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One could say that the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was the logical evolution of the development of international trade law from 1947, the year in which the provisional agreement on tariffs and trade rules, called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was established and which entered into force in 1948. Indeed, in order to avoid the occurrence of a new world war after two devastating ones resulting mainly from the economic depression that took place because of trade barriers, the international community in particular the allies who won the war decided first the establishment of an International Trade Organization (ITO) where the agreement establishing the organization was not ratified. For that reason, the provisional agreement GATT became the principal instrument governing international trade in the following decades until the Uruguay round. Indeed, this round constituted a huge shift in international trade as it changed the rules, structures, and mechanisms through which previously trade was conducted between the nations. According to the author Lenor Sek: “One of the most important changes that came about from the Uruguay Round was the establishment of a new trade structure, the World Trade Organization (WTO), which incorporated the many changes reached during the Uruguay Round: the former GATT with its newly negotiated reforms, bodies to oversee the new trade issues, a stronger dispute resolution procedure, a regular review of members’ trade policies, and many other committees and councils. In contrast to the GATT, the WTO was created as a permanent structure, with “members” instead of “contracting parties.” Soo Yeon Kim further elaborated on this idea by stating that: “In comparing the WTO to the GATT, the first obvious difference is the size of the agreement itself: the WTO comprises 60 agreements, compared to ten under the GATT. The WTO consists as well of some 60 different formal councils and committees, while the GATT included less than one-third of this number even in its last years. It formalized a great many of the subjects covered in the GATT in separate agreements, thus vastly expanding the scope of the institutional arrangements. The WTO also linked these agreements as a “single undertaking,” requiring Members to accept the full set of agreements concluded in the Uruguay Round.” 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 the author’s words: “The establishment of the WTO itself was not seen to represent a radically new departure, nor as an attempt to revive the abortive ITO’s Havana Charter with its broad socio-economic scope. On the contrary, it was the final stage of a gradual evolution to strengthen the system originally established under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) 1947.” Hence, as it can be seen, the WTO represents the gradual development of the trade rules since 1947 until now where the multilateral trade system has managed to gain a huge legitimacy among the different countries and plays an important role in the organization of international trade.
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