The Relationship between Trade Dispute Settlement, Soft Power, and Trade

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-918-6_43How to use a DOI?

Keywords

dispute settlement; soft power; trade

Abstract

Liberalism views that trade agreement and trade may prevent war and conflicts from happening between states. Trade and trade agreement were perceived to be a way of cooperation and prevent conflict from happening. However, many developed countries have been endorsing new issues, such as gender, environment, and labor, into both under bilateral or regional free trade agreements (deep agreements) and not providing flexibility for developing countries. Deep agreement is a soft power of developed countries to developing countries. The feature of both bilateral and regional free trade agreements is having dispute settlement mechanism in those agreements. However, there are different level of development. Some developing countries have difficulties in fulfilling their obligations in those agreements due to lack of capacity. When enforcement for commitment of such agreement is imposed, developing countries will not be able to fulfill its obligation. Dispute settlement allows complainants to retaliate when its claims are supported by the adjudicators. Retaliation or trade compensation for nullification or impairments of benefits for those parties in dispute is a kind of trade sanction. Trade sanctions could create uncertainty and reduce trade. If regional trade agreements emphasize on promoting enforcement of new global norms as a soft power from developed countries to developing countries, it will not create more trade but it will reduce trade. This paper argues that the approach on promoting new issues to developing countries should be cooperation approach rather than enforcement approach.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Nur Rakhman Setyoko
AU  - Muhammad Syaroni Rofii
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/16
TI  - The Relationship between Trade Dispute Settlement, Soft Power, and Trade
BT  - Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Strategic and Global Studies 2025 ((ICSGS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 697
EP  - 711
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-918-6_43
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-918-6_43
ID  - Setyoko2025
ER  -