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Liberalization and the Ascendancy of Trade 143

USTR officials are mandated to grant them from one year to eighteen
months to negotiate a settlement or face retaliatory action. 42 If,
following negotiations, the executive branch (in practice, the USTR
and the President) determined that the policies or practices of the
priority country were 'inconsistent with the provisions of, or otherwise
denies benefits to the US under, any trade agreement, or ... is unjus-
tifiable, unreasonable, or discriminatory and burdens or restricts US
commerce,' 43 the President is compelled to take action against the
offending country. 44 As Sauvant interprets Section 301:

[its working] definitions are very broad. In fact, the definition of
'unreasonable' applies even to acts that are 'not necessarily in
violation of or inconsistent with the international legal rights of
the United States.' In other words, the perceived interests of the
US are placed above the strict letter of international agreements
... [Because] no internationally recognized standards . to govern
[services and intellectual property exist,] ... until such standards
are established, the US will be able to determine and apply its
own concept of 'unreasonable. ' 45

It is difficult to imagine any other country carrying out this kind of
trade policy. The assertion of unilateral trade sanctions against prior-
ity countries (initiated by the US Congress largely due to mounting
corporate constituency pressures and an ongoing national balance-
of-payments crisis) in part was meant to stimulate the successful
conclusion of the Uruguay GATT process. Yet Super/Special-301 is
explicitly illegal under existing GATT rules. In the US and elsewhere,
international treaties, such as the GATT, have the legal force of
domestic law. Nevertheless, retaliatory measures continued to be
taken especially in the services sector due to its status as a 'priority
area.' 46
As previously mentioned, the Uruguay Round also involved nego-
tiations on trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPS). 47 This
inclusion was accepted by relatively advanced industrialized GATT
members largely in response to the general ineffectiveness of existing
international agreements as remedies against the unauthorized use (or
'piracy') of information-based commodities. The Berne Convention,
the Universal Copyright Convention (administered by the UN), and
the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (pro-
tecting patents and trademarks), all lacked effective enforcement
mechanisms and dispute settlement procedures.