In 2001, in tiny Qatar’s capital city of Doha, a process began that came to a shuddering, final stop on Tuesday. The Doha round of trade talks, which were supposed to lead to a grand compromise freeing trade everywhere, was pronounced dead. When something as huge and complex as these negotiations fail, accusations and counter-accusations are traded, narratives of responsibility wrought and pronouncements of doom intoned across the world. Some of them are accurate, some exaggerated, and plenty simply untrue. Enough enter the public consciousness and are accepted as truth as time passes to warp and distort future stands. It is essential, as early as possible, to try and tell them apart so that that process doesn’t take hold.

Getting 153 countries to agree on anything would always be difficult, we have been told. That simply isn’t a useful way of looking at it. It’s not the countries that are difficult to coordinate; it’s interest groups within and across those countries. The current talks in Geneva, for example, started with about 30 key players. It was then narrowed down to seven: the US, India, Brazil, the EU, Japan, China and Australia. This wasn’t because these countries were the most stubborn, but because most of the others felt they could trust one or more of those to represent their own interests fairly: African cotton producers, for example, could trust India’s negotiators because there were correspondences between what African producers wanted and what domestic constituencies in India wanted. (Reports saying India was “the only holdout” should thus be ignored, as eliding over that basic point.) What was difficult was not summoning consensus among all countries, but among three or four large blocs.

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