After World War II, the third pillar of the Bretton Woods order — the International Trade Organization — was never founded because the U.S. Senate refused to ratify it in 1948. In its place, a provisional treaty called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) regulated world trade for nearly half a century. GATT was not an organisation but an agreement; through eight rounds of negotiations it cut average customs tariffs from around 40% down to 5%, but services, intellectual property, agriculture, and textiles remained largely outside its scope.

The eighth round, which began in Uruguay in 1986, lasted eight years and became the most ambitious trade negotiation in history. On 15 April 1994, in Marrakesh, Morocco, 123 countries signed the Marrakesh Agreement: on 1 January 1995, a World Trade Organization would come into force, GATT 1947 would continue under its roof, and new agreements (Services — GATS, Intellectual Property — TRIPS, Agreement on Agriculture) would for the first time impose binding global rules. The most important innovation was a dispute settlement mechanism: instead of individual states, a panel and an appellate body would decide cases, and aggrieved states could be authorised to retaliate against violators.

The WTO became the institutional monument of the integrated world market that opened with the end of the Cold War. China's accession in 2001 connected 1.3 billion people to global trade; Eastern European post-communist countries, Vietnam (2007), and Russia (2012) joined in turn. Production chains fragmented — an iPhone began to be made across Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China; textiles moved to Bangladesh, steel to China, call centres to India. Between 1990 and 2008 global trade grew twice as fast as world GDP; extreme poverty (people living on less than 1.90 dollars a day) saw its steepest fall in history, with China alone lifting around 800 million people out of poverty.

But opposition was there from the start. On 30 November 1999, the WTO's third ministerial conference in Seattle was surrounded by some 40,000 protesters — unions, environmentalists, and anti-globalization activists took the streets, police responded with tear gas, and the talks collapsed. The Doha Development Round opened in 2001 but stalled over agricultural subsidies between rich and developing countries; it effectively died in 2008. After the 2008 global financial crisis it became clear that the gains of integration were flowing to capital rather than middle classes in the developed world, and anti-globalization populism grew: Brexit in 2016, Trump's election the same year, and from 2018 onward a US–China trade war with hundreds of billions of dollars in retaliatory tariffs. The WTO's appellate body was paralysed in 2019 when Washington blocked the appointment of new judges. The dream of frictionless trade opened in 1995 had, thirty years on, produced both an unprecedented surge of prosperity and a deep crisis of legitimacy.