17 September 1999
To: the Secretariat of the World Trade Organization, Accessions
Division, rue de Lausanne 154, CH-1211 Geneva 21, Switzerland.
Fax: (41-22)739 57 76
Communication to: Mr Arif Hussain, Director of Accessions
For: Mike Moore, Director General of the World Trade Organization (External Relations Division)
From: the Nanostate Office, pro tem (17-19 September 1999), Golders Green Club, London.
Reply to: hub at nanostate dot org
Application by the Nanostate for WTO Observer status, understood as preliminary to negotiating WTO Membership.
WHY THE NANOSTATE IS SEEKING WTO MEMBERSHIP. AN OVERVIEW.
FINAL OBSERVATIONS. POTENTIAL BENEFITS TO THE WTO OF NANOSTATE MEMBERSHIP
See also the WTO Polemic
1. This Submission is to be taken as formally stating the intention and desire of the Nanostate to seek Observer status to the proceedings and activities of the World Trade Organization (WTO) with a view to becoming a Member of the WTO and acceding to the WTO Agreement of January 1, 1995, as envisaged by Article XII of the Marrakesh Agreement of that date establishing the WTO.
2. As needed preliminary, the Nanostate draws the attention of the Director-General of the WTO and the Director of Accessions to the determinations of the physical extent of Nanostate sovereign territory contained in the Nanostate Protocol volume 1, hereafter "NPv1", full text at: http://www.nanostate.org. It will here be convenient to reference the times pertaining to this sovereignty (defined in NPv1, Art 3) as Specified Time Points of Nanostate Territorial Sovereignty, hereafter STPNTS. (Further, see "memo re: CHRONOTOPE" at the above.)
3. The Nanostate feels sure that the WTO will take full cognizance of the fact that its apparently distinctive physical characteristics as stated in NPv1, specifically Articles 3 and 10, especially as regards the mobility and vectoring of its frontiers, and its discontinuous overlay of other sovereign political entities are distinctive only in respect of their explicit formalization. The Nanostate is encouraged to note that de facto overdeterminations of sovereignty and territorial reach, and uncertainty and disputes in their regard, are not seen by the WTO as incompatible with Membership or Observer status, witness the WTO's acceptance of both the People's Republic of China and Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) as simultaneous Observer governments, also simultaneous Membership of India and Pakistan, to cite prominent instances.
WHY THE NANOSTATE IS SEEKING WTO MEMBERSHIP. AN OVERVIEW.
4. In the most general terms, The Nanostate fully supports and is desirous of participating in the overarching objectives of the WTO as stated in the preamble to the Marrakesh Agreement establishing the WTO, by the parties to it, Ministers of the Member governments thereof. The General Council of the WTO will easily see that Articles 10-14 of NPv1 directly preclude in principle and in practice any direct engagement of the Nanostate in Trade in Goods insofar as this entails legal proprietorship but that, since "its creative purposes and processes will necessarily be incarnated by, externalized or embedded in material objects" (NPv1, Art 11) and insofar as "Goods" in the normally accepted meaning is subsumed under the Nanostate category of "objects", it has a vital stake in:
a) participating in fostering good aspects of the "relations in the field of trade and economic endeavour", "allowing for the optimal use of the world's resources in accordance with the objective of sustainable development", and "seeking to protect and preserve the environment" according to the Marrakesh Agreement Preamble;
b) developing understandings of the inherent characteristics of Nanostate formation whereby existing distinct sovereign entities having commercial relations in goods traffic governed by the presently obtaining General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade ("GATT 1994") are reassembled at STPNS into interior zones of a single sovereign jurisdiction with annulment of existing GA Tariff Schedules, thereby
c) allowing, through the strong North-South alignment of Nanostate
STPNTS zones, the testing "under laboratory conditions" of the results
of cancelling the tensions between developed and developing countries felt by
some WTO members to be exacerbated by systemic practices involving Tariff Peaks,
Tariff Escalation and other measures widely seen as discriminatory and unfair,
as also are the bilateral retaliatory practices frequently used by economically
powerful members against the developing economies of the South. (Clearly the
WTO is anticipating potentially unproductive consequences of these tensions,
witness its highly defensive approach to the forthcoming Seattle Conference
in November); the General Council will readily appreciate the potential relevance
of this alignment, intrinsic to the structural dynamics of the Nanostate, to
rendering systematic the ad hoc formation and proliferation of Plurilateral
Regional Trade Groupings which the WTO clearly perceives as having inherently
disorganizing potential (further referenced in Paragraphs 8 and 10 of this Submission);
d) helping to ensure that practical consequences issue from the WTO view recently
expressed in Geneva by the then Director in Charge, David Hartridge that "the
trading system does not exist for its own sake" and "that its relationship
to issues of broader social concern matters greatly to many of our Member governments
because it matters to their populations", the Nanostate perceiving as an
important aspect of its raison d'etre the work needed to identify that part
of a Good which constitutes "the productive kernel" of its production
process" (NPv1 Art 11; see also Paragraph
7 of this Communication) both as regards life enhancement for the natural
person and the realization of citizenship, the interfacing between the trading
system and fields of social concern seen as an important issue by the (then)
Director and the WTO;
e) exploring the practical implications of the affinity which exists between
the civic aspects of Nanostate remodelling of understandings of territoriality,
interior and openness (and its uncoupling of the link between neighbourhood
and geographical adjacency - see NPv1, Arts 4,
and 7) and the non-localized structure of the WTO's
Multilateral Trade Negotiation process; the Nanostate will detail what it sees
as the productive aspect of this affinity in the trade policy memorandum it
will submit as required by the Accession procedure.
THE GENERAL AGREEMENT ON TRADE IN SERVICES ("GATS") AND THE AGREEMENT ON TRADE-RELATED ASPECTS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS ("TRIPS") : THE NANOSTATE VIEW
5. GATS and TRIPS are agreements representing the qualitative leap from the GATT to the creation of the WTO in 1994-1995. They imply an enlargement of the category of Goods that can be traded, and a dematerialization of both the nature of the Goods themselves and the medium of exchange. This constitutes prima facie good reason for the Nanostate to wish to be a signatory to the WTO Agreement, since the Nanostate has a more obvious interest in Trade in Services and in Intellectual Property Rights in some of the WTO's determinations of these categories, than in material Goods, while taking account of the provisos of Paragraph 4 .
6. In the case of the GATS, these include the "cross-border supply of services supplied from one country to another (e.g. international telephone calls), consumers using services abroad (e.g. tourism), foreign banks, individuals providing services abroad, e.g. artists, consultants, fashion models ("Trading into the Future", 2nd edition revised April 1999) all involving timed acts and transactions thus relatable to STPNTS. The Nanostate would welcome observations by the WTO regarding trade possibilites peculiar to these, conversion of international telephone calls and IT communications rates to domestic rates within STPNTS etc.
7. TRIPS is the most controversial new element of the WTO, for reasons briefly referred to below (Paragraph 9b). The Nanostate wishes not to make a formal statement regarding the way it envisages the interaction of the TRIPS provisions with its commercial activity and awaits forthcoming WTO rulings. It is especially interested in the ongoing discussions initiated by Member governments especially of developing nations regarding disparities between TRIPS and various national legislations. It is vitally in the Nanostate's interest as regards its membership of the WTO that a clear distinction be made between creative acts, which constitute, in the terminology of TRIPS section 5(Patents) Article 27.1, "inventions, whether products or processes" as "new", as involving "an inventive (i.e. non-obvious) step" and as "capable of industrial application". The Nanostate's concern arises from the fact that the WTO's concern in TRIPS generally is with "inventions, whether products or processes", and ownership thereof, and not the "inventive step" or creative act, in Nanostate terminology "productive kernel", which presently lies outside the WTO's remit. The Nanostate is hopeful that the WTO's provisionally declared preparedness to take on board issues regarding labour and employment as trade-related matters, will allow consistency in the treatment of material products (Goods) and Intellectual Property and will see "inventive step" as standing in the same relation to "inventions" as labour to product (see also Paragraph 9a).
FINAL OBSERVATIONS. POTENTIAL BENEFITS TO THE WTO OF NANOSTATE MEMBERSHIP
8. At the time of the instituting of the GATT process in 1947 by its then 23 constituent member states ("contracting parties"), it is very probable that an application to become a participant by a sovereign entity having the characteristics of the Nanostate would have been unconditionally rejected. Today the situation has radically changed. Even in business contexts, as in then WTO Director-General Renato Ruggiero's address to the Tokyo Business Association celebrating 50 years of GATT/WTO, poetry and metaphysics are had recourse to in evoking this change. Depicting "a world where the web of global value added can't be unravelled", and a "digital economy which operates in cyberspace and has no physical reality, let alone nationality", Ruggiero cites the question posed by Robert Reich, "Who is Us?". He quotes distinctions made at the highest levels of the global economy, by the World Bank, between "fast and slow countries, learning and static countries". The Nanostate is in fact a sovereign political entity which is fast in many senses, which is a learning country since it possesses no inertial institutions restricting the learning process, and which through an internal dynamic driven by the splitting of process and product, creativity and proprietorship, the "natural person" and the citizen, requires the question "Who is Us?" to be realistically posed.
9. The Nanostate puts the following observations as regards matters which can clearly be seen from WTO documents to be of concern but which at present receive uncertain and ambiguous expression. It believes that membership of the WTO will offer the Organization a framework in which they can be explicitly interrogated, and in addition will allow a properly coherent formulation of Nanostate trade policy in any further Memorandum or Submission required by the WTO:
a) the Nanostate sincerely hopes that to be consistent with its own admission within its remit not only of Trade but of Trade-related matters (initially as regards TRIPS), and in view of the forthcoming Round in the year 2000, the WTO will signal its intention to return to its origins, the originally projected International Trade Organization whose Charter (never ratified because of lack of agreement by leading Contracting Parties) included, as well as the GATT, a chapter on employment and labour policy, as a means of overcoming the disparity of treatment with regard to application of the notion of trade-relatedness particularly as between GATT 1994 and Annex 1C (TRIPS) of the Marrakesh Agreement.
b) dissatisfaction regarding the discriminatory
effect of WTO understanding of patent rights and copyright, and the regulatory
pressure brought to bear by WTO Trade Policy Reviews and other means to bring
national legislation into line with TRIPS is expressed too frequently by developing
countries for it not to have substance. For its own purposes, the Nanostate
hopes that detailed discussion of TRIPS 27.3(b) will continue and that expressions
of the "need for clear language on the conservation of biodiversity and
the sustainable use of its components, and of the definition and interpretation
of the key terms in the provision", by India, Korea and others will be
respected.
c) the Nanostate respectfully hopes that the WTO will take account of President
Clinton's recent urging that the WTO makes itself more "transparent, accessible
and responsive to citizens", but more importantly that the WTO explores
ways of scrutinizing the legitimacy of ratification procedures whereby Member
governments endorse Agreements reached with the WTO, especially prior to ratification.
At present the WTO has a "black box" approach to domestic legislative
procedures of individual Member governments, which it seems to the Nanostate
contrasts unfavourably with the attentive stipulations it makes regarding domestic
modes of making transparent trade agreements already entered upon.
10. The Nanostate believes that its constituted
structure consistently embodies the contradictory processes inherent in current
global political realities, those of the formation, interpenetration, redistribution
and dissolution of sovereignties largely driven by the economic processes which
the WTO is instituted to regulate. It is posited on the assumption of a politically
partitioned reality rather than the endgame outcome of the "borderless
economy", but is based on the realities of movement rather than the fictions
of permanence. As a sovereign entity combining within itself nul sovereignty
and the unified world state, the notions underlying it would seem to be the
measure and potentially productive extrapolation of the WTO'S pressure downwards
on tariff rates and inwards towards regulatory uniformity, The Nanostate hopes
that its contradiction in unity will recommend its accession to the WTO.