Geneva to Seattle, 1998–1999

The timing of the Second Ministerial Conference of the WTO at Geneva in 1998, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the GATT, divided the three years between the Singapore and Seattle meetings neatly in two. This was a greater frequency of ministerial meetings than planned, but there was a great deal of work to do to manage the huge WTO agenda, and issues in the public debate surrounding ‘globalization’ were becoming politically more sensitive all the time.