Dünya ticaretinin yönetişimine eleştirel bir bakış: DTÖ'deki iktidar politikaları, söylevler ve mevcut nispetsizlikler

This study intends to analyze the ongoing negotiations in world trade from a critical and post-structuralist perspective. The member driven nature of decision making at the World Trade Organization (WTO) makes it prone to the exercise of power politics between the member states among which there are considerable asymmetries of power. Based on the power perceptions of Habermas, Foucault, and Gramsci, this study aims to analyze the dynamics of world trade negotiations at multiple levels. The strategically or communicatively reached decisions at domestic level defines the priorities of national trade policy, and each country engage in multilateral trade negotiations based on calculations of self interest. To attain their objectives, both developed and developing countries held meetings with their peer equivalents in order to generate an inner circle consensus. As a result of those small group negotiations, each coalition constructs its own discourse over the issues of negotiation at the WTO, and tries to shape the agenda through articulating their own ?truth discourses?. The legacy of multilateral trade negotiations clearly shows that when developing and developed countries have contending views on the agenda issues, the hegemonic and near hegemonic countries employ certain strategies and discourses to coerce or to persuade the opposing parties. Hence, the multilateral trade negotiations emerge as zones of exercising hegemony over the developing and less developed countries through discursive and strategic measures rather than being an area to produce common norms, values and policies for the well being of all members in the world trade regime.