-Caveat Lector-
World Inc. under siege
Summit mayhem isn't like anything we've seen before
by Vinay Menon, POP CULTURE REPORTER,
Toronto Star,
July 29, 2001
ACTIVISM has never been so misunderstood.
From Muggles to Wombles, to the A-17, M-1 and S-26
protests. The fall of the Berlin Wall. The creation of
the Quebec Wall. White Overalls. Black Bloc. Fast
track. Free trade. Structural adjustments. Life
improvement. Death economy.
To the uninitiated, the frenetic images of the
costumed protesters are equally baffling: Some are
dressed as endangered sea turtles or genetically
modified tomatoes. There are mad cows and sad hawks,
Zapatistas and Sandinistas, giant Uncle Sams and
stylized Grim Reapers.
This is the anti-globalization movement. Sprawling,
disparate, powerful. A political force unto itself
that, given its international scope and staggering
number of participants, is unprecedented in history.
And, it would appear, at a significant crossroads.
"We are at a very important juncture," says Antonia
Juhasz, project director for the San Francisco-based
International Forum on Globalization. "We are
simultaneously feeling out our strengths and
weaknesses. As such, we are in a place of tremendous
responsibility."
A responsibility that only grows as world leaders
stop to take wide-eyed notice.
"There is a much more significant phenomenon behind
all this and that's the rise of a civil society, of
non-governmental organizations and activist groups as
players in the game of world politics," explains
Ronald Deibert, a political science professor at the
University of Toronto.
"And this raises some profound questions about the
nature of world politics; first-order questions of
political theory that we used to talk about on a
domestic scale. But now it's global."
Like previous social movements - anti-nuclear, civil
rights, anti-Vietnam War, women's rights, the
environment, identity politics - anti-globalization
has reached a fork in the proverbial road where
internal considerations are overtaking external
strategies.
"There are definitely some serious issues that the
movement is now grappling with," says David Robbins,
trade campaigner with the Council of Canadians, the
country's largest citizens' watchdog organization.
"Violence is clearly one of them, but I would add to
that issues around race, inclusion and exclusion. And
also issues of gender, in terms of who holds power
within these groups."
In the last two years, anti-globalization messages
have been distorted through a haze of pepper spray and
rock throwing, rubber bullets and Molotov cocktails,
hurled insults and blasts from water cannons.
"The public is in a sense of confusion right now,"
says Robin Wagner-Pacifici, a sociology professor at
Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. "I don't sense
that the public is writing off the protesters as a
bunch of troublemakers. But, on the other hand, I
don't think they are completely sympathetic, and that
has to do with the segment of protesters that use
violence."
Tracing the genesis of the anti-globalization
movement is at best a subjective exercise. Some say it
started in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
Some say it was the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas,
Mexico, a couple of years later. Maybe it was the fall
of the Berlin Wall.
But many believe the movement gained flashbulb
momentum in 1996, when it was revealed that a line of
clothing from talk-show host Kathie Lee Gifford was
manufactured in Honduran sweatshops by young women who
toiled in abysmal conditions for below-subsistence
wages.
At that moment, a confluence of factors
crystallized: distrust of much-publicized (but
nebulous) trade agreements, growing antipathy toward
laissez-faire principles and a gnawing sense that
multinational corporations were dictating the
international political agenda.
"There are a lot of people suspicious and angry
about the ascendancy of corporate power and how much
influence big business has in the U.S. and around the
world in shaping policy," says Han Shan, program
director for the California-based Ruckus Society.
In December, the Institute for Policy Studies, a
Washington think-tank, released a study titled Top
200: The Rise Of Corporate Global Power. The report
found that 51 of the 100 largest economies in the
world were corporations.
Meaning, as a measure of gross domestic product or
annual sales, General Motors is bigger than Denmark.
General Electric is bigger than Portugal. IBM is
bigger than Singapore. Hitachi is bigger than Chile.
Sony is bigger than Pakistan. Nissan is bigger than
New Zealand.
The study also found that combined sales from the
world's biggest 200 companies is 18 times larger than
the combined annual income of the 24 per cent of the
world's population who live in severe poverty.
Between 1983 and 1999, profits from the top 200
companies grew by 362 per cent, while the number of
people they employed grew by only 14 per cent.
"If you were to land on Earth today, you would see a
world of tremendous inequality," says Joshua Karliner,
executive director of CorpWatch. "The vast majority of
people on this planet are living in poverty and
without access to the wonderful technological,
medical, informational and scientific advances that
humanity has achieved.
"And that is what this is all about."
As Juliette Beck, economic rights co-ordinator for
Global Exchange, puts it: "We are fighting for
economic justice to stop the growing divide between
rich and poor. How can you not be concerned that every
major ecosystem on the planet is in decline? Our
fisheries, our topsoil, our air, our water are all in
decline and being devastated by unsustainable economic
policies."
This concern reached a watershed in Seattle, where
approximately 60,000 protesters from all political,
social and environmental persuasions managed to shut
down a meeting of the World Trade Organization.
Once perceived as staid centres of international
bureaucracy, the WTO, as well as the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund (IMF), are now targets of
anti-globalization activists, who regard these
institutions as murky cabals - unaccountable,
undemocratic and unwitting facilitators of the
corporate agenda.
So, instead of just targeting companies such as
Nike, Starbucks, McDonald's and The Gap for exploiting
workers and promoting "global monoculture," protesters
have new power structures to burn in effigy.
"We do not have a voice when these rules are being
developed. This is not democracy and that's really
apparent," says Anna Dashtgard, an anti-globalization
activist and organizer for Common Front On The WTO, a
coalition of more than 60 Canadian organizations,
including those championing labour, the environment
and social and human rights.
"For perspective on how big this is in Canada, the
anti-globalization movement, at this point, is way
more powerful than the NDP. There is no question about
it."
With size comes publicity, power and influence. And,
in turn, opposition.
It's not surprising then, activists say, that
politicians and corporate executives denounce the
movement as misguided and hopelessly misinformed.
Critics like Thomas L. Friedman, a two-time Pulitzer
Prize winner and author of The Lexus And The Olive
Tree: Understanding Globalization, argue that
globalization is why the living standards for
one-quarter of humanity quadrupled within a
generation.
George W. Bush says free trade is the only way
developing nations can adjust and thrive in the new,
information- and services-based economy.
Others lambaste anti-globalism activists and raise
the spectre of First World protectionism, calling the
protesters parochial, radical, obtuse and purveyors of
"chic activism." Many critics observe, with great
cynicism, that most of the protesters are white,
middle-class citizens "with really cushy lives."
As the WTO's Mike Moore said recently: "The people
that stand outside and say they work in the interests
of the poorest people...they make me want to vomit.
Because the poorest people on our planet, they are the
ones that need us the most."
Juhasz, of the International Forum on Globalization,
is quick to take exception. "I would encourage people
to look at the millions upon millions who have
protested in the developing world against
globalization policies. And then ask, `By what
standard do you judge that the developing world wants
trade?'
"More people have been protesting and dying - dying!
- in the developing world against these policies than
have ever lifted a finger in the north."
She says mass protests, such as those in Bolivia,
Argentina, India, Haiti, Brazil and Indonesia, get
almost no attention from mainstream Western media. To
attract the cameras, it seems, flag-waving protests
need to be unfurled against an industrialized
backdrop.
This becomes most pronounced when a protest turns
nasty and confrontation becomes the central focus of
satellite-fed coverage.
And since Seattle, the protests are more violent.
Last month, in Goteborg, Sweden, 25,000
demonstrators clashed with police at a European Union
summit. There were dozens of arrests and injuries,
including three people who were shot by police.
Similar protests unfolded in Quebec city, Barcelona,
Salzburg, Davos, Melbourne and Washington.
Last September's IMF-World Bank summit in Prague was
particularly fierce, with more than 130 people
injured, including nearly two dozen police officers.
The mayhem reached a new, frightening level two
weeks ago, when an Italian protester was killed by
police during demonstrations in Genoa that attracted
more than 100,000 people.
It is perhaps not surprising that the movement's
first Western death was recorded in Italy, a nation
with a long history of anarchist groups and
extravagant politics. The country is home to sects
like Ya Basta! and Tutte Bianche. At Genoa, these
groups were joined by bands like Wombles (White
Overalls Movement Building Libertarian Effective
Struggles) and Black Bloc.
The Bloc was instrumental in N30 - a reference to
Nov. 30, the first day of the Seattle protests. The
month/date pairing has become a shorthand form to
communicate protest dates on the Internet. Notes
Deibert: "It's phenomenal the way the Internet plays a
part in all of this."
It was the Internet that also helped spread the word
from Genoa that an activist had been shot by police.
The killing and the consequent bedlam stunned many
organizations.
"If you look at some of the talk within the
organizations and groups involved in orchestrating
these protests, this is now the hot talk," says John
Delicath, a professor of communications at the
University of Cincinnati.
"There seems to be an overwhelming consensus that
there needs to be moves and public gestures to condemn
the violence."
Which may be why, at a grassroots level, some of the
world's anti-globalization groups are rethinking the
"Summit Formula." When the WTO assembles for its
post-Seattle meeting, in Doha, Qatar, in November,
there may be a change in strategy.
"It will be the first time since Seattle that
instead of having one big mass action, the emphasis
will be on community-based actions at the local
level," predicts Dashtgard.
Adds Shan: "What a lot of people are trying to
figure out is how to stop focusing on these giant,
international summits...and get back to the business
of local, community organizing."
It's a conscious attempt to jump away from the
cops-versus-protesters scenario. ("Because that
obscures the fundamental cultural conflict," Shan
says, "which is a system that worships money versus a
system that worships life.")
Amory Starr is an activist, sociology professor at
Colorado State University and author of last year's
Naming The Enemy: Anti-Corporate Movements Confront
Globalization. She disagrees with the decision to
return to local protesting.
"It's clear that we are doing really well, because
they are scared of us," she says.
"There's tons of scholarship on our side documenting
how free trade does not benefit the poor. That
argument is a neo-liberal economic argument that has
not changed in 50 years."
And that's another challenge anti-globalization
protesters face: Many members of the public can't
grasp the abstract, socio-economic principles upon
which the movement is based. So critics start
dismissing groups as "militant radicals," "Yuppie
freaks," "Hippie wannabes," "flat-Earth advocates,"
"neo-Marxists," "neo-Luddites" and "anti-capitalist
pipe dreamers."
Even the term "anti-globalization movement" is
misleading. There is no formal structure, no
hierarchy. No one leader. No one platform. For some,
there isn't even an "anti" - they believe it's not a
question of "if we globalize," but how.
There are, instead, widely different groups, with
widely different agendas. And these groups will only
get bigger and more effective, professor Deibert says.
It's a trend.
"Citizens are side-stepping traditional structures
of political participation and becoming active
participants, as opposed to spectators in the game of
world politics.
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