Peter Gallagher thinks that unilateral reforms, not multilateral negotiations, deserve credit for our relatively liberal international economic order:

After thirty years of these stand-offs (Tokyo Round through Doha) it is past time to acknowledge that the multilateral trade round format doesn’t work. We cannot coordinate real changes in trade and investment policies by negotiation. Over and over again it appears that real changes arise only from autonomous measures such as those in Brazil and China in the late 80s and first half of the 90s; the EC (‘McSharry reforms’) in the first half of the 1990s; Vietnam’s and India’s first steps to liberalization in the mid-to-late 90s, and also reluctantly; ASEAN, Korea and Mexico in the late 90s. Attempts to wrench such changes from WTO Members in a round of negotiations has a very poor record of success and what changes are won come at a cost to the system.