The kernel of what would eventually become the film of Forbidden Games (1952) was a somber and disquieting screenplay that its author, François Boyer, found impossible to sell. He expediently repackaged the contents as a novel, published in 1947 under the title The Secret Game and virtually ignored in France, but which enjoyed a major, if freakish, commercial success in America. Unexpectedly, it now looked like a hot property, so René Clément and the screenwriting partners Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost took Boyer's film script-cum-novel and turned it back into a screenplay. But that wasn't the end of the movie's tortuous prehistory. Forbidden Games was originally planned as a humble short subject – the middle section of a three-part omnibus or anthology film to be called Cross My Heart and Hope to Die. This larger project got shelved after financing fell through, and the existing footage composed no more than a vignette. Impressed by its lyricism and grace, however, the producer Robert Dorfmann urged Clément to expand the material to feature length.

Like many great films, then, Forbidden Games sprang serendipitously from a chain of accidents, failures, and stopgaps, none of which are remotely evident onscreen. Clément's direction is so scrupulously measured, and the theme so archetypal, that every shot achieves a kind of fatedness.

Trade, the WTO and Development – An Introduction

The dictionary definition of trade is: ‘the buying and selling of goods and services; a commercial activity of a particular kind’. Development signifies a progress from a less sophisticated phase to a more advanced stage. It is defined as ‘a new stage in a changing situation; a new product or idea’. Synonyms include: advance; betterment; change; enlargement; growth; progress.

In the past, ‘development’ remained within the realm of discourse on economic and social rights of individuals and societies around the world. As such, development work is largely credited to the activities of international agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and alliances between nations under which some financial assistance is offered to the less developed countries of the world, such as the G8. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) with its rules-based system, its compulsory dispute settlement mechanism and its promotion of the free trade ideology, has not hitherto been counted as an international development agency. Therefore, it could be argued that ascribing a development character to this trade organisation may well be beyond its circle of influence. It is important to assess the validity of both sides of the argument.

Trade and development, the two concepts which form the basis of this study, must necessarily be assessed in the context of their relationship within the WTO. The starting point is to appreciate the WTO: what it stands for, how it came into being, and how it functions in the trading environment. The understanding, both of the WTO and of most trade practitioners, is that the Organisation is principally, a trade negotiating body. The trade negotiation role of the WTO in the multilateral trade arena is not in doubt. Part of the appeal of a regulated system for multilateral trade even under the umbrella of the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was and still is the accessibility it affords its membership to negotiate on a wide range of trade and economic related issues.

International trade has grown in the past century largely because the world’s nations have expressed a joint interest in eliminating protectionist domestic legislation and in promoting the free trade mechanism for trade in goods (and services).

Introduction

To fully appreciate the obligations and the impact of the rules-based system, one has to go beyond identifying that the WTO is a trade-negotiating body. It is in the detailed provisions of the respective Agreements that one may discern a true glimpse of the potential which trade has for development. In this selected study we opt for a more fundamental approach in assessing the dynamics of trade and economic development by taking a closer look at one such Agreement: the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures – the SPS Agreement. The essence of the SPS Agreement lies in the demands for public health and safety which is a universal need, placed alongside the need to ensure that the protection of public health and safety does not constitute the basis of arbitrary restrictions on trade by national governments. Thus while the importance of public health and safety is acknowledged, the adoption of unfair restrictive trade measures lacking scientific basis is denied.

It is not too difficult to understand the reasoning behind this perspective. Regulating the international market and all trade and economic endeavour carried out therein must be seen to have a positive impact on not only producers, but also on consumers. This is because when a rule of international trade reaches into the domestic environment as they all inevitably do, its only justification must be that it is well balanced against the legitimate aims of the domestic regulations. Thus trade rules are negotiated with the objective of ensuring that the multilateral co-operation under the WTO takes into consideration those essential aspects of societal regulation which are for the common good. On the other hand, domestic trade policies and measures which have not been sufficiently backed by science cannot, riding on the need for public health and safety be allowed to restrict trade, a restriction which may only be a disguised form of protectionism.

This case study provides a more in depth and empirical study of the benefits and challenges which WTO Members face in exercise of their obligations as WTO Members. Particular emphasis will be on developing countries’ capacity to execute their obligations under the Agreement. Our study will be in three broad parts.

Dublin—In the Shadow of the Grand Tradition

Although Ireland's principal tourist attractions were located in its picturesque countryside, once landed in Dublin, many visitors toured the capital city before setting out for the glens, mountains and lakes. In fact, many travel writers devoted considerable space to describing the Empire's “second city,” partly because of genuine interest in Dublin and partly in response to the touring habits established by the urban-centered Grand Tour, to which Georgian Dublin itself owed much of its character. Like their English counterparts, Anglo-Irish grandees returned from their Italian tours with paintings, statues, architectural designs and sketches to be incorporated into their townhouses and country estates. Many of Dublin's buildings, public and private, reflected what one observer, referring to the new Parliament building, called “the true Italian taste.” Working with architect Sir William Chambers, Lord Charlemont drew upon his experiences in Italy to design his Palladian mansion on Rutland Square (today's Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art) and his exquisite miniature hideaway, the Casino, on his Marino estate overlooking Dublin Bay. C. T. Bowden described it as “one of the most beautiful and elegant seats in the world.”

By the middle of the eighteenth century the capital was already on its way to becoming a great Georgian city. Land on both sides of the River Liffey had been reclaimed and the river channeled along the city's quays.

A brilliant linguist, Grigorii O. Vinokur (1896–1947) stands out from the famous 1920s constellation of Russian/Soviet linguistic and literary scholars as a theoretician of applied linguistics and the proponent of language culture (kul'tura), a specifically utilitarian language science, which laid the foundation for Soviet scholarship in the social and cultural history of language, and theory of language usage, including but not confined to stylistics.Whilst in a broader sense Vinokur used the term ‘language culture’ to refer to verbal practices of a society, more specifically it also presents one of the many models of sociological linguistics, developed and employed by Soviet theorists and language practitioners in the immensely language-conscious period of the 1920s and early 1930s. Also referred to as ‘linguistic technology’, Vinokur's language culture in its second, narrower, meaning offers perhaps one of the most consistent attempts at a methodological delineation of the newly emerging branches of social and human sciences in Soviet scholarship. Against the advance of the so called vulgar sociologism in literary criticism and linguistics, Vinokur sought to delimit the boundaries of linguistics, poetics and sociology with the help of a scientifically sound method which, for him, had been outlined in Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale [Course in General Linguistics] (1916). What is, however, less obvious, but certainly no less important, is that Vinokur undertook the unique task of reviving philology as a distinct field of knowledge and a methodological system in his outwardly Saussurean – and what is expected by extension to be a rigidly linguistic – approach.

The importance of trade to countries is two-fold: one, it provides a country with income; and two, it directly provides a country's citizens with income as well. In a sense, facilitating access to markets is the best form of direct investment a country can undertake towards its socio-economic development.

Throughout this work, we have emphasised that trade is instrumental to a people's socio-economic development. We started first with a review of trade and development at the WTO. The emphasis was on understanding the exact nature of the Organisation in order to provide a preliminary foundation for future consideration of what the WTO can and cannot do for its developing country Members. When we examined the classifications by international organisations on development status, it was clear that the international community through these various organisations understands that the principal element of ‘developing country’ status is the level of poverty and the limited capacity for individual growth and opportunity. These are elements which motivated the world trading system even from the time of the GATT, to lay out provisions in the international trade rules to address the challenges of developing country participation in organised global trade.

Developing country integration however has faced and still continues to face teething problems. Apart from the general barriers experienced across the global market which a uniform rules-based system was expected to resolve, developing countries’ circumstances have not been improved in the face of challenges like the inequalities in trading power, internal constraints, an everexpanding body of rules, and the single undertaking requirement which demands commitment to every single WTO rule irrespective of the capacity to execute the obligations therein. In addition, we also argued that the application of the comparative advantage theory to the modern market is more of a constraint than a true reading of the political economy of the times. Current action under the Doha Development Agenda in spite of the renewed activity at the WTO Secretariat which carries out administrative functions even in the provision of technical assistance is not moving as swiftly as it should especially with the protraction of the Doha Round.

My appreciation of the impact of trade liberalisation and the organisation of the global trading system under the World Trade Organisation was limited to a vague acknowledgement of the fact that things seemed to have changed dramatically in my country, Nigeria, in the early 1990s. Apart from the strained living conditions imposed by continuous military rule, there were no real connections made between the declining rates of product manufacture and food availability and the country's attempts to abide by the single undertaking requirements of the WTO. Knowledge of trade liberalisation, of the impact of the WTO Agreements on the domestic economic system was at best academic. Developing countries' criticism of the rules-based system was mainly directed to the perceived highhandedness of the more developed countries and not to what it should have been – on the capability of the system to sufficiently address the development needs and concerns of its Members. It was not until the Seattle protests that widespread criticism of the WTO began in the public and in the mass media.

Sitting amongst a group of well-read practicing barristers one day, the issue of the Seattle protests came up. As I listened intently, I tried to understand the reasons for the protests. But it was difficult. The difficulty was caused by the fact that even those who had a better understanding of the global market finally admitted that the work and relevance of the WTO was not easy to explain. There were too many issues to consider.

When they embark on a journey, travelers begin a rite of passage, detaching themselves from their home and homeland, initiating a series of adventures and challenges, which, no matter how minimal, prepare them for their unfamiliar status as strangers in a new and different place. The longer and more difficult the trip, the greater their sense of leaving behind the certain and familiar for the strange and foreign. By the time of arrival the journey has already cost time and money, as well as the inevitable wear and tear on body, mind and spirit. Today's tourists must brave the traffic to the airport, negotiate crowds and endure delayed flights and endless security checks at the airport. Once on board the airplane, they must survive cramped seats and bad food. This is tame stuff, however, compared to travel a few centuries ago. Prior to the age of steam, anything beyond a trip to the next village required careful preparation, a good bit of time and much endurance.

Until the 1820s those British tourists intent on visiting Ireland had to first travel by coach or horseback to a western port and then board a sailing ship for a sea journey of uncertain duration and minimal comfort. For much of the eighteenth century, many Ireland-bound travelers went first to Chester, a six-to-seven day horseback ride from London. There they remained until they could take sail from Parkgate, a harbor twelve miles outside of the city.

My appreciation of the impact of trade liberalisation and the organisation of the global trading system under the World Trade Organisation was limited to a vague acknowledgement of the fact that things seemed to have changed dramatically in my country, Nigeria, in the early 1990s. Apart from the strained living conditions imposed by continuous military rule, there were no real connections made between the declining rates of product manufacture and food availability and the country's attempts to abide by the single undertaking requirements of the WTO. Knowledge of trade liberalisation, of the impact of the WTO Agreements on the domestic economic system was at best academic. Developing countries’ criticism of the rules-based system was mainly directed to the perceived highhandedness of the more developed countries and not to what it should have been – on the capability of the system to sufficiently address the development needs and concerns of its Members. It was not until the Seattle protests that widespread criticism of the WTO began in the public and in the mass media.

Sitting amongst a group of well-read practicing barristers one day, the issue of the Seattle protests came up. As I listened intently, I tried to understand the reasons for the protests. But it was difficult. The difficulty was caused by the fact that even those who had a better understanding of the global market finally admitted that the work and relevance of the WTO was not easy to explain. There were too many issues to consider. What was most glaring, however, was that the Organisation's less-developed countries were not faring any better in the global trading system in spite of the promises of Membership of the rules-based system.

What promises? What benefits? What exactly was the WTO all about and why do developing countries seem to fare worse under a system that claims it exists for the good of every Member? What was the basis of organised global trade in the first place? Were there practical and honest attempts to address the constraints of market integration on developing countries? These and many other questions were examined, but even at the end of the informal discussion, we dispersed unconvinced of our own arguments for and against the WTO.

Marking Tourists Sites

As tourism develops, it reconfigures the host country into a succession of specific sites that shape the visitors' itinerary. In Britain, as Esther Moir points out, newly awakened curiosity sent early tourists off to explore as much of their country as was accessible. However once the great estates became organized for visitors, as ruins, mountains and lakes were “discovered” and noted in guidebooks, tourism came to define itself as a progress from one designated site to another. The same was true of Ireland.

What constitutes a tourist attraction? Dean MacCannell maintains that “no naturalistic definition of a tourist sight is possible.” Instead, it is the result of “an empirical relationship between a tourist, a sight, and a marker….” A marker “points” to a place. It can be any piece of information about a site, including travel accounts, guidebooks, the guides themselves, souvenirs and pictures. John Hutchinson suggests that engravings of scenes in Wicklow, which began to appear as early as 1730s, contributed to the popularity of certain tourist sites in that county. Literary associations also can act as markers. For instance, the ruins of Kilcolman Castle in County Cork, no more picturesque than those of many other abandoned Irish tower houses, could boast as its marker its connection to Edmund Spencer, author of The Faerie Queen.

Marking also facilitates the organization of a site or sight for visitors, not only physically in terms of accessibility, but conceptually as well.

Attitudes toward language carry import beyond what they tell us about dominant trends in a particular country's national linguistics. Whether they appear in the public press or more narrow trade journals, in philosophical discussions or classroom lesson plans, discourses on language quite often reflect concerns that go well beyond the realm of linguistics, however broadly defined. The study of “language ideologies” or “linguistic ideologies” attempts to capture this metalinguistic dimension by taking as a starting premise that implicit in our attitudes about language are basic assumptions about power and authority – about who has the ability to shape the language and ultimately ideas and realities of a society and whether or not that is even possible in the first place. Linguistic ideologies further illuminate the manner in which individuals, societies, and nations understand and talk about language: their attitudes toward appropriate forms it should take, about its function in society, and about its relationship to the speaking and writing public. Looking at language ideologies allows for the examination of “the ways in which beliefs about languages and habitual engagement in particular linguistic practices create or buttress the legitimacy of specific political arrangements” (Gal and Woolard 1995, pp. 130–132).

If on some level we recognize this ability of language to serve as a symbolic forum for broader discussions, for example, of statehood, citizenship, and the role of the individual citizen speakers and writers in articulating the central ideas of the state, then an examination of certain keywords of Soviet-era linguistics should provide insight into attitudes not only about language, but also about its role in shaping citizens, society, and the state.

In the closing years of the eighteenth century, the British Critic reported: ‘Travellers continue to assert their privilege of telling their tales in their own way, “of hair-breadth escapes”, and the public seems very indulgently disposed to give them audience’. ‘Curiosity will always make travellers, and a still more extended curiosity, produces readers for their narratives’. Accounts of travels were so popular in 1798 that the editors suggested, humorously, that their own prefaces should be ‘allied to that species of composition’. They later explain: ‘We are, however, kinder to our readers than the generality of travel writers’ because ‘the hardships they encounter are generally detailed at full length; frequently, perhaps, not without exaggeration’. In 1799 the British Critic claimed that voyages and travels ‘always were, and must be, popular’ because ‘they administer to a curiosity which is liberal and almost universal’ and ‘give the satisfaction of knowledge, without exacting the labour of serious study’. Expressing succinctly the power of literary realism before critical conceptions of realism had developed, the editors wrote in 1799 that the literature of voyages and travels, of all forms of literature regularly surveyed, ‘approaches more nearly to the character of the novel, than any other book of information’.