This month, the Geneva-based trade body will start the hunt for a new director general, but is the decline of globalisation making it irrelevant?

At an elegant 1920s building set in a lush park on the shore of Lake Geneva this month, nine senior global politicians – six men and three women – will be attending an extraordinary job interview. The World Trade Organisation, once the hated target of anarchists and anti-globalisation protesters furious about unfair rules and backroom deals that locked poor countries out of the world’s markets, is seeking a new director general.

Yet few angry campaigners are expected to throng the centre of Geneva on 29-31 January, as the candidates file into the WTO’s headquarters to set out their vision for the future of the global marketplace. More than five years into the financial and economic crisis, the once-hot topic of “globalisation” is no longer where the action is.

“The WTO has lost an incredible amount of sex appeal,” says Ricardo Meléndez-Ortiz, chief executive of the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, a Geneva-based thinktank.

In 1999, when a WTO meeting in Seattle was brought to a halt by street riots, it was the focus for protesters’ rising sense of injustice about the impact of globalisation on the world’s poor. Yet 14 years later, many of the most fraught issues rocking the world economy – on tax, on immigration, on exchange rates – are being fought out far from Geneva. And there are signs that aspects of the “globalisation” that was the WTO’s raison d’etre are being quietly unpicked.

The WTO, which polices international trade law as well as being a forum for negotiations, is having to arbitrate a growing number of international disputes, as the temporary truce called for by the G20 countries in the depths of the financial crisis gives way to a more fractious climate.

China and the US, for example, are battling each other over allegations that China unfairly subsidises its solar power industry. At the same time, multinational firms are beginning to reverse the relentless process of outsourcing, which has seen supply chains stretch out across the globe.

Meanwhile, the increasingly powerful emerging economies, burned by the experience of the financial crisis, are asserting their right to protect themselves against the surges of “hot money” that leave their economies vulnerable. Brazil, for example, has used taxes on foreign exchange – anathema in the days of the so-called Washington consensus – to try and stem the appreciation of its currency, the real.

“The days of expecting a lot out of outsourcing are gone,” says Simon Evenett, professor of trade and development at St