Bilateralism is a term referring to trade or political relations between two states. For the purposes of Public International Law and Private International Law, a state is a defined group of people, living within defined territorial boundaries and subject, more or less, to an autonomous legal system exercising jurisdiction through properly constituted courts. ...

Most international diplomacy is done on the bilateral level. Examples of this include treaties between two countries, exchanges of ambassadors, and state visits. The alternatives to bilateral relations are multilateral relations, which involve many states, and unilateralism, when one state acts on its own. An ambassador, rarely embassador, is a diplomatic official accredited to a foreign sovereign or government, or to an international organization, to serve as the official representative of his or her own. ... Multilateralism is an international relations term that refers to multiple countries working in concert. ... Jump to: navigation, search Unilateralism, (one+side-ism) refers to a doctrine or agenda which supports one-sided action. ...

There has long been a debate on the merits of bilateralism versus multilateralism. The first rejection of bilateralism came after the First World War, when many politicians concluded that the complex pre-war system of bilateral treaties had made war all but inevitable. This led to the creation of the multilateral League of Nations. Jump to: navigation, search World War I was primarily a European conflict with many facets: immense human sacrifice, stalemate trench warfare, and the use of new, devastating weapons - tanks, aircraft, machineguns, and poison gas. ... Jump to: navigation, search The League of Nations was an international organization founded after the First World War at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. ...

A similar reaction against bilateral trade agreements occurred after the Great Depression, when it was argued that such agreements helped to produce a cycle of rising tariffs that deepened the economic downturn. Thus, after the Second World War, the West turned to multilateral agreements such as GATT. Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the worldwide economic crisis of the 1930s; for other uses of the term, see The Great Depression (disambiguation). ... Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km into the air. ... General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (usually abbreviated GATT) functions as the foundation of the WTO trading system, and remains in force, although the 1995 Agreement contains an updated version of it to replace the original 1947 one. ...

Despite the high profile of modern multilateral systems such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, most effective diplomacy is still done at the bilateral level. Bilateralism has a flexibility and ease that is lacking in most compromise-dependent multilateral systems. Jump to: navigation, search The United Nations, or UN, is an international organization established in 1945. ... Jump to: navigation, search WTO Logo The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international organization which oversees a large number of agreements defining the rules of trade between its member states (WTO, 2004a). ...

External Links

• bilaterals.org - An open-publishing website initiated by organizations and activists to share information and action ideas about bilateral deal-making. The site focuses on several key issues, including agriculture and intellectual property.