GATT’s history revises ideas about international organizations, trade in international relations, and the liberal global order. Although the USA and EEC receive the most attention in GATT studies, leadership was fluid and opportunistic and the engagement of small and mid-sized members sustained GATT s momentum and legitimacy. The secretariat was proactive in promoting trade liberalization and cooperation, whereas GATT members emphasized rights above obligations and pursued their economic interests in ways that were not always compatible with liberal trade practices. Reactions to GATT and trade liberalization were polarized and divisive. Not only does trade produce winners and losers, but some people had faith in the liberal promise and associated GATT with fairness, rules, and inclusive prosperity, whereas others feared it as a destructive agent of globalization that would cause domestic upheaval and undermine national autonomy. As for the liberal order, it was made up of national and international ideas and priorities that both pushed against and reinforced one another. Despite the presumption of liberalism s universal applicability, the liberal trade order was conservative, privileging some nations, some sectors of the economy, and some people over others. But because GATT retained a normative authority, members never rejected it entirely.

Despite the universal pretensions of GATT, the Cold War repositioned it geopolitically as a forum and instrument of the western alliance. The narrative follows the accession process of communist countries (Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and the People s Republic of China) as well as strategic allies (West Germany and Japan). Debates about admitting new contracting parties focus on GATT members that were part of the western bloc as well as ideological rivals – Czechoslovakia and the United States. The consequences of closer association or ongoing disassociation for Cold War objectives affected who was let into, allowed to associate with, or shut out of GATT. The admission of communist countries was also important to counter accusations that GATT s membership was restrictive, a claim that aggravated its institutional insecurity. Unlike many writings that have characterized GATT as apolitical, this chapter shows how the eastwest geopolitical fault line politicized and instrumentalized GATT and liberal trade.

The introduction situates GATT in relation to new approaches in international history and to political science literature on hegemony, trade and peace, the relationship between domestic and international spheres, and the agency of international organizations. It explains the main premise of the book – that trade is an essential component of global politics – and sets out the book s revisionist goals: to understand the role of international organizations in world affairs; rethink our understanding of the nature, drivers, and priorities of postwar international relations; and interrogate claims about the liberal global order that was established after the Second World War. Finally, it describes the four thematic case studies in the book: GATT in relation to the Cold War, the EEC and other regional trade agreements, development, and agriculture.