The multilateral and bilateral provision of trade: Institutional forms and the content of commercial cooperation in the world economy, 1860--1995

Can the rise, collapse, revival and maintenance of liberal trade in the world economy from 1860-1995 be explained in a single institutionalist logic? This study is a historical institutionalist challenge to the public good theoretical and British hegemony empirical foundations of the dominant traditions in international political economy---hegemonic stability theory (HST) and neoliberal institutionalism---and their common hegemonic explanation for the rise of liberal trade in the West. I argue that liberal commerce is not a public good, and did not emerge due to British economic hegemony in the nineteenth century or principally because of American hegemony in the twentieth century. Liberal trade, in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is instead a highly excludable good that is principally the institutional outcome of international tariff bargains conducted within a distinctive set of reciprocally reinforcing international and domestic institutions known as the conventional tariff system (CTS): the organizing principle of multilateralism incarnate and institutionalized.; My central claim is new. The tariff stability, international constraints, and institutional infrastructure provided by the CTS were the principal reasons for the rise of liberal trade in the world economy during the both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The rise, collapse, revival, and maintenance of liberal trade in the world economy from 1860-1995 all have an institutional foundation, a single institutional foundation: the presence or absence of the CTS. The CTS was not initiated and led by laissez-faire-incapacitated Britain. The regime was instead established in 1860 and led until 1892 by Saint-Simonian/statist France. The German Empire then assumed leadership of the regime with the inauguration of the Caprivi treaty-network on February 1, 1892 until the outbreak of World War I. The prewar regime was destroyed at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. The CTS, however, was reestablished when America adopted the institution with the passage of the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act. In 1947 the CTS was expanded into the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade and into the World Trade Organization in 1995.