The WTO Doesn't Have Arthritis. It has Politics

I read a recent article “The WTO Is Not in Crisis, It Has Arthritis” that was the initial spark for this essay. The article argues that the World Trade Organization is not collapsing but rather struggling with the rigidity and slower coordination capacity that comes with institutional aging after decades of successful trade liberalisation. The author further suggests that the WTO became, in some ways, a victim of its own success having embedded trade rules so deeply that its role has evolved into coordination.

I take the diagnosis seriously. But I want to argue that the metaphor makes invisible important political dynamics that should remain central to how we understand the WTO and the contemporary trade order.

The metaphor makes politics invisible

What struck me most was the way the article speaks about the WTO almost as an autonomous actor moving through the world independently of its members. The WTO is described as embedding rules into customs systems, stabilising expectations, and structuring global trade flows as though this occurred through the institution’s own autonomous force.

"Once the institution itself becomes the actor, the politics of construction begin to disappear."

But the reality is that the WTO does not move itself through the world. Its authority is produced through rules negotiated, implemented, defended and sometimes disregarded by states whose power within the system is profoundly unequal. I belabour this point because the distinction matters. Once the institution itself becomes the actor, the politics of construction begin to disappear.

Institutions do not biologically age

The arthritis metaphor frames the WTO’s difficulties as the natural deterioration of an ageing institution. But institutions do not weaken through biology; they are continually reproduced, defended, bypassed or redirected through political choices. A political economy lens therefore shifts attention from institutional “stiffness” to the changing interests, strategies and power of the states that sustain the system.

A postcolonial lens goes further by questioning whether the WTO ever represented institutional health equally for all members. What appeared as successful liberalisation for powerful states often involved constrained policy space, unequal negotiating capacity and uneven gains for the Global South. The WTO’s present condition is therefore not simply the result of age, but of unresolved asymmetries and a changing distribution of global power.

"Institutions do not weaken through biology; they are defended, bypassed or redirected through political choices."

On the “price of success” framing

I also found myself pushing back on the idea that the WTO’s current condition is simply the “price of success” because this framing also risks naturalising what are deeply political transitions.

The movement of trade governance into plurilateral arrangements, strategic alliances, industrial policy frameworks, and regional blocs is not merely the next evolutionary stage of a successful system maturing into complexity. Rather, it reflects changing geopolitical priorities and shifting state interests.

Major powers did not simply outgrow the WTO because the institution “succeeded too well” at liberalisation. These powers are increasingly engaging in what scholars call venue shopping: selecting the institutions and negotiating forums most likely to advance their strategic interests.These include technological control, national security, supply-chain resilience and industrial policy.

"That is not institutional destiny, nor the arthritic spasms of an old institution. These are political choices... by powerful states recalibrating their relationship to the multilateral order."

What the metaphor keeps us from asking

The arthritis metaphor directs attention to the WTO’s ability to move rather than to the political forces shaping its direction. It encourages questions about flexibility, coordination and reform, while obscuring more fundamental ones: which states still benefit from the multilateral system, which rules continue to serve their interests, and which states have the power to bypass or redirect it?

It also conceals the unequal nature and the political contestation embedded in the bargain itself. WTO members do not possess equal market power, negotiating capacity or freedom to pursue alternatives. The question, therefore, is not simply whether the bargain still holds, but whose bargain it was, who benefited most from it, and whose interests are now reshaping the trade order.

To analyse its present condition without centring those dynamics risks turning a deeply political system into an oddly depoliticised one. The question, then, is not simply whether the institution has become slower with age. It is whether the interests that once sustained the multilateral bargain still align, and what powerful states are building, bypassing or abandoning as that bargain changes.