It seems fitting that the untimely death of Peter Sutherland this week should have occurred on the eve of the 100th anniversary of President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points speech. The former Irish politician who became the European Competition Commissioner during the vital years in the 1980s, when the rules for the single market were set, and then founding director-general of the World Trade Organisation in the 1990s, can rightly be considered one of the architects of the modern, global, rules-based trading system, laying the ground for the triumphant phase of globalisation that lasted until the onset of the global financial crisis.

Woodrow Wilson laid down the basis of a world trading system HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Yet the origins of this global rules-based system can traced to Wilson’s speech on January 8, 1918, in which he laid down the principles