Fwd: 2000: The Year of Global Protest against Globalization (fwd)

This might be of some interest to some folks on the list... (the
conference that the pre-message refers to is one that will be held at UCI
in April).

dave smith
sociology, uc-irvine

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 08 Jan 2001 18:10:10 -0800
From: Gilbert Gonzalez <gggonzal@uci.edu>
Subject: Fwd: 2000: The Year of Global Protest against Globalization  (fwd)


>The Labor Studies Conference will have a panel devoted to resistance to
>globalization.
>Gil
>
>2000: The Year of Global Protest against Globalization
>
>         by Walden Bello*
>
>         The last year will probably go down as one of those defining
>moments in the history of the world economy, like 1929. Of course, the
>structures of global capitalism appear to be solid, with many in the global
>elite in Washington, Europe, and Asia congratulating themselves for
>containing the Asian financial crisis and trying to exude confidence about
>launching a new round of trade negotiations under the World Trade
>Organization (WTO). What we witnessed, nevertheless, was a dramatic
>series of events that might, in fact, lead to that time when, as the poet
>says, "all that is solid melts into thin air."
>         For global capitalism, the year began a month early, on Nov. 30-Dec.
>1, 1999, when the Third Ministerial of the WTO collapsed in Seattle. It
>ended earlier this month with an equally momentous event: the
>unraveling of the Climate Change Conference in the Hague.
>
>Seattle: the Turning Point
>
>         The definitive history of the Seattle events still needs to be
> written,
>but they cannot be understood without the explosive interaction between
>the militant and unrelenting protests of some 50,000 people in the streets
>and the rebellion of developing country delegates inside the Seattle
>Convention Center. Much has been made about the different motivations
>of the street protesters and the Third World delegates and the
>differences within the ranks of the demonstrators themselves. True,
>some of their stands on key issues, such as the incorporation of labor
>standards into the WTO, were sometimes contradictory. But most of
>them were united by one thing: their opposition to the expansion of a
>system that promoted corporate-led globalization at the expense of
>social goals like justice, community, national sovereignty, cultural
>diversity, and ecological sustainability.
>         Still, the Seattle debacle would not have occurred without another
>development: the inability of the European Union and the United States
>to bridge their differences on key issues, like what rules should govern
>their monopolistic competition for global agricultural markets. And the
>fallout from Seattle might have been less massive were it not for the
>brutal behavior of the Seattle police. The assaults on largely peaceful
>demonstrators by police in their Darth Vader-like uniforms in full view of
>television cameras made Seattle's mean streets the grand symbol of the
>crisis of globalization.
>         When it was established in 1995, the WTO was regarded as the
>crown jewel of capitalism in the era of globalization. With the Seattle
>collapse, however, realities that had been ignored or belittled were
>acknowledged even by the powers-that-be whose brazen confidence in
>their own creation had been shaken. For instance, that the supreme
>institution of globalization was, in fact, fundamentally undemocratic and
>its processes non-transparent was recognized even by representatives
>of some of its stoutest defenders pre-Seattle. The global elite's crisis of
>confidence was evident, for instance, in the words of Stephen Byers, the
>UK Secretary for Trade and Industry: "The WTO will not be able to
>continue in its present form. There has to be fundamental and radical
>change in order for it to meet the needs and aspirations of all 134 of its
>members."
>         Seattle was no one-off event. Bitter criticism of the WTO and the
>Bretton Woods institutions was the not-so-subtle undercurrent of the
>Tenth Assembly of the United Nations Conference on Trade and
>Development (UNCTAD X) held in Bangkok in February. Indeed, what
>brought an otherwise uneventful international meeting to the front pages
>of the world press was the pie-splattered face of outgoing IMF Managing
>Director Michel Camdessus, who was on the receiving end of a perfect
>pitch from anti-IMF activist Robert Naiman.
>
> >From Washington to Melbourne
>
>         Naiman's act helped set the stage for the first really big
> post-Seattle
>confrontation between pro-globalization and anti-globalization forces: the
>spring meeting of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington, DC. Some
>30,000 protesters descended on America's capital in the middle of April
>and found a large section of the northwest part of the city walled off by
>some 10,000 policemen. For four rain-swept days, the protestors tried,
>unsuccessfully, to breach the police phalanx to reach the IMF-World
>Bank complex at 19th and H Sts., NW, resulting in hundreds of arrests.
>The police claimed victory. But it was a case of the protestors losing the
>battle but winning the war. Just the mere fact that 30,000 people had
>come to protest the Bretton Woods twins was already a massive victory
>according to organizers who said that the most one could mobilize in
>previous protests were a few hundred people. Moreover, the focus of the
>media was on Washington, and the first acquaintance of hundreds of
>millions of viewers throughout the world with the World Bank and IMF
>were as controversial institutions under siege from people accusing them
>of inflicting poverty and misery on the developing world.
>         From Washington, the struggle shifted to Chiang Mai in the highlands
>of Northern Thailand, where the Asian Development Bank (ADB), a
>multilateral body notorious for funding gargantuan projects that disrupted
>communities and destabilized the environment, held its 33rd Annual
>Meeting in early May. So shaken was the ADB leadership by the sight of
>some 2000 people asking it to leave town that soon after the conference,
>ADB President Tadao Chino established an vice presidential level "NGO
>Task Force" to deal with civil society. Fearful of even more massive
>protests in 2001, the ADB also shifted the site of its next annual meeting
>from Seattle to Honolulu in the belief that the latter would be a secure
>site.
>         Chiang Mai had significance beyond the ADB, however. With a
>majority of the protesters being poor Thai farmers, the Chiang Mai
>demonstrations showed that the anti-globalization mass base went
>beyond middle class youth and organized labor in the advanced
>countries. Equally important, key organizers of the Chiang Mai actions,
>like Bamrung Kayotha, one of the leaders of the Forum of the Poor, had
>participated in the Seattle protest, and they saw Chiang Mai not as a
>discrete event but as a link in the chain of international protests against
>globalization.
>         The battle lines were next drawn Down Under, in Melbourne,
>Australia, in early September. The glittering Crown Casino by
>Melbourne's upscale waterfront had been chosen as the site of the Asia-
>Pacific Summit of the World Economic Forum (Davos Forum) which had
>become a leading force in the effort to put a more liberal face to
>globalization. The casino, many activists felt, was a fitting symbol of
>finance-driven globalization. In nearly three days of street battles, some
>5,000 protesters were at times able to seal off key entrances to the
>Casino, forcing the organizers to bring some delegates in and out by
>helicopter, again in full view of television. And again, as in Seattle, rough
>handling of demonstrators by the police, many of them mounted,
>magnified the global controversy over the event.
>
>The Battle of Prague
>
>         Later that month came Europe's turn to serve as a battleground.
>Some 10,000 people came from all over the continent to Prague,
>prepared to engage in an apocalyptic confrontation with the Bretton
>Woods institutions during the latter's annual meeting in that beautiful
>Eastern European city in the most beautiful of seasons. Prague lived up
>to its billing. With demonstrations and street battles trapping delegates at
>the Congress Center or swirling around them as they tried to make their
>way back to their quarters in Prague's famed Old Town, the agenda of
>the meeting was, as one World Bank official put it, "effectively seized" by
>the anti-globalization protesters. When a large number of delegates
>refused to go to the Congress Center in the next two days, the
>convention had to be abruptly concluded, a day before its scheduled
>ending.
>         As important as the protests in Prague was the debate held on Sept.
>23 at the famous Prague Castle between representatives of civil society
>and the leadership of the World Bank and the IMF, an event orchestrated
>by Czech President Vaclav Havel. Instead of bridging the gap between
>the two sides, the debate widened it, since, in response to concrete
>demands, World Bank President James Wolfensohn and IMF Managing
>Director Horst Koehler were not prepared to go beyond platitudes and
>generalities, as if worried that they might overstep the bounds set by
>their G-7 masters. George Soros, who defended the Bank and Fund at
>the debate, said it all when he admitted that Wolfensohn and Koehler
>had "performed terribly" and had blown their most important encounter
>with civil society.
>         After Seattle, much talk about reforming the global economic system
>to bring on board those "being left behind" by globalization was emitted
>by establishment personalities like Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair,
>Kofi Annan, and Nike CEO Phil Knight. The Davos Forum, in fact, placed
>the question of reform at the top of the agenda of the meetings it held for
>the global elite.
>         A year after Seattle, however, there has been precious little in the
>way of concrete action.
>         The most prominent reform initiative, the Group of Seven's plan to
>lessen the servicing of the external debt of the 41 Highly Indebted Poor
>Countries (HIPC) has actually delivered a debt reduction of only $US 1
>billion since it began in 1996 - or a reduction of their debt servicing by
>only 3 per cent in the past four and a half years!
>         One year after the Seattle collapse, talk about reforming the
>decision-making process at the WTO has vanished, with Director
>General Mike Moore, in fact, saying that that the non-transparent,
>undemocratic "Consensus/Green Room" system that triggered the
>developing country revolt in Seattle is "non-negotiable."
>         When it comes to the question of the international financial
>architecture, serious discussion of controls on speculative capital like
>Tobin taxes has been avoided. An unreformed IMF continues to be at
>the center of the system's "firefighting system." A preemptive, pre-crisis
>credit line at the Fund (which no country wants to avail of) and a
>toothless Financial Stability Forum - where there is little developing
>country participation - appear to be the only "innovations" to emerge
>from the Asian, Russian, and Brazilian financial crises of the last three
>years.
>         At the IMF and the World Bank, similarly, there is no longer any talk
>about diluting the voting shares of the US and European Union in favor
>of greater voting power for the Third World countries, much less of doing
>away with the feudal practices of always having a European head the
>Fund and an American to lead the Bank. The much-vaunted consultative
>process in the preparation of "Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers"
>(PRSP) by governments applying for loans is turning out to be nothing
>more than an effort to add a veneer of public participation to the same
>technocratic process that is churning out development strategies with the
>same old emphasis on growth via deregulation and liberalization of
>trade, with maybe a safety net here and there. At the Bank, strong
>resistance to innovations that would put the priority on social reforms led
>to the resignation of two reformers: Joseph Stiglitz, the chief economist,
>and Ravi Kanbur, the head of the World Development Report task force.
>
>Debacle in The Hague
>
>         The protests throughout the year had a strong anti-TNC strain, with
>the World Bank, IMF, and WTO regarded as servitors of the
>corporations. A strong distrust of TNCs had, in fact, developed, even in
>the United States, where over 70 per cent of people surveyed felt
>corporations had too much power over their lives. Distrust and opposition
>to TNCs could only be deepened by the collapse in early December of
>the Hague Conference on Climate Change, owing to US's industry's
>unwillingness to significantly cut back on its emission of greenhouse
>gases. At a time that most indicators are showing an acceleration of
>global warming trends, Washington's move has reinforced the conviction
>of the anti-globalization movement that the US economic elite is
>determined to grab all the benefits of globalization while sticking the
>costs on the rest of the world.
>         Assessing the post-Seattle situation, C. Fred Bergsten, a prominent
>advocate of globalization, told a Trilateral Commission meeting in Tokyo
>last April that "the anti-globalization forces are now in the ascendancy."
>That description is even more accurate now. With the global elite itself
>having lost confidence in them, a classic crisis of legitimacy has
>overtaken the key institutions of global economic governance. If
>legitimacy is not regained, it is only a matter of time before structures
>collapse, no matter how seemingly solid they are, since legitimacy is the
>foundation of power structures. The process of delegitimation is difficult
>to reverse once it takes hold. Indeed, what we might call, following
>Gramsci, as the "withdrawal of consent" is likely to spread to the core
>institutions and practices of global capitalism, including the transnational
>corporation.
>         2001 promises to be an equally trying time for the globalist project.
>
>* Executive director of Focus on the Global South in Bangkok and
>professor at the University of the Philippines.
>