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system in 1971, ushering in floating currency exchange rates. Two years later came the first of two oil crises that buffeted global trade and economies. The Germans and Japanese must have felt that, instead of entering a US-style Garden of Eden of earthly delights, they had instead been led down the garden path. The impact of these crises involved unaccustomed negative current account deficits for both countries through the early 1980s. However, reduced use of energy, changes in the energy mix, and highly successful export drives soon led to a pronounced recovery. These surpluses have generally remained positive ever since, although at far more modest levels in Japan than in Germany.

This chapter discusses the controversial status of energy in international trade law from the early years of GATT up to the present time. It exposes as mistaken the assumption that energy was de jure excluded from the scope of GATT and the WTO through a study of commitments made in early GATT schedules. The chapter then analyses the factors have led to energy attracting more attention in the multilateral trading system, such as the oil crises in the 1970s, the emergence of new types of energy, the accession of major energy producers to the WTO and the inclusion of energy services as a negotiation topic in the Doha Round. Finally, the chapter discusses energy as a topic in WTO accession protocols and the rise of energy-related disputes in the WTO Dispute Settlement System