Emerging Powers and the World Trading System
Cambridge University Press, 2021

Summary: Victorious after World War II and the Cold War, the United States and its allies largely wrote the rules for international trade and investment. Yet, by 2020, it was the United States that became the great disrupter—disenchanted with the rules’ constraints. Paradoxically, China, India, Brazil, and other emerging economies became stakeholders in and, at times, defenders of economic globalization and the rules regulating it. Emerging Powers and the World Trading System explains how this came to be and addresses the micropolitics of trade law— what has been developing under the surface of the business of trade through the practice of law, which has broad macro implications. This book provides a necessary complement to political and economic accounts for understanding why, at a time of hegemonic transition where economic security and geopolitics assume greater roles, the United States challenged and emerging powers became defenders of the legal order that the United States created.

Praise: “This fascinating book shows how international trade law changed China, India, and Brazil—and how these countries in turn changed trade law. It thereby sheds light on an important puzzle: How is it that the United States, the predominant power behind the shaping of the current international trade regime, came to see itself as a victim of it? Shaffer’s superb account is a model of how to analyze the constitutive aspects of the law without ignoring the role of economic and political power.“ —Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

”At a time when the world is struggling to understand the trade policies of the Trump administration and what motivated them, Gregory Shaffer has provided compelling answers grounded in decades of research along with case studies of the shifts in economic power and legal capacity in China, India, and Brazil. If you want to understand the past and the future of the transnational legal order for trade, read this book!” —Jennifer Hillman, Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, former member of World Trade Organization Appellate Body, commissioner of the U.S. International Trade Commission, and U.S. Trade Representative General Counsel