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The World Trade Organization (WTO) is one of the cornerstones of the multilateral trade system. The latter has managed to prove the importance of its existence since the beginning. Indeed, whether the progressive codification of all the matters that are related to international trade or the continuous evolution of the rulings of the panels and Appellate Body (AB), the WTO has for sure proved to be an organization that is highly important for solving the trade conflicts between the different states members to the organization. That could not be more clear nowadays as member states are not questioning the existence of the organization but rather seeking to reform the existing structure in accordance with their own interests. Hence, there is a general movement towards the progressive reform of the rules of the WTO. However, this operation is a very complex one as all the relevant legal provisions have to be revised and all the revisions have to take into consideration the interests of the states members to the multilateral trade system. When mentioning the issue of reforming the international trade system, several factors must be taken into consideration as the latter played an important role in the development and the evolution of the trade rules. One of the main factors that must be mentioned in this regard and deserve to be discussed is the phenomenon of globalization. In the chapter “The WTO – A Suitable Case for Treatment? Is It Reformable?,” of the book “ The Reform of International Economic Governance”, the author Friedl Weiss explored this matter in details. As such, the author had the opportunity to examine the impact of globalization on the development of the international trade system from the socio-economic dimension and the legal-institutional dimension. In this context, it is important to first acknowledge the huge benefits that globalization brought to our modern society. Indeed, one can not deny how the whole international trade in goods and all kinds of products have been completely facilitated due to this simple factor. According to the author: “Production and trade flows are ‘global’, and capital moves with unsettling speed, and mostly uncontrollably, across permeable state structures in the ‘borderless’ world economy.” Yet, plenty of scholars have also criticized globalization for the negative consequences that the phenomenon brought to several countries, in particular, developing and Least Developing Countries (LDCs). It is being said that globalization benefited more the north when it comes to the liberalization in areas like information technology and telecommunications rather than the south that is still struggling to ensure liberalization in sectors such as textiles and agriculture. The other dimension of globalization is obviously the legal one. As such, and according to the author, globalization is “a process of peaceful normative, regulatory and/or adjudicative integration through which certain socio-economic values have come to be enshrined in and accepted as global standards governing the conduct of international and transnational actors, that is of states and other entities including companies.”
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