Lamy tells it as it is?

Ivo

On something that is dear to our sainted host’s heart, WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy has been making rounds in American universities of late holding court on globalisation, global governance, economic dominance etc. At the Fletcher School, for example, apparently amidst heckling and in between defending the governance structures of the WTO, he admitted that “the world has left behind political colonialism, but still suffers from what he termed "economic colonialism." This report of his talk does omits this reference but Professor Joel Trachtman, makes up for this.

At Harvard, Lamy’s oeuvre was somewhat larger, but unfortunately not quite as forthright.

Read both Trachtman’s post as well as Lamy’s speech and see if does anything that reassures us that not only are the formal ‘global institutions’ profoundly undemocractic, but as the grand (now aged) theorist of democracy, R. A. Dahl, has argued (‘Can International Organizations be Democratic? A Skeptic’s View’,. in I. Shapiro and C. Hacker-Cordon (eds), Democracy’s Edges), incapable of being democratized.

Ivo