The Inconveniences of Transnational Democracy

W hen then European Union Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy returned from the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial in Seattle, where gas-choked streets overflowing with tens of thousands of protesters had signaled the emergence of a worldwide movement against ‘‘corporate-led globalization,’’ he expressed support for broadening the input taken on trade-rules formation. One lesson of the WTO’s failure to launch a new round of trade talks, Lamy told his audience at the European Parliament, was that the organization should consider ways to improve representation, including proposals to create a WTO parliamentary body. Such a body, even if purely consultative, could provide more avenues of access and give greater legitimacy to WTO governance as the organization’s regulatory impacts continued to expand. 1