<nettime> (fwd) Walden Bello on WTO Seattle meeting

[t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

     [lifted from doug henwood's lbo-talk list (start at
      <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html> and
      work from there). as doug noted, 'corporate-driven
      globalization' used to be called 'capitalism.' but
      it's good to see nice demos in the US.   cheers, t]


FOCUS ON TRADE
Number 40, November 1999

Focus-on-Trade is a regular electronic bulletin providing updates and
analysis of trends in regional and world trade and finance, with an
emphasis on analysis of these trends from an integrative,
interdisciplinary viewpoint that is sensitive not only to economic issues,
but also to ecological, political, gender and social issues. 

Your contributions and comments are welcome. Please contact us c/o CUSRI,
Wisit Prachuabmoh Building, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330
Thailand. Tel: (66 2) 218 7363/7364/7365, Fax: (66 2) 255 9976, E-Mail:
<admin@focusweb.org>, Website: <http://focusweb.org.>

Focus on the Global South is an autonomous programme of policy research
and action of the Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute
(CUSRI) based in Bangkok. 

[...]

NGO's Take on WTO in the Battle of Seattle
by Walden Bello*

(The following article came out in Business World (22 November, 1999)  and
other Asian newspapers.) 

"Make sure to bring your raincoat," Anuradha Mittal of Food First, the
famous food security advocacy institute based in the US, warned me on the
phone. "It's pouring in Seattle." 

But it is not Seattle's famous non-stop rain that will make the Third
Ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) memorable. It is
the social climate. When delegates from the more than 130 member-countries
of the World Trade Organization (WTO) arrive in Seattle a week from now,
they will find a city in turmoil. Seattle Harbor, one of the prime entry
points for goods from Asia into the United States, will be closed down by
American longshoremen. Many of the city's skyscrapers will be sporting
huge banners denouncing the WTO put up by daring mountaineers who have
trained especially for the occasion. And the streets will be filled with
what is now conservatively estimated to be over 50,000 protesters from all
over the world, many of them prepared to be arrested for acts of civil
disobedience. 

In contrast to the angry mood in the streets, government officials and
business circles hosting the event are nervous and demoralized. One of
Seattle's two corporate giants, Bill Gates' Microsoft, has just suffered a
crushing legal defeat for engaging in monopolistic behaviour and could
face, some say, a government-decreed dismemberment. The other, Boeing, is
under suspicion for faulty engineering that might have caused the
spectacular crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 on 31 October, which took 217
lives. 

Strategic Blunder

This was not the way the century was supposed to end, in the view of US
officials and businessmen who had pushed for this jewel of a city in the
US Pacific Northwest as the site of the Third WTO Ministerial Meeting.
Seattle was supposed to mark the triumph of free trade and free markets at
the end of the Second Millennium. "Surely, choosing Seattle must rate as
one of the Clinton administration's strategic blunders," says Sarah
Anderson of Washington's Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). "They
overlooked the fact that the city has both a strong labour movement and a
strong environmental movement." The "outside-agitator" theory will not
work in this case. It is Seattle's citizens who have themselves taken the
lead in organizing against WTO and free trade. 

Seattle's anti-WTO groups are, in fact, part of a global network of civil
society organizations that have mushroomed over the last few years in
opposition to free trade. Ironically, it was the triumph of the Uruguay
Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that
established the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994 that propelled the
massive wave of civil society opposition that now threatens to stalemate
future moves in the direction of global trade liberalization. Made up of
farmers, environmentalists, workers, academics, consumers, and social
activists, these non-governmental and people's organizations did not
necessarily see eye-to-eye on key social issues. They were, however,
united in one thing: the fear of the WTO's guiding philosophy and program
of "free trade uber alles" ( as consumer activist Ralph Nader described
it) that they saw as the cutting edge of the drive of transnational
corporations to recast global economic and political rules to remove
barriers to the flow of capital and goods in search of greater profits.
And here they were joined by many developing country governments. 

A key event in global civil society's march to Seattle was the defeat of
the corporate-driven effort to get the OECD--the club of rich
countries--to adopt the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in 1998
by a global campaign mobilized via email and the Internet led by groups
and individuals such as Third World Network, International Agriculture and
Trade Policy Institute (IATP), International Forum on Globalization (IFG),
and the formidable Susan George. Another decisive event was the US
Congress's refusal a year earlier to grant President Bill Clinton
"fast-track authority" in negotiating another trade agreement. This meant
that to be ratified, future agreements would be scrutinized line by line,
a process which could lead to the gutting of treaties negotiated by the
executive. This event was a product of a rare de facto coalition of
progressive NGO's, like IPS and Nader's Public Citizen, labour unions, and
conservative and right-wing groups wary of "multilateral entanglements." 

Caught Napping If the anti-free trade groups were the ones who were
disorganized in 1994, it is the pro-free trade lobby that has been caught
napping in the months leading up to Seattle. They paid little attention to
polls that showed that all over the world, protectionist feelings were on
the rise, attesting to the fact that the anti-free trade (or "pro-fair
trade") forces were winning the debate. 

* They let monopolists like Bill Gates serve as the spokesmen for free
trade. 

* The US government allowed itself to become the transnational Monsanto's
agent in aggressively using the WTO dispute resolution mechanism to dump
genetically modified agricultural products in Europe. 

* The US and the European Union sanctimoniously proclaimed "free trade"
even as they massively increased the subsidies to their farming interests
that are creating the huge surpluses that are destroying the agricultural
sectors of large numbers of developing countries. 

The partisans of free trade have finally awakened to the prospect that
Seattle might turn out to be a massive public relations debacle for
globalization. The half-hearted efforts to convince NGO's that free trade
will result in Jeremy Bentham's paradise marked by "the greatest good for
the greatest number" is giving way to a harsher approach. In the pages of
the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, International
Herald Tribune, Washington Post and other influential establishment
newspapers and periodicals, it is now open season on civil society. NGO's
are called "irrational," "ignorant," "emotional," "Luddites," to name but
a few cute epithets heaped on us. 

Counterattack Typical is the verbal pyrotechnics of Martin Wolf, the
influential columnist of the Financial Times: "At the very least," he
argues, "the substantive claims of those most strongly opposed to trade
liberalization must be challenged. Yet it is quite as important to
confront their political legitimacy as purported representatives of civil
society as a whole. Civil society, says Wolf, "is simply a label for all
those activities, relationships, and organizations that fall outside the
purview of the state. This amorphous mass cannot be represented by anyone.
Those who claim to do so are impostors..." 

Then the call to action: "The fate of the MAI is a warning. Policy- makers
need to prepare their ground far better than this. They also need to
recognize the changed political context in which they operate. The enemies
of the liberal international economy have found new ways of organizing.
Both need to be resisted. What is at stake is far too important to go by
default." 

Queried on well-argued criticisms raised by civil society groups, Mike
Moore, the WTO's new director general, has resorted to uncivil words: "It
does irritate us that someone who never sells a product, never gets a vote
and doesn't actually do anything can come out and attack you." 

Panic

These are not reasonable voices. These are the words of people in panic. 

Selling the WTO has become the most difficult public relations job of our
time. For the problem is very basic: while seemingly compelling in theory,
there is very little empirical evidence that radically liberalized regimes
in trade, finance, and investment actually bring about net benefits
globally. Instead what people have actually seen over the last few decades
of accelerated global liberalization are greater and sharper inequalities
among regions, countries, and classes, plus tremendous environmental
damage wrought by the corporate engines of free trade and free markets. 

What we have seen is the multiplication of unconscionable realities such
as the fact that three of the WTO's corporate hosts in Seattle, Bill Gates
and his two top lieutenants at Microsoft, make more than the combined
income of some 45 developing countries. 

You can't sell that, except to the minuscule global elite that actually
benefits from corporate-driven globalization. 

*Dr. Walden Bello is executive director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the
Global South and professor of sociology and public administration at the
University of the Philippines. 

[...]


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