Doug Irwin has a nice encomium to GATT in today's WSJ. Here are the last few paragraphs:
Over its 60-year history, the GATT has had many shortcomings. Agricultural trade has largely eluded liberalization. The current spread of preferential trade arrangements, in the form of bilateral and regional so-called free trade agreements, have reintroduced discriminatory trade practices in a way that weakens the multilateral system built on the MFN clause.
The GATT has also gone through many difficult phases. The world economy went through a particularly dangerous period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when sluggish growth and painful structural adjustments led many countries to ignore the GATT rules altogether. Trade barriers in the form of voluntary export restraints and orderly marketing arrangements proliferated, restricting trade in sectors such as automobiles, steel and textiles. In this environment, the prospect for new trade negotiations seemed so dismal that some suggested "the GATT is dead."
Despite these shortcomings and difficulties, the GATT framework has survived as a durable code of conduct for commercial policy and dispute resolution. Tariffs have been ratcheted down, the penchant for voluntary trade restrictions has been put to rest, and potential trade wars have been peacefully defused. The relevance of the GATT is reflected in the WTO's ever-growing membership, now up to 150 countries.
The prosperity of the world economy over the past half century owes a great deal to the growth of world trade which, in turn, is partly the result of farsighted officials who created the GATT. They established a set of procedures giving stability to the trade-policy environment and thereby facilitating the rapid growth of world trade. With the long run in view, the original GATT conferees helped put the world economy on a sound foundation and thereby improved the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
The task for statesmen today is to look beyond short-term political considerations, arising from the complaints of special interests that fear market competition and the parsing of subsidies, and bring the ongoing Doha Round to a successful conclusion. If immediate steps cannot be taken to liberalize trade, then the phasing in of reforms and the phasing out of subsidies over many years is perfectly consistent with the long-term objectives of the GATT. We should remind ourselves how much poorer the world would be today without the politically courageous decisions made by visionary diplomats meeting in Geneva 60 years ago this month.
Even as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund struggle to rethink their role in the modern world economy, the role of the GATT and WTO is secure. The postwar expansion of world trade fostered by the GATT has made a lasting contribution to world prosperity and, as Cordell Hull suggested, to world peace as well.