Legal avenues to ‘multilateralizing regionalism’: Beyond Article XXIV

A core feature of regional trade agreements (RTAs) is that they offer, or are supposed to offer, WTO-plus liberalization. The question that this book examines is how these WTO-plus elements could be ‘multilateralized’. To give teeth to WTO-plus benefits in RTAs, most RTAs include regional dispute settlement. This chapter analyses how these regional dispute settlement systems, and the legal disciplines they enforce, interact with multilateral dispute settlement at the WTO. Failure to give effect to regional dispute settlement may endanger WTO-plus liberalization; finding a legal balance and mutual support between RTAs and the WTO can be one of the ways to ‘multilateralize regionalism’.