Intellectual Property Rights and the Culture of Global Liberalism

Abstract

The recently inaugurated World Trade Organization (WTO) formally specifies and protects intellectual property rights as it sets the rules for a global open-market economy. It does so by advancing a culturally specific notion of property rights as private and exclusive. In so doing, the WTO also promotes the defining concepts of liberalism—rights and property—and extends them globally in the service of open-market principles. Liberalism, originally a seventeenth-century European political theory, is now recognizable as a distinct ensemble of cultural practices and meanings. As international interactions are increasingly defined by liberal concepts and conform to liberal principles, a nascent global culture of liberalism develops distinctively from its national forms. This article places these events in several broad contexts, including U.S. foreign policy, open-trade advocacy, and intellectual property protection.