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This chapter introduces the broad changes in the global politics of intellectual property that marked the late 1900s and early 2000s, and a coalitional argument for understanding cross-national and longitudinal diversity in response to the new external environment. The chapter situates the book’s analysis in the context of broader scholarship in comparative and international political economy, highlighting the importance of coalitions for understanding national forms of compliance to global changes. The chapter reviews scholarship on the politics of intellectual property, with an eye toward integrating international and domestic drivers of national policies. The chapter concludes with discussion of the logic of case selection, the method of data collection and comparative analysis, and the organization of the remainder of the book.

The chapter provides brief introductions to intellectual property, patents, and pharmaceuticals to help the reader understand the nature of the enduring conflicts in this area. Prior to the 1990s few developing countries granted patents on pharmaceutical products, but changes in the global politics of intellectual property made doing so obligatory – the starting point for the analyses in this book. The chapter reviews the policy challenges that countries addressed in deciding how to introduce pharmaceutical patents and then in revising their new patent systems, and then presents the explanatory framework to account for cross-national and longitudinal variation. National forms of compliance with global changes are iterative and path-dependent processes, in that there are successive episodes of conflict, and the policy choices of one period exert influence on the policy choices in subsequent periods. Degrees of over-compliance with the new global order are produced through resolution of these two sets of conflicts.

This chapter analyses Argentina’s minimalist response to the global sea change. The pathway from the President Menem’s 1991 proposal for a new patent law to the 1996 Law on Invention Patents and Utility Models reveals intense Executive–Legislative conflict over how Argentina should introduce drug patents. The US Government and the Argentine Executive fought tirelessly for over-compliance, but failed to secure this outcome. Argentina’s national pharmaceutical firms were able to construct a broad coalition against over-compliance, benefiting from its own considerable resources as well as the support of other actors in the industrial sector and health community. In contrast, the transnational sector was unable to attract allies that could widen its own coalition, as the country’s export structure meant that the principal instrument used to expand coalitions for over-compliance was ineffective. By the end of the 1990s, minimalism had become state policy in Argentina.

The Patents Act, 1970 and its virtual abolition of a pharmaceutical patent regime did not go unchallenged by the innovator pharmaceutical industry of the developed world. Starting in the mid-1980s, the United States (US) spearheaded an effort to link trade in goods with trade in intellectual property under the aegis of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Although India initially resisted even discussing the issue, it capitulated in Geneva in April 1989 in what came to be known as the famous ‘Geneva Surrender’. Once negotiations began, the USt cajoled India to agree to Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and a pharmaceutical patent regime. Joining the WTO and becoming a signatory to TRIPS required India to reinstate a pharmaceutical patent regime in exchange for greater trading benefits in other sectors, like textiles. This chapter recounts the diplomatic negotiations and national politics that led to India agreeing to TRIPS.