What is "multilateral"?

IN RECENT YEARS unilateralism has emerged as the most contentious issue in U.S.-European relations. Europeans have complained about what they see as a U.S. go-it-alone approach to foreign policy, one said to contrast with a European tendency to emphasize "negotiation, compromise, and the virtues of agreed constraints."1 These criticisms, already common during the Clinton years, intensified during the early months of the Bush administration when they were fueled by U.S. rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and the threat to withdraw from the ABM treaty. After a lull following the September i i terrorist attacks, they rose to new heights as Europeans protested the U.S. failure to use NATO in the war in Afghanistan, the treatment of captured al Qaeda suspects in Cuba, Washington's sidetracking of the Biological Weapons Convention (sWC) review conference, and the U.S. campaign to exempt itself from jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

For all its fervor, however, the transatlantic debate over unilateralism has been intellectually rather superficial, with little serious discussion of the political, economic, and legal questions that arise in connection with the practice of multilateralism in a world of sovereign states. Political rhetoric has tended to obscure the fact that there is no consensus in either the academic or policymaking communities about how multilateralism should be defined; about when, if ever, unilateral action is acceptable; or about such issues as the relationship between regional multilateral cooperation, such as has unfolded in Europe for the past 50 years, and the kind of global multilateralism embodied in the United Nations.

Multilateralism is easiest to define in economic affairs, where it remains the bedrock on which the international financial and trading systems are built. As codified in the IMF Articles of Agreement, monetary multilateralism traditionally has meant the convertibility of national currencies on a non-discriminatory basis and rejection of the currency blocs and competitive devaluations that characterized the interwar period. As enshrined in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), trade multilateralism has meant application of the mostfavored-nation principle on a non-discriminatory basis. In both the IMF and GATT/World Trade Organization (WTO) systems, offenders against agreed multilateralist principles have been countries within these organizations that have failed to observe these principles. Nonmember countries do not take on the obligations or...