Lim, C.L. --- "Who’s Afraid of Asian Trade Regionalism, and Why?" [2011] ELECD 464; in Buckley, P. Ross; Hu, Weixing Richard; Arner, W. Douglas (eds), "East Asian Economic Integration" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: East Asian Economic Integration

Editor(s): Buckley, P. Ross; Hu, Weixing Richard; Arner, W. Douglas

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849808682

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: Who’s Afraid of Asian Trade Regionalism, and Why?

Author(s): Lim, C.L.

Number of pages: 24

Extract:

2. Who's afraid of Asian trade
regionalism, and why?
C.L. Lim

THE MODERN HISTORY OF FREE TRADE
AGREEMENTS

The `GATT draftsmen knew whereof they spoke when they termed the
regional exception a "standard clause in all commercial treaties"'.1 From
the 1700s to the 1930s, trade agreements were bilateral,2 and for practical
political reasons the GATT 1947 too needed to include various excep-
tions to cater for regional trade agreements.3 Such exceptions covered
not only the general permission (under GATT Article XXIV) to form
customs unions and FTAs, but also the need to accommodate British and
French imperial preferences and other pre-existing arrangements such as
those between the Lebanon­Syria Customs Union and Palestine and the
Transjordan.4
These were limited exceptions, however, coupled with the belief on the
part of the GATT's framers that regional trade agreements (that is, FTAs
and customs unions) could serve as building-blocks towards greater global
trade liberalization at a time when such FTAs and customs unions were
relatively few in number. Moreover, belief in the multilateral system, and
in particular the underlying idea of trade liberalization through successive




1 John Jackson, World Trade and the Law of GATT (Charlottesville, VA:

Michie, 1969), 576.
2 Frederick M. Abbott, `A New Dominant Trade Species Emerges', in

William J. Davey and John Jackson (eds), The Future of International Economic
Law (Oxford: OUP, 2008), 133, 134.
3 By `regional trade agreements', we mean both FTAs and customs

unions.
4 Jackson, World ...