Thank you for your response to my post. Let's start with the facts. The Chair himself has said that there was a "deviation" from the procedure agreed. You, however, begin rhetorically, by referring to "conspiracies." I never used that word. Instead I offered a hypothesis from a well-informed person as to why the EU might have engaged in a certain course of conduct, and even stooped to something like engaging in a procedural violation. To the extent that the EU has a common commercial policy, every time it does something as a bloc in the WTO I suppose it is a "conspiracy". But I did not suggest that this aspect of the EU acting together was in any way in itself improper, as it seems to be a necessary implication of the EU's internal "constitution". (Whether as a single entity they deserve all those votes is another matter but not directly related). Of course, there is also the question of why the leadership of the WTO, including the Troika went along with it...
In the end, you don't offer any reasons or positive evidence as to why the account that I reported in my posts is not true. Nor has there been, to my knowledge, any denial from the EU that it participated in the procedural irregularity, i.e.that it (all the states Members and the EU) gave five preferences. As you in fact admit, "what was going on inside the EU is anyone's guess." And I am merely reporting one educated "guess."
Your second point is that not all African states supported African candidates. But there is no principle I am aware of that a candidate should need unanimous support from their region or continent in order to stay in the race. I don't think that would be a legitimate selection principle, because it would mean that a candidate that was great for the WTO and had some regional support would never get through the first cut, just because one state in their region, for whatever reason, did not support them.
Ultimately the persuasive force of your response depends upon the plausibility of what is sometimes called "harmless error"-the notion that a procedural error should not lead to the reversal of an outcome, if the same outcome would have occured even if correct procedures were followed. This was the excuse of the Chair Mr. Bashir and I accept that the counter-factual might be true. But we are not dealing here, say, with appellate review of a criminal conviction but rather a selection process where, because of the consensus rule, those who lose can veto the final outcome. That correct procedure was followed, and all acted in good faith, are important considerations in convincing the losers to accept as legitimate an outcome that they didn't want. In the bad old days, what often substituted for legitimacy was, I suspect, arm-twisting, Green Room-type tactics. But how many Members are going to put up with that anymore? Remember what happened in the DG selection the time before last. As Kalypso Nicolaidis and I argue in recent and on-going scholarship, if a consensus-based WTO is to survive, the WTO needs to have a political ethics to guide its decision--making. Proceduralism is one part of that ethics.
