Bilateral trade agreements and global capitalism

The global capitalist system, which faced constant crises until the twenty first century, revealed the need for a new model after each crisis. The system started to show rapid development in the twentieth century especially with the influence of neoliberal policies and international organizations implemented in the 1980s after the oil crisis. Thus, the countries have become very close economically, politically, and socio-culturally and they have increased global trade by achieving the liberalization of international trade, which is among the goals of neoliberal policies and the WTO. Although neoliberal policies and the World Trade Organization (WTO) successfully implemented their goal of liberalizing international trade in the global economies for a certain period, by the advent of the twenty-first century, the erosion of global free trade began to manifest with the occurrences of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the 2019 Global Pandemic Crisis, the Russia-Ukraine War, and the U.S.-China trade war. In the face of developments in the twenty-first century and the recent failure of the WTO to deliver what was expected in multilateral trade regulations, countries have begun to turn to protectionist policies because they want to protect their economies. In addition to protectionist policies, countries have recently begun to prefer bilateral trade agreements in international trade. During this period, countries aimed to advance their commercial relationships by signing bilateral trade agreements where their own rules would prevail, rather than engaging in multilateral trade. However, an expectation has arisen that the bilateral trade agreements pursued by countries in recent times will impart a different dimension to the global capitalist system. In this regard, the aim of the thesis is that after the global trade system began to erode in the face of the events of the twenty-first century, countries' turning to bilateral trade agreements and what impact these agreements will have on global capitalism.