context, and to show how its agenda and procedures, as well as its problems and possible outcomes, have arisen from the conjunction of developments in patterns of world trade and the evolution of the GATT itself. The Uruguay Round has some novel features, but it also strongly reflects the continuation of the trends of the last forty years. The GATT has fostered the evolution of the world trading system from a highly restrictive form with two major players (the US and the UK) towards a more liberal and evenly balanced form. The practices appropriate to the former circumstances achieved many of their objectives, but they proved gradually less able to cope with the strains of the new circumstances and problems. Thus the GATT's traditional bilateral mode of tariff negotiations has given way first to a more multilateral form of tariff talks and then to a preoccupation with constitutional issues such as trading rules and the sectoral coverage of the GATT. Its procedures have become progressively more multilateral, but especially when one considers trade policy implemented between GATT rounds, its outcomes appear recently to have become less so. It is paradoxical that whereas initially the GATT harnessed the crude power of bilateralism to achieve multilateral outcomes, it has more recently adopted multilateral procedures but with more bi- and pluri-lateral results.