6.6双语新闻：全球贸易新霸主，谁与争锋？

Wanted: new hegemon for the global trading system. Must have: serious economic heft, a reasonably united and far-sighted domestic constituency and strong commitment to multilateral rules. The next round of interviews will be held at this weekend’s G7 summit in Canada. (Incidentally, entre nous, whatever you may have heard, the last occupant of the post wasn’t entirely a model employee: see further down for details.)

招聘：全球贸易体系的新霸主。要求：巨大的经济体量、比较团结且眼光长远的选民以及对多边规则的坚定维护。下一轮面试将于本周末在加拿大召开的七国集团(G7)峰会上进行。（私下里顺便说一句，不管你听到了什么，这个职位的上一个人选不是一个完全模范的员工：具体情况请参见后文。）

The HR director for globalisation is destined for disappointment: this position will remain unfilled for the foreseeable future. Donald Trump has turned the US from the anchor of the world economy to its wrecking ball in record time. But the only two possible contenders big enough to take over are China and the EU, and each fails one of the job specifications. The former, whatever speeches President Xi Jinping gives at Davos, is bent on establishing its dominance in a range of low- and high-tech fields by almost any means necessary, breaking rules it deems inconvenient and, more importantly, preventing new international regulations emerging to stop it.

全球化的人力资源主管注定会失望：在可预见的将来，这个职位仍会空缺。唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)已在创纪录的短时间里把美国从稳定全球经济的“锚”变为摧毁全球经济的大铁球。但经济体量满足这个空缺要求的仅有的两个可能人选是中国和欧盟(EU)，而它们都各有一项要求不满足。不管中国国家主席习近平在达沃斯发表了什么演讲，中国一心希望通过几乎任何必要途径在一系列低技术和高科技领域占据主导地位，打破中国认为不便的规则，同时更重要的是，防止正在形成的新的全球规定阻碍中国这样做。

That leaves the EU, whose problems lie with the second criterion, its domestic constituency. As it happens, the  extraordinarily clodhopping  nature of Mr Trump’s policies accidentally helped to maintain internal unity between EU member states.  Germany was keen  to dangle various incentives in front of the US, including a possible trade deal covering only industrial goods, to forestall the threatened steel and aluminium tariffs. This would render unnecessary the retaliation the EU had already threatened and prevent the trade war spreading to Germany’s precious car industry.

那就只剩下欧盟了，它的问题在于第二项要求：区内选民。正如你现在看到的那样，特朗普政策特别粗暴的特点意外帮助保持了欧盟成员国之间的内部团结。德国曾热衷于拿出各种激励诱惑美国，包括一项旨在预先阻止美国威胁要征收的钢铝关税、仅涵盖工业产品的可能的贸易协议。这将让欧盟已威胁要进行的报复变得没有必要，并阻止这场贸易战蔓延到德国珍视的汽车行业。

That goods-only deal was always implausible. Not only does agriculture form an indispensable part of the US’s offensive export interests, but there would almost certainly be widespread public revulsion in Europe to a deal with Mr Trump, particularly given the EU’s commitment to making adherence to the Paris climate accord an indispensable part of any new trade agreement. The US rejected that offer: the EU looks weak for having made it.

这项只涉及商品的协议从未可行过。农业是美国咄咄逼人的出口利益不可或缺的一部分，而且欧洲民意几乎肯定会厌恶与特朗普达成一项交易，特别是考虑到欧盟致力于让遵守《巴黎气候协议》成为任何新的贸易协议不可或缺的一部分。美国拒绝了这份要约：欧盟因发出了这份要约而落了下风。

On this occasion, Mr Trump threatening steel and cars at the same time made the calculation about escalation and trade-offs moot. But the conversations within the EU over the past few weeks, with Germany keen to placate rather than take a stand on principle, do not show a global leader in the making.

在这种情况下，特朗普同时威胁对钢铁和汽车征税的做法，让局势升级和做交易的考量不复存在。但过去几周欧盟内部的谈话没有显示出全球领袖在诞生。德国希望息事宁人，而不是在原则上站定立场。

Particularly disturbing was a sense expressed by many EU officials that a relatively benign outcome would be for the US to impose quotas rather than tariffs, on the model of the deal it forced on Seoul to limit Korean steel exports to 70 per cent of their three-year average. If the quota were sufficiently high, perhaps 100 per cent of recent exports, retaliation could be minimised, the EU could file a token case at the World Trade Organization which would crawl slowly through the clogged-up plumbing of the dispute settlements system, and life would carry on much as before.

尤其让人担心的是，欧盟很多官员表达出这样一种看法：与关税相比，韩国模式的配额是一个相对更好的结果——美国与韩国的协议迫使后者将其钢铁出口限制为3年平均水平的70%。如果配额足够高，或许达到最近出口的100%，欧盟方面的报复行动可能降至最低，欧盟可能会装装样子，在世界贸易组织(WTO)提起诉讼，案件将在严重堵塞的WTO争端解决系统中缓慢爬行，生活将大致如前。

The idea is seductive but dangerous. The whole idea of normalising trade managed by pure quantitative measures such as quotas is a deeply retrograde one. It was explicitly constrained by WTO law adopted in 1994, partly as a reaction to the managed trade of the 1980s between, for example, the US and Japan on cars, in which Tokyo accepted “voluntary export restraints”. The quotas currently proposed by the US are on imports, not exports, and not quite as egregious. But the idea that the EU would be negotiating with quotas in mind as a positive outcome does not say much for its alleged role as a guardian of world trade law. It would be trading a short-term quiet life for a long-term weakening of the multilateral system. This kind of defeatism is not how global anchors are made.

这种想法具有吸引力，但很危险。通过配额等纯量化举措实现贸易正常化的整个想法是在倒行逆施。1994年实行的WTO法律明确禁止这种做法，这在一定程度上是针对上世纪80年代的管制贸易，例如美国和日本在汽车领域的管制贸易，日本当时接受了“自愿出口限制”。当前美国提出的配额针对进口，而非出口，而且不那么过分。但欧盟会抱着配额是一个较好结果的想法去谈判，这可不怎么符合它据称为世界贸易法律守护人的身份。这将是用多边体系的长久性削弱换取一时的舒坦生活。奉行这种失败主义的欧盟，不可能成为明日的全球经济之锚。

Germany has a habit of undermining EU unity for its particular export interests. Angela Merkel, for example,  badly undercut  the European Commission in 2013 by withdrawing her support for antidumping tariffs on solar cells against China, one of the big trade disputes of the day, fearing retaliation against German companies selling into China.

德国一贯为了自己独有的出口利益破坏欧盟团结。例如，2013年，德国总理安格拉•默克尔(Angela Merkel)撤销对向中国征收太阳能反倾销关税——当今重要贸易争端之一——的支持，担心中国会报复向中国销售商品和服务的德国企业，此举让欧盟委员会(European Commission)阵脚大乱。

As an aside, over-optimistic Brexiters of the “they want to sell us cars” stripe were actually somewhat accurate when they said that EU interests were disproportionately influenced by German auto manufacturers. They were merely wrong in judging that a tariff on a finished car sold into the UK outweighed the wider threat to the EU single market. German manufacturers feared that giving the UK a sweetheart deal would encourage other member states to break away, damaging the supply chains they have painstakingly constructed across eastern Europe.

顺便说一句，那种“他们希望卖给我们汽车”的过于乐观的英国退欧论者实际上是正确的：他们说欧盟利益受到德国汽车制造商的过度影响。他们只是在这一点上错了：认为对销售到英国的成品汽车的关税比对欧盟单一市场的更广泛威胁分量更重。德国制造商担心，给英国优惠待遇将鼓励其他成员国退欧，这将破坏他们在东欧辛苦建立起来的供应链。

Having said all of this, the state of multilateral governance was not in tremendous shape even before Mr Trump turned up. For decades the US has proved something of an unreliable hegemon. As with the EU, it is too often dominated by small, well-organised lobbies. In the 1990s it gave the WTO a bad name by using it as a vehicle to advance restrictive intellectual property rights; in the 2000s it  helped to kill  an entire multilateral trade deal, the Doha round, by declining to stand up to its own heavily subsidised farmers. Mr Trump’s attacks on the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism did not come out of a blue sky. Barack Obama’s administration was also sharply critical of the general slant of its rulings, and blocked the appointment of judges whose views it did not like.

综上所述，甚至在特朗普上台之前，多边治理的状态就已经欠佳了。几十年来的事实一直在证明，美国不是一个可靠的霸主。欧盟则太多时候受到组织完善的小规模游说的左右。上世纪90年代，欧盟把WTO作为推进限制性知识产权的工具，这让WTO背负了恶名；本世纪初，拒绝对抗本区域内获得巨额补贴的农民的欧盟，是整个多边贸易协议——多哈回合(Doha)——流产的原因之一。特朗普对WTO争端解决机制的批评并非无中生有。巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)政府也曾严厉批评WTO裁决的普遍不公平，并拒绝任命持美国政府不喜欢的立场的WTO法官。

Still, as the world trading system is in the process of discovering, it was a whole lot better than nothing. No plausible candidate presents itself for the post of benign hegemon, and the position is likely to remain open for a very long time.

然而，如全球贸易体系正在发现的那样，有总比没有强得多。善良霸主的职位还没有出现任何值得寄以希望的候选人。这个职位可能会在很长一段时间内继续空缺。