GLOBAL ECONOMIC CONSTITUTIONALISM AND THE FUTURE OF GLOBAL TRADE

The global trade order that has been in place since the end of the Second World War is now in crisis. Populism has broken out around the world, embraced by powerful forces in the United States and Europe. This Article identifies the changes in the nature of the global constitutional order and domestic markets that resulted in the legitimacy crisis of the global trade order. We proceed in four parts. We begin by articulating the concept of a global economic constitution. We then review the history of successive iterations of the global economic constitution, starting with the Industrial Revolution and continuing through the rise of today's globalized, integrated markets. In that historical context, we analyze the factors that explain the current crisis of legitimacy of the international economic order and that require a transition to a new global economic order. These include: the rise of a new class of disadvantaged members of the middle class, whom we call the "chronically excluded"; fundamental changes in the global supply chain; the rise of a global middle class competing for existing opportunities, which exceeds three billion members and which disproportionately grows in emerging markets; changes in the nature of work, the corporation, and the scope and effectiveness of the governmental regulation. We propose policy and institutional reforms, accounting for those changes. These proposals will, we argue, usher in a new global economic constitution, one that will preserve the legitimacy of the global economic order.