Compliance with international institutional norms is often conceived as a yardstick with which to test the effectiveness of international law. However, the ongoing failure of the WTO regime to elicit compliance with its agreements has led many legal theorists to reject this view in favour of a realism that describes an international system, void of any authority to enforce rules, in which egoistic states calculate their own interests in light of the existing distribution of power. An institutionalist riposte, which insists on the capability of states to come together nonetheless to make binding rules that will determine their behaviour vis–vis each other, of necessity focuses on developing enforceable remedies when rules
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