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Walden Bello - 2003
Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines and president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition. A retired professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines, he is currently a senior analyst at the Bangkok-based analysis and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He is the author of 15 books, the most recent of which is The Food Wars.
A Year in the Life of the World Social Forum (14 January 2003)
On January 23-28, thousands of people from all over the world will converge on Porto Alegre, Brazil. The pilgrims will include African landless peasants, Filipino trade unionists, Palestinian liberation fighters, indigenous people from all over Latin America, and large delegations of civil society activists from India, North America, and Europe. The occasion is the World Social Forum (WSF).
This year's gathering, the third in a row in this city of 1.3 million, acquires special significance owing to the recent resounding victory of Luis Inacio da Silva, better known as Lula, in Brazil's presidential elections. Lula is the prime mover of the Workers' Party (PT), one of the organizational mainstays of the WSF. The WSF or "Porto Alegre process", as it is also called, has become the prime organizational expression of a surging movement against corporate-driven globalization. Since the events of September 11, 2001, it has also acquired a strong anti-war dimension, and opposition to the US design to launch a war on Iraq is expected to dominate this year's proceedings. The Porto Alegre phenomenon has had its share of critics, even among progressives. One prominent American intellectual has characterized it as a gathering mainly of people who want to "reform" globalization. Another has blasted it as a forum dominated intellectually and politically by Northern political and social movements. Functions of the WSF These criticisms have not, however, deterred the WSF from drawing widespread adherence globally. This year, some 100, 000 people are expected to show up, up from 75,000 in 2002 and 15,000 in 2001. Perhaps, the reason is that it fulfills three indispensable functions for the anti-globalization movement. First, it represents a space-both physical and temporal-for this diverse movement to meet, to network, and, quite simply, to feel and affirm itself. Second, it is a retreat during which the movement gathers its energies and charts the directions of its continuing drive to confront and roll back the processes, institutions, and structures of global capitalism. Third, Porto Alegre provides a site and space for the movement to elaborate, discuss, and debate the vision, values, and institutions of an alternative world order. Prelude: the ESF and ASF 2002 was marked by an expansion and deepening of the WSF. Indeed, this year's meeting will be the culminating point of an exciting year-long global process. A number of cities, including Buenos Aires and Caracas, have held Porto Alegre-style social forums. It was, however, the regional social forums that were the exciting innovation of the year. The European Social Forum (ESF), held in Florence, Italy, on November 6-9, 2002, drew over 40,000 people, more than three times the expected number. Even more amazing was the ESF-sponsored million-person march on 9 November against the planned US war on Iraq, which took place with not one of the incidents of mass violence that scare mongers like Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci had predicted. Equally impressive was the recently concluded Asian Social Forum (ASF) that took place in the historic city of Hyderabad, India, from January 2 to 7, which drew over 14,400 registered participants, mostly from the host country, though there was representation from 41 other countries. The atmosphere was electric from the first day of the event. During almost every minute of the five-day marathon, drumbeats and chants of mini-rallies filled the air at the Nizam College grounds, the main site of the conference. There, and in around 40 other sites throughout the city, 18 conferences and plenary events, 178 seminars and workshops, a youth camp, and scores of cultural presentations took place. Topics included resistance to the World Trade Organization (WTO), Dalit (outcaste) rights, the threat of fundamentalist movements, women's empowerment, food sovereignty, big dams, the Palestinian struggle, natural resource theft, and alternative economics. Militant struggle against militarism was the note on which the peoples' gathering began, with Nora de Cortinas, co-founder of the Argentine human rights group Madres de Plaza de Mayo, telling the opening plenary on January 2 that "We must not allow the US to launch its war on Iraq". Opposition to the "venom of communal hatred" was emphasized by Mehda Patkar, head of the National Alliance of Peoples' Movements, who called for the formation of a broad people's coalition against the government-supported fundamentalist forces responsible for the recent slaughter of over 2000 Muslims in Gujarat state. Resistance to globalization was the clarion call of former President of India K.R. Narayanan at the outdoor rally closing the event. "We want the world to be one but not globalized, ruled by one country", he stated. "The world is pluralistic and will remain so". Narayanan characterized the "voice being raised at the ASF" as a "voice for human rights, against violence, and against imperialism, and it is only right that it has come from India because it was India that sounded the death knell for an empire on which the sun was never supposed to set". As was the case with the ESF, the ASF had its share of logistical mishaps like non-functioning sound systems and workshop sites that took hours to find. Like the ESF, too, the ASF had its share of friction among the groups that put it together. The ASF was stitched together in less than a year by what noted Indian activist Minar Pimple characterized as a coalition that was "one third Gandhian socialists, one third left political parties, and one third independent organizations and individuals". Given the fragmentation of the progressive movement in both Europe and Asia, however, that the ASF and ESF came together magnificently in the end was a stunning achievement. ASF participant Nancy Gaikwad of the Oppressed People's Movement summed up many people's feelings when she said, "This is the first time in a long, long time that this has happened in India, for people from different political streams to be able to work together on a common platform". Towards Unity? Indeed, one of the main reasons the Porto Alegre process is gaining such momentum is precisely that is provides a venue where movements and organizations can find ways of working together despite their differences. While the usual ultra-leftist groups remain defiantly outside it, the Porto Alegre process in Brazil, Europe, and India has brought to the forefront the common values and aspirations of a variety of political traditions and tendencies. The Porto Alegre process may be the main expression of the coming together of a movement that has been wandering for a long time in the wilderness of fragmentation and competition. The pendulum, in other words, may now be swinging to the side of unity, driven by the sense that in an increasingly deadly struggle against unilateralist militarization and aggressive corporate globalization, movements have no choice but to hang together, or they will hang separately. Porto Alegre and Lula As thousands of people converge on Porto Alegre in the coming week, there is another development that is equally significant. Since Seattle, the anti-corporate globalization movement has attained a critical mass globally, in the sense that its ability to assemble forces at significant junctures, such as the December 1999 Seattle WTO ministerial and the July 2001 Genoa meeting of the Group of Eight, enabled it to impact on international developments and acquire a high ideological and political profile globally. Yet being a global actor did not necessarily translate into being a significant actor at the national level, where traditional elites and parties continued to be in a commanding position. Over the last year, however, the movement has achieved a decisive majority at the national level in a number of countries, most of them in Latin America. Not only has espousal of neoliberal policies been a surefire path to electoral disaster, but political parties or movements promoting anti-globalization policies have achieved electoral power in Ecuador and Brazil, joining the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela at the forefront of the regional anti-neoliberal struggle. Perhaps most inspiring is the case of Luis Inacio da Silva, or Lula, in Brazil, who won 63 per cent of the presidential vote last October. Lula is the prime figure in the Workers' Party (PT) and, as everyone knows, the Workers' Party is the main pillar of the WSF. Not surprisingly, many of those trekking to Porto Alegre this year will be coming with one question uppermost in their mind: What can the victory of Lula and the PT teach us about coming to power in our countries? Many personalities of the international progressive movement are slated to come to Porto Alegre. By far the most interesting, most popular, and most sought after will be Lula, the personification of the new Latin American left. And this year's meeting will be, in many ways, a celebration of a movement that, by achieving a remarkable measure of political unity amidst diversity, has changed the face of Brazilian politics. World Social Forum: Coming Together of a Movement (22 January 2003)
Since Seattle, the anti-corporate globalization movement has attained critical mass globally, in the sense that its ability to mass forces at significant junctures, such as the December 1999 Seattle WTO ministerial and the July 2001 Genoa meeting of the G8, enabled it to effect international developments and acquire a high ideological and political profile globally
The World Social Forum (WSF), to be held on January 23-28 for the third year in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has become the prime organizational expression of a surging movement against corporate-driven globalization Since the events of September 11, 2001, it has also acquired a strong anti-war dimension, and opposition to US plans to launch a war on Iraq is expected to dominate this year’s proceedings. The Porto Alegre phenomenon has had its share of critics, even among progressives. One prominent American intellectual has characterized it as a gathering mainly of people who want to "reform" globalization Another has blasted it as a forum dominated intellectually and politically by Northern political and social movements. These criticisms have not, however, deterred the WSF from drawing widespread adherence globally. This year, some 100,000 people are expected to show up, up from 75,000 in 2002 and this year's meeting will be the culmination of an exciting year-long global process. A number of cities, including Buenos Aires and Caracas, have held Porto Alegre-style social forums. It was, however, the regional social forums that were the exciting innovation of the year. The European Social Forum (ESF), held in Florence, Italy, on November 6-9, 2002, drew over 40,000 people, more than three times the expected number. Even more amazing was the ESF-sponsored million-person march on November 9 against the planned US war on Iraq, which took place with not one of the incidents of mass violence that scare mongerers like Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci had predicted. Equally impressive was the recently concluded Asian Social Forum (ASF) that took place in the historic city of Hyderabad, India, from January 2 to 7, which drew over 14,400 registered participants, mostly from the host country, though there was representation from 41 other countries. Topics included resistance to the World Trade Organization (WTO), Dalit (outcaste) rights, the threat of fundamentalist movements, women's empowerment, food sovereignty, big dams, the Palestinian struggle, natural resource theft, and alternative economics. Former president of India K.R. Narayanan characterized the message of the ASF as a "voice for human rights, against violence, and against imperialism, and it is only right that it has come from India because it was India that sounded the death knell for an empire on which the sun was never supposed to set". One of the main reasons the Porto Alegre process is gaining such momentum is precisely that is provides a venue where movements and organizations can find ways of working together despite their differences. While the usual ultra leftist groups remain defiantly outside it, the Porto Alegre process in Brazil, Europe, and India has brought to the forefront the common values and aspirations of a variety of political traditions and tendencies. The Porto Alegre process may be the main expression of the coming together of a movement that has been wandering for a long time in the wilderness of fragmentation and competition. The pendulum, in other words, may now be swinging to the side of unity, driven by the sense that in an increasingly deadly struggle against unilateralist militarization and aggressive corporate globalization, movements have no choice but to hang together or they will hang separately. There is another development that is equally significant. Since Seattle, the anti-corporate globalization movement has attained critical mass globally, in the sense that its ability to mass forces at significant junctures, such as the December 1999 Seattle WTO ministerial and the July 2001 Genoa meeting of the G8, enabled it to effect international developments and acquire a high ideological and political profile globally. Yet being a global actor did not necessarily translate into being a significant actor at the national level, where traditional elites and parties continued to be in a commanding position. Over the last year, however, the movement has achieved critical mass at the national level in a number of countries, most of them in Latin America. Not only has espousal of neoliberal policies been a sure fire path to electoral disaster, but political parties or movements promoting anti-globalization policies have achieved electoral power in Ecuador and Brazil, joining the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela at the forefront of the regional anti-neoliberal struggle. Perhaps most inspiring is the case of Luis Inacio da Silva or Lula in Brazil, who won 63 per cent of the presidential vote last October. Lula is the prime figure in the Workers' Party (PT), and as everyone knows, the Workers' Party is the main pillar of the WSF. Not surprisingly, many of those trekking to Porto Alegre this year will be coming with one question uppermost in their mind: What can the victory of Lula and the PT teach us about coming to power in our countries? Many personalities of the international progressive movement are slated to come to Porto Alegre. By far the most interesting, most popular, most sought after will be Lula, the personification of the new Latin American left. And this year's meeting will be, in many ways, a celebration of a movement that, by achieving a remarkable measure of political unity amidst diversity, has changed the face of Brazilian politics. The Reemergence of Balance-of-Power Politics (10 February 2003)
People speak and write today about feelings of utter powerlessness to prevent the coming war. So powerful is the US. And so determined to strike. Impotence in the face of the supremely powerful. With our imagination limited by memories of the superpower standoffs and ambiguous victories and defeats of the Cold War period, it is tempting to see the current situation as unique.
Yet the world has been here before. In the summer of 1940, after the fall of France, when Nazi Germany’s determined drive to global dominance seemed unstoppable by any possible combination of forces. In the Europe of the early 1800’s, when a seemingly invincible Napoleon put to rout in battle after battle any military alliance its many foes could muster. The last few years and the coming ones have been and will be bad for world peace. They are, however, rich in lessons about international power relations. And the lessons are not all grim. Hegemony and Insecurity To be sure, the first lesson is discouraging: that unchallenged superpower status stimulates conflict, not peace. This did not seem so clear in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. Then, there was widespread in the West an expectation that the US would use its sole superpower status to undergird a multilateral order that would institutionalize its hegemony but assure an Augustan peace globally. Even some people not enamored of the United States speculated that with superpower rivalry gone and all other potential rivals taking themselves out of the competition, Washington’s quest for military superiority and strategic advantage would slow down. Europe, Japan, and China seemed ready to settle down to a condition of controlled competition in the economic sphere while accepting long-term American dominance in the security area. In fact, as the nineties rolled on, it became clear that what the end of the Cold War ushered in was a volatile period more dangerous than the Cold War, when the superpower standoff warded off big wars, contained smaller wars, and gave relations among states a certain predictability. The instability of the new era did not stem primarily from the emergence of "irrational" non-state actors that were prepared to engage in "asymmetric warfare" against conventionally powerful state actors, though many Beltway intellectuals made their names painting terrorists as the greatest threats to global peace and stability in the post-Cold War era. It came from the transformation of the balance of power in the global state system. The Balance of Power The balance of power among states is the subject of John Mearsheimer’s magnum opus The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Regarded as the definitive work on the subject, the book argues persuasively that in all balance of power systems, great powers aim not so much to achieve a defensive balance against their rivals as to achieve a significant degree of military and political advantage over them. Mearsheimer is also correct that "bipolar" systems such as the US-Soviet faceoff that dictated the dynamics of the Cold War period are more stable and less likely to break down than "multipolar" systems like the pre-Word War II situation, which was marked by relative equality among a number of powerful states. What Mearsheimer fails to tell us, however, is that the situation most productive of conflict, tension, and instability is one where there is one overwhelmingly dominant power surrounded by a number of midget powers-meaning today’s world. He quotes with approval Kant’s comment that "It is the desire of every state, or of its ruler, to arrive at a condition of perpetual peace by conquering the whole world, if that were possible". Yet he does not seem to appreciate the fact that Kant’s insight is perhaps of greatest relevance in the post-Cold War world, where American military and political preponderance is unmatched. This intellectual failure is jarring, and it stems from a primordial belief that Washington, unlike other great powers, is not just motivated by naked realpolitik but by the desire for a benign global order as well. These ideological blinders prevent Mearsheimer and many other American intellectuals from appreciating the fact that the US has switched its role from that of being an "offshore balancer" against would-be hegemons like Hitler and the former Soviet Union to being itself an aggressive power bent on achieving world hegemony. The Unilateralist Conjuncture Many critics of US power, for their part, attribute George W. Bush’s unilateralism to the self-centered, provincial worldview of the American right. This explanation confuses cause and effect. Bush’s unilateralist ideology is a product of a unique structural conjuncture: the consolidation of the civilian-military "defense establishment" that won the Cold War as the dominant faction of the US elite and the disappearance of an effective countervailing force to US power in the global state system. To mask its shift from containment to hegemony, however, the defense establishment needed a rationale, and the last decade saw its invoking a succession of actors to fill the role vacated by the Soviet Union-North Korea, China, Al Qaeda, the "Axis of Evil". Paying very little respect to the actual state and capacity of the targeted regimes, this process was embarrassingly opportunistic and failed to achieve credibility even among a critical mass of its prime target group, the American people. From this perspective, the September 11 attack was a godsend that consolidated domestic support for the open-ended and preemptive unilateralist interventionism that was articulated in George W. Bush’s historic speech on Sept. 17, 2002. As for the multilateralist paradigm, this was never a serious alternative entertained by any significant faction of the US elite except perhaps for marginalized old liberal circles and personalities like Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton, who distrusted fellow Democrat Jimmy Carter, may have invoked multilateralist rhetoric but he did not hesitate to act unilaterally-as he did when he ordered the bombing of Serbia despite European objections during the Kosovo crisis. Containing Washington That is the bad news. The good news is that even when backed up by overwhelming force, unchallenged hegemony is a transient state. As was the case in Napoleonic Europe, lesser powers may calculate that a posture of compliance or subservience may be necessary in the short-term, but they know that it is disastrous as a long-term strategy, for it is simply an invitation to more aggression. This is what the UN Security Council standoff over Iraq is all about. It is less about Saddam’s compliance and more about containing a hegemon that feels it has a blank cheque to intervene, topple, and depose anywhere in the world with the dangerous rationale of preventing a threat, no matter how abstract, from "reaching the American people". If France and Germany at this point seem willing to go the distance in stubbornly blocking the US from waging war on Iraq, it is to discourage future US moves that might pose a more direct threat to their national security. Cultural bonds or a sense of generosity for being liberated from Nazism 50 years ago are weak rationales when compared to the fear of encouraging aggressive ambitions that could translate into economic bullying in the short term and military blackmail in the long term. However the current Iraq crisis is resolved-and indeed France and Germany may yet capitulate under pressure-it has already accelerated the decline of the Atlantic Alliance of the Cold War era, a development captured in US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s disdainful comments about recalcitrant "Old Europe". And it marks the rebirth of balance of power politics, with the lesser powers moved into active cooperation to contain US aggression. Joining France and Germany in what is emerging as this era’s version of the pre-World War I Triple Alliance are China and Russia, with the more weighty developing countries like Brazil and perhaps even South Korea eventually hopping on board. Though individual members may change, this coalition is likely to be long-term. And, unlike currently, where its real dynamics are clouded by the debate over the question of Saddam’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, its basis will eventually be more clearly articulated as the defense of national and global security against the American threat. Global Resistance This reemergence of a system of containment at the level of the state system must be seen in the context of the advance of other movements of global resistance. There are, of course, the Islamic fundamentalists, who have made tremendous gains among the Arab and Muslim masses owing to the US mailed-fist response to September 11 events and its alliance with Israel. The coming war on Iraq is likely to drastically weaken the so-called moderate regimes in the Arab and Muslim world and eventually give rise to governments uncompromising in their resistance to US interventionism. Not too long from now, we may see radical Islamic regimes in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia. Then there is the burgeoning global movement against corporate-driven globalization, which has, in the last year and a half, fused with the anti-war movement to form a powerful anti-US front at the level of international civil society. Like the Islamic fundamentalist movement, elements of this diverse movement are likely to assume state power in a number of countries in the coming years. Indeed, they already have in a number of Latin American countries-in Brazil, Venezuela, and Ecuador. Islamic fundamentalism and the anti-corporate globalization movement will not mainly function to add diplomatic and material weight to the containment of the US. What they will do is something equally important though, and that is to erode the legitimacy of the American enterprise and expose it for what it is: a naked bid for hegemony. This is critical since the staying power of hegemons is ultimately based on the perception of their legitimacy. The next few years and decades are likely to witness ever more brazen efforts to reorder the world to better serve US interests. But they will also consolidate an anti-US coalition of the less powerful while accelerating the spread of anti-US movements in global civil society. This is not the unchallenged hegemony that Washington aspires for, but the classic dynamics of overreach, of overextension. For if there is one unambiguous lesson in the history of nations, it is that empire is transient while resistance is permanent. From Tokyo with Love (17 February 2003)
Waiting for my flight out of Narita international airport, I see a familiar face on television-that of US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, this time demanding that Japan open up its agricultural market in the same way that "other countries have opened their markets to Japanese manufactured goods". It is the concluding press conference of the Tokyo mini-ministerial and the uncompromising words and body language of Zoellick, his pal European Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, and other participants spell trouble for the ongoing World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations on agriculture.
The draft negotiating document prepared by WTO farm negotiations chairman Stuart Harbinson zoomed to the top of the agenda when, even before the meeting began, Japanese Minister of Agriculture Tadamori Oshima rejected the paper's proposals for minimum cuts of between 25 and 45 per cent and average reductions of 40 to 60 per cent on all farm tariffs over five years. The European Union (EU) also attacked the Harbinson proposal as "unbalanced" for proposing that "trade-distorting" subsidies be cut by 60 per cent over five years and that export subsidies be phased out entirely over nine years. Both Japan and the EU denounced the paper as ensuring that the US would be the only victor in the negotiations. Harbinson Draft Sidesteps Developing Country Concerns In the fight between the agro-export giants, the concerns of developing countries were conveniently lost. As Focus on the Global South analyst Aileen Kwa points out, the Harbinson text does not address their fear that EU and US subsidies will now mostly be shifted to the so-called "Green Box", a listing of exempted subsidies that include the massive direct payments to farming interests that directly or indirectly distort trade. The Harbinson text also completely ignores proposals put forward by Argentina and the Philippines (both of which were not invited to the Tokyo meeting) for countervailing mechanisms that would allow developing countries to raise tariffs on crops subsidized by the developed countries by amounts proportionate to the subsidies. Instead, for developing countries, tariffs greater than 120 per cent are to be slashed by 40 per cent, while those between 20 and 120 per cent will be decreased by 33 per cent, with no linkage to the subsidies maintained by the wealthy agro-exporters. The draft also contains no meaningful recommendations that would apply the principle of "special and differential treatment" to the developing countries, giving their agricultural sectors significant protection for structural reasons-owing to their different level and conditions of agricultural development. In essence, the Harbinson draft proposes to change some of the terms of monopolistic competition among the EU, US, Australia, and Canada while accelerating the removal of the protective barriers of the developing country markets they are fighting over. Transparency Issue Ignored Concerns raised about the transparency of the Mini-ministerial and its legitimacy did not seem to ruffle representatives of the 22 governments participating in it. Perhaps this was because the issue barely made it to the press, except for very brief allusions in the English-language newspapers and one short clip in Japan's NHK television network. Non-transparency was, however, the central issue at a civil society gathering sponsored by ATTAC Japan, the Consumers Union of Japan, and other civil society organizations on Feb. 14. The meeting was attended by about 400 people from different sectors, which indicated the great potential for organizing on the WTO in Japan. Other burning issues also received perfunctory discussion at the mini-ministerial. Among these was the continuing controversy over the US's effort to water down the Doha Declaration's provision overriding Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs) in the interest of public health. In Tokyo, Washington refused to back away from its position of strictly limiting the number of diseases for which public health would be prioritized over patents. NGO's like Medicines sans frontiers, Africa Japan Forum, and Oxfam International lobbied participating governments to reject the TRIPs Council's recent recommendation (obviously inspired by the US) that compulsory licensing of critical drugs be limited to "national emergencies or other conditions of extreme urgency". They pointed out that the Doha Declaration said nothing about limiting the overriding of TRIPs to "national emergencies". Scripted Meeting? We had a chance to bring these other concerns directly to Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi, host of the mini-ministerial, on Feb. 15. She had agreed earlier to meet with an NGO delegation. Ten minutes after we were ushered into the meeting room in Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, however, Deputy Foreign Minister Ichiro Fujisaki's cell phone rang to convey the Foreign Minister's regret that owing to the "tightness of her schedule", she couldn't make it. I had a strong feeling that Kawaguchi and Fujisaki had scripted the whole thing. So we were reduced to presenting our concerns to Fujisaki, who displayed the appropriate gravitas as photographers snapped away to record yet another instance of the Japanese government's sensitivity to the concerns of civil society. Aside from the TRIPs issue and the non-transparency of the meeting, we brought up our apprehension about Japan's leading role in pushing negotiations on the New Issues, particularly investment. The developing countries, we pointed out, felt threatened by Japan's position, which has not budged from its formulation prior to the Seattle ministerial: "National Treatment and the most-favored nation treatment are the basic principles of the WTO Agreement, and thus should be included in the future investment rules of the WTO. In particular, once a foreign country is established in a host country, it should, in principle, be treated in a manner equal to that of domestic companies, as there are in most cases no rationales for discriminatory treatment". Japan has been so dogged in pursuing its line on investment that prior to the Doha ministerial, according to sources in Geneva, Tokyo warned Jakarta that any attempt by the Indonesians to block its efforts to bring investment into the WTO would affect Japanese investors' willingness to bring their capital to Indonesia. After politely listening, Fujisaki limited himself to two comments: First, that the mini-ministerial was an "informal meeting". Second, that "Japan's position on investment was shared by other countries". How not to Isolate the WTO Compared to the Sydney mini-ministerial, there was clearly a failure to make the meeting in Tokyo controversial in the public view. A great deal of the responsibility must belong to the leaders of the Japanese farmers' organizations, especially the Central Union of Agricultural Cooperatives (Zenchu). The pitifully small demonstration by less than 2000 largely aging farmers organized by Zenchu on Saturday morning, Feb. 15, showed up the weaknesses of its approach to mobilizing public opinion around the WTO. First of all, none of the other issues such as TRIPs, non-transparency, and Japan's position on investment were even alluded to by the 15 or so speakers at the pre-march rally at Hibiya Park. Instead of universalizing the Japanese farmers' struggle to other-and younger-constituencies, the organizers seemed intent on confining the WTO question to agriculture. No wonder the WTO in Japan is seen largely as an aging farmers' issue! I wanted to rush up the stage to say that the one of the key issues was the legitimacy of the gathering taking place at the Imperial Hotel a few blocks away, but nobody seemed to be able to help me contact the organizers. Second, the theme of the rally was to show Japanese farmers'support of both the Japanese government and the European Union. The rhetoric about protecting small farmers was there, as were impassioned references to agriculture being unlike industry in that it is a way of life and has a beneficial impact on the environment. But in the interest of maintaining an intergovernmental alliance, Japanese farmers were not told that Japanese agriculture and EU agriculture are fundamentally different. Japan is not an agricultural exporting country but one where farmers are simply trying to survive and maintain an organic tie to the rest of the society. The EU is a massive agro-exporter whose subsidized products are creating havoc among small farmers throughout the developing world. The real interest of Japanese farmers lies in allying themselves with small farmers in the developing world in a common front against dumping, not with large-scale EU agricultural interests and agro-technocrats in Brussels. Denouement To be sure, other civil society organizations joined the march, but the organizers kept them at the tail end of the march, away from the cameras. In any event, by 1 p.m., the marchers had served the Zenchu and the Japanese government's purpose of telling the 21 other governments that Japanese farmers and their government were one. They had not embarrassed the government. Their rally had mentioned none of the issues, like investment, on which the Japanese government had taken questionable positions. They had made sure there would be no untoward incidents triggered by the NGO's. The march ended suddenly, when most of the marchers scampered into heated buses waiting to take them back to their rural communities. "This was not a show of force", said one participant. "They came because they were told to come by the organizers. Maybe their neighbors came to some demonstration last year. Now it was their turn". And I had come to Tokyo dreaming of militant action, including civil disobedience! Anyway, the good news is that agriculture could well be the WTO's Achilles Heel. A failure to reach agreement on agriculture before the deadline of March 31 could unravel negotiations in other areas likeindustrial tariffs, the new issues, services, and TRIPs, leading to WTO Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi's great fear: lack of any movement toward consensus prior to the Fifth Ministerial in Cancun, Mexico, in mid-September. A "heavily bracketed text" showing lack of agreement on so many points, WTO bureaucrats know only too well, helped precipitate the Seattle debacle. The bad news is that the relative absence of protest against its taking place in Tokyo gave back to the illegal meeting some of the legitimacy that was taken away by the huge protests on the occasion of the Sydney mini-ministerial in November 2002. The spotlight now turns to New Delhi, where the next mini-ministerial is said to be scheduled for mid-March. Indian civil society must realize that we cannot afford another Tokyo in the run-up to Cancun. The Road to Cancun: Towards a Movement Strategy for the WTO Ministerial in Cancun (25 February 2003)
International trade today is one of the key battlefields between pro-corporate globalization and anti-corporate globalization forces. This struggle is likely to become more intense in the next few months as the pro-globalization forces set in motion their drive to expand the powers of the World Trade Organization at the Fifth Ministerial of the WTO which will be held in Cancun, Mexico, in mid-September 2003.
As in every theater of struggle, strategy must respond to the needs of the moment. This can only be derived by identifying the strategic objective, accurately assessing the global context or conjuncture, and elaborating an effective strategy and tactical repertoire that responds to the particularities of the conjuncture. For the movement against corporate-driven globalization, it seems fairly clear that the strategic goal must be halting or reversing WTO-mandated liberalization in trade and trade-related areas. The context or "conjuncture" is characterized by a fragile victory on the part of the free-trade globalizers at the 4th Ministerial at Doha, where they bludgeoned developing countries into agreeing to a limited round of trade talks for more liberalization on agriculture, services and industrial tariffs. The conjuncture is marked by the globalizers' effort to build momentum so as to have the coming 5th Ministerial in Mexico launch negotiations for liberalization in the so-called trade related areas of investment, competition policy, government procurement, and trade facilitation. Their aim is to have the 5th Ministerial expand the limited set of negotiations they extracted at Doha into a comprehensive round of negotiations that would rival the Uruguay Round. This expansion of the free trade mandate and the expansion of the power and jurisdiction of the WTO, which is now the most powerful multilateral instrument of the global corporations, is a mortal threat to development, social justice and equity, and the environment. And it is the goal that we must thwart at all costs, for we might as well kiss goodbye to sustainable development, social justice, equity, and the environment if the big trading powers and their corporate elites have their way and launch another global round for liberalization during the WTO's 5th Ministerial Assembly in Mexico in 2003. Campaign Objective: Derail the Drive for Free Trade at the 5th Ministerial Given the strategic goal of stopping and reversing trade liberalization, the campaign objective on which the movement against corporate-driven globalization must focus its efforts and energies is simple and stark: derailing the drive for free trade at the 5th Ministerial, which will serve as the key global mechanism for advancing free trade. The free trade partisan C. Fred Bergsten, head of the Institute of International Economics (IIE), has compared free trade and the WTO to a bicycle: they collapse if they do not move forward. Which is why Seattle was such a mortal threat to the WTO and why the globalizers were so determined to extract a mandate for liberalization at Doha. Had they failed at Doha, the likely prospect was not simply a stalemate but a retreat from free trade. For the movement against corporate-driven globalization, derailing the 5th Ministerial or preventing agreement on the launching of a new comprehensive round would mean not only fighting the WTO and free trade to a standstill. It would mean creating momentum for a rollback of free trade and a reduction of the power of the WTO. This is well understood by, among others, the Economist, which warned its corporate readers "globalization is reversible." If derailing the drive for free trade at the 5th Ministerial is indeed the goal, then the main tactical focus of the strategy becomes clear: Consensus decision-making is the Achilles heel of the WTO, and it is the emergence of consensus that we must prevent at all costs from emerging. In the six short months before the 5th Ministerial, the anti-corporate globalization movement must continue to focus its energy on ensuring that countries do not come into agreement in any of the areas now being negotiated or about to be negotiated, that is, agriculture, services, and industrial tariffs; and at the ministerial itself, preventing any consensus from emerging on negotiating the new issues of government procurement, competition policy, investment, and trade facilitation. The aim must be, as in Seattle, to have the delegates go to the ministerial with a "heavily bracketed" declaration-that is, one where there is no consensus on the key issues-and at the ministerial itself, to prevent consensus via last minute horse-trading. As in Seattle, the end goal must be to have the ministerial end in disagreement and lack of consensus. As Martin Khor and others have asserted, the significance of Cancun resides mainly in the drive to extend WTO jurisdiction to the "New Issues." Herein lies the main threat, so "winning" or "losing" in Cancun will be largely determined by whether or not we are able to stop or stalemate negotiations on the new issues. This means that the struggle will turn on whether a) our side is able to impose its definition that the Chairman's Statement at Doha, which says that negotiations on the new issues can only be launched if there is "explicit consensus" from members, is the decisive legal document; and b) some countries can be convinced to refrain from extending consensus. Components of the Strategy If the goal is unhinging the game plan for greater free trade at the 5th Ministerial, then the anti-corporate globalization movement has its work cut out for it. We must unfold a multi-pronged strategy whose components must include:
- unraveling the alliance between US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy by exacerbating the US-EU conflict on Europe's agricultural subsidies, the Bush administration's failure to obtain unrestricted fast-track authority to negotiate from the US Senate, Washington's imposition of protective tariffs on steel and its resurgent trade unilateralism, and the US' export of hormone-treated beef and genetically modified organisms (GMOs);
The task is immense and we have so little time. But we have no choice. The trading powers and the WTO learned from Seattle, and they brought the bicycle of the WTO back on its wheels in Doha. Likewise, we must learn from Doha so that we can wrestle the bicycle back to the ground in Mexico. And among the key lessons we need to absorb is that our coalition must have a coordinated strategy that brings our work on many different fronts, levels, and dimensions to bear on one goal: unhinging the drive for free trade at the 5th Ministerial. Springtime in Baghdad (16 March 2003)
It was cool and sunny when we set out early this morning to meet with students at Baghdad University. As it has been over the last few days that we have been here, the city appeared to be going about its business in the usual fashion. Some sandbags have been placed on some streetcorners and in front of some government buildings, but this city is not physically on war footing.
At the College of English, it is most definitely springtime. Coeds are chattering cheerily and they smile as we pass. "We are intent on finishing the syllabus, war or no war", says Professor Abdul Jaafar Jawad. He tells us that during the Gulf War of 1991, he was discussing a doctoral dissertation with a student while American and British warplanes were bombing Baghdad. Jawad's determination to carry on despite the the approach of war is shared by the students at his department. Students at a class on Shakespeare are discussing Romeo and Juliet when we interrupt them. No, they say, they don't mind answering some questions from the Asian Peace Mission. They are carrying on with Shakespeare, but their answers show that morally they are on war footing. What to they think of George Bush? "He is like Tybalt, clumsy and ill-intentioned", says a young woman in near perfect English. What do they think about Bush's promise to liberate them? Another coed answers, "We've been invaded by many armies for thousands of years, and those who wanted to conquer us always said they wanted to liberate us". What if war comes, how would they feel? Another says, "We may not be physically strong, but we have faith, and that is what will beat the Americans". A young professor tells me, "I love teaching, but I will fight if the Americans come". These are not a programmed people. Saddam Hussein's portrait may be everywhere, but there are not programmed answers. In fact, we have hardly encountered any programmed responses from anybody here in the last few days. Youth and spring are a heady brew on this campus, and it is sadness that we all feel as we speed away, for some of those lives will be lost in the coming war. As one passes over one of the bridges spanning the Tigris River, one remembers the question posed by Dr. Jawad: "Why would today's most powerful industrial country wish to destroy a land that gave birth to the world's most ancient civilization?" It is a question that no one in our delegation can really answer. Control of the world's second biggest oil reserves is a convenient answer, but it is incomplete. Strategic reasons are important but also incomplete. A fundamentalism that grips the Bush clique is operatiive, too, but there is something more, and that is power that is in love with itself and seeking to express that deadly self-love. An American journalist I meet at the press center says the people are carrying on as usual because they are in deep denial of the power that will soon be inflicted on them. I wish he had been with us when we visited the campus earlier in the day, to see the toughness beneath the surface of those young men and women of Baghdad University. Like most of the Iraqi we have met over the last few days, they are prepared for the worst, but they are determined not to make the worst ruin their daily lives. Tomorrow afternoon, March 17, the date of the American ultimatum for Iraq to disarm or face war, we in the Asian Peace Mission will be traveling by land on two vans flying the Philippine flag to the border with Syria. Dita Sari, the labor leader from Indonesia, was offered a ride to the border this evening by the Indonesian ambassador, who was very concerned about her safety. She refused, saying she would leave only when the mission left. We are leaving late and cutting it close because all of us-Dita, Philippine legislators Etta Rosales and Husin Amin, Pakistani MP Zulfikar Gondal, Focus on the Global South associate Herbert Docena, our reporter and cameraman Jim Libiran and Ariel Fulgado, and myself-feel the same compulsion: we want to be with the Iraqi people as long as possible. Pascal Lamy Holds Court at the Oriental (April 2003)
On April 1, 2003, in what was described as an effort to "reach out" to civil society, European Union Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy met with representatives of several Bangkok-based NGOs at the riverfront Oriental Hotel. While the meeting did not produce fresh revelations on the ongoing World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations, it nevertheless yielded interesting insights on the EU's negotiating perspective, strategy, and tactics.
The Harbison Draft: A Tactical Blunder Not surprisingly, agriculture dominated the agenda of the brief one-hour meeting. Lamy had few nice things to say about the draft agreement on agriculture prepared by chief agricultural negotiator Stuart Harbinson. With negotiators in Geneva missing the March 31 deadline for agreement on the modalities of a new agreement, Lamy put the blame squarely on Harbinson, whom he charged with committing a "tactical mistake" for being "too precise" in his proposals for liberalization "at this stage of the discussion". This was obviously referring to the tariff and subsidy cuts that Harbinson proposed, which the EU considers too deep. "We don't like the Harbinson draft", Lamy declared flatly, and he went on to cite two reasons. "First", he said, "it does not take into account non-trade concerns, such as sustainability, the link to the environment, rural landscape, and animal welfare. In agriculture, you do not just produce a commodity but also a service, a collective good that doesn't belong to just anybody, which means you need not just trade policy but public policy". The EU, in short, is not retreating on its stand on "multifunctionality". The second reason cited by Lamy was Harbinson's lack of flexibility in dealing with EU subsidies and other forms of domestic support. According to him, the draft failed to recognize several trends. One, that EU export subsidies are one- fourth of what they were ten years ago. Two, that the EU offer is substantial - "fifty per cent reduction in domestic support, fifty per cent reduction in export subsidies, and increasing market access by one third". Third, the Harbinson draft does not reflect appreciation of the fact while the US has been moving towards "market distorting" mechanisms to support its farming interests, the EU "has been moving towards non-trade distorting forms of subsidization by adopting Green Box measures like direct payments to farmers decoupled from production". Was there anything positive in the Harbinson draft? Yes, said Lamy, pointing to what he called the "food security box". This proposal would allow developing countries to list a few "strategic products" which would be subject to less tariff reduction than other agricultural products. Unlike Lamy, it might be noted, many developing country representatives have dismissed it as a feeble concession that cannot balance the detrimental consequences of the comprehensive liberalization that their agricultural sectors will undergo. Lamy was at pains to paint EU agriculture as sharing a similar dilemma as many developing economies. He claimed that like many developing economies, the EU was largely an importer when it came to agriculture. "We only export a bit", he claimed, implying that the impact of its domestic support and export subsidies on global markets was limited. Exploiting Developing Country Differences He went on to assert that two camps of developing countries had developed in the current agricultural negotiations: the big agro-exporters that were members of the Cairns Group and the other developing countries. "There's Brazil, on the one hand, and there's India", he said. Brazil and Thailand were painted as strong promoters of liberalized trade, which Lamy doubted was in the interest of other developing countries. African countries, he claimed, "could not live with liberalized trade in agriculture". While Lamy claimed that there "has to be a compromise between these two camps", in fact, the EU has moved quickly to exploit the conflict to fortify its negotiating position. On February 28, the EU, Norway, and Switzerland presented a statement signed by many developing countries, including India, endorsing a Uruguay Round formula for tariff cuts, which would provide more leeway in protecting sensitive products than the Harbinson formula. According to Focus on the Global South analyst Aileen Kwa, "this left the US and Cairns Group stumped and feeling quite isolated in their pro-liberalization approach". Moving to implementation issues, Lamy disagreed with the charge that the Doha Declaration put implementation issues-the top agenda item for developing countries-on the backburner. "In fact", he contended, "the Doha Declaration integrated implementation issues for the first time as a central agenda item. This was the big prize for the developing countries". He acknowledged, however, that negotiations on implementation had not gone forward, but he put the blame squarely on developing countries whom he claimed "could not agree on the top two or five implementation issues to be discussed". Managing Expectations Asked whether the current round of negotiations was threatened with derailment owing to lack of progress, Lamy affected not to be worried. On agriculture, he said, "we are only halfway in the negotiations-we have till the end of 2004". There were different rates of progress in the different areas under negotiations, he said, with "some areas already one third done and others one two thirds done". He cited the negotiations on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) as "98 per cent complete, with all of us knowing what that remaining two per cent is". This was a rather bizarre way of describing the way the US has blocked any movement in negotiations with its demand that, contrary to the Doha Declaration's broad intent, patent restrictions on the production and export of drugs be lifted only for a few specified diseases. Lamy, it seemed, was in the early stages of managing expectations about the outcome of the Cancun Ministerial in September. A gap between the expectations of significant new liberalization that the EU trade commissioner himself has helped cultivate and actual meagre results would be a political disaster that would practically stymie negotiations in all other areas after Cancun and set the stage for the specter haunting Lamy and other free traders: the reversal of globalization. The Stalemate in Iraq and the Global Peace Movement (2 April 2003)
Before the US-UK invasion of Iraq, I was occasionally invited to television talk shows to provide an "unconventional" counterpoint to Philippine government officials who confidently echoed the Washington’s scenario of a quick war. But it was probably only at the Iraqi-Syrian border on March 17 that I became solidly convinced that the US had a protracted conflict on its hands. At the otherwise nondescript "VIP Lounge", our Asian Peace Mission leaving Iraq encountered about 20 young men going in the opposite direction. They were Moroccans, Algerians, Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians, Palestinians. In their late twenties, thirties, or forties, they were obviously not green, with some said to be veterans of Israeli jails. They were in high spirits, obviously relishing what they regarded as a rare opportunity to face the hated Americans in battle. Were they Arab volunteers, I asked. "Islamic fighters", I was corrected.
US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently attacked Syria for allegedly sending weapons, including night vision goggles, to Iraq. But what he was probably most upset about but could not mention on pain of giving more evidence that things were not going according to plan was the transit through Syria of these Muslim fighters, whom Baghdad now claims number in the thousands. Volunteers and Militia These militants are joining the estimated 750,000 trained and well-armed militia that the Iraqis say they have. Even if only a third of these were actually available, the US force that is poised to enter Baghdad would have its hands full. But what the US faces is probably an even greater number of effective combatants since many ordinary men, women, and children are likely to join the fray. These were supposed to be the people who would rise up against Saddam in Rumsfeld’s script. Had US intelligence agents talked to Maha, the Iraqi refugee who was on the same plane with me from Damascus, they would have had very serious reservations about this scenario. She told me that her brother and sister also had a chance to flee before the fighting broke out, but "they decided to stay and fight together with their families". Had they had the freewheeling discussion we had on March 16 with the students at Baghdad University, they would have torn up the Rumsfeld script, for one thing was unquestionable: beneath the cheerful banter, these young men and women were ready to die for their country and their faith. Confusion in Washington While Baghdad and its population radiate resolve, two weeks into the war Washington is in confusion. Rumsfeld says nothing went wrong, everything went according to plan, while one of his top officers, Lt. Gen. William Wallace says that "the enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we war-gamed against". US Theater Commander Tommy Franks says "there is a continuity of operations in the plan", Rumsfeld declares "we have no plans for pauses or ceasefires or anything else", while Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff speaks about "an operational pause in a macro sense". What seems to be clear to everybody outside the Bush bubble is that almost nothing in this war has evolved as planned: not the conventional battles that would decimate the Iraqi regular army, not the Muslim Shiite uprisings that would smash the Ba’ath Party political administration and set the stage for coalition troops to be welcomed as liberators, not the bombing campaign that would shock and awe the rest of the population into submission. The truth is that even as Central Command propaganda paints the image of rapid advance, the American campaign has ground to a virtual halt before Baghdad. The British are stuck in Basra. All the way up and down the 450 kilometers between the Kuwait border and their leading elements before Baghdad, coalition troops are being harried by Iraqi irregulars. Inability to distinguish between combatants and civilians is frustrating US troops, leading them to commit one atrocity after another. "Operational macro-pauses" will not solve the American dilemma: having failed to either provoke civil uprisings or draw out the Iraqi regular army to the set piece battles where they could be defeated in detail, the US has no choice but to assault Baghdad without being sure of the outcome. The Urban Nightmare Recent American experience in urban warfare has not been pleasant. The casualty rate involved in retaking the 22 or so cities that staged uprisings during the Tet offensive in Vietnam was prohibitively high, and when the whole bloody business was finally over, Washington had won the battle but had lost the war, being forced by the precipitous drop in the US public’s support for the war to go to the negotiating table. Mogadishu, October 3, 1993, is a name and date that still rankles in the US Army. Its inflicting over 1000 casualties on the swarming Somalis did not mitigate the fact that a heavily armed Ranger unit was badly mauled, losing 18 dead and 84 wounded, leading to a humiliating US exit as the US public lost appetite for a "peacekeeping mission". But if the Pentagon is unprepared for what lies ahead, it is not for lack of warning. At a hearing at the US House of Representatives reported by the Financial Times last November, Ret. Gen. Joseph Hoar, former commander in chief of Central Command, said, "In urban warfare, you could run through battalions a day at a time...All our advantages of command and control, technology, mobility-all those things are, in part, given up and you are working with corporals and sergeants and young men fighting street to street". One might add that as technological advantage is nullified, morale begins to spell the difference, and high morale is what urban partisans fighting for kith, kin, and country have an oversupply of. Nor were the Iraqis shy about giving warnings: As Mohammed Medhi Saleh, a senior member of Saddam Hussein’s cabinet told the Washington Post last November, "Take the desert. What’s in the desert? If they want to change the political system in Iraq, they have to come to Baghdad. We will be waiting for them here". "Nightmare" is the word many commentators use to describe any attempt to take a densely metropolis of 4.5 million like Baghdad, where, as in most other third world cities, residential, commercial, military, and government establishments coexist in close proximity; where civilians and partisans will be indistinguishable since one will be fighting a hostile population in arms; where no street can be considered fully secured; where partisans will be on one’s front, right, left, rear, and under. In short, as Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, puts it, a "360 degree battlefield".. Then there is a question of numbers. During the guerrilla conflicts in Southeast Asia in the sixties, anti-insurgency experts used to say that to neutralize one guerrilla, you needed six or seven soldiers. Such a ratio translated into a Baghdad setting would underline one thing: that the maximum 50,000 to 65,000 frontline combat troops that the US can deploy for the taking of Baghdad would be grossly inadequate. Finally, there is the climate, the element that felled both Napoleon and Hitler in their invasion of Russia. Spring is ending, and Baghdad will soon be visited by the horrific Iraqi summer, when temperatures can go as high as 60 degrees centigrade. In fact, it is not unlikely that the number of coalition troops felled by heat stroke might rival, if not outstrip, the number of combat casualties. Military Stalemate and the Global Peace Movement More and more likely as a scenario in the next few weeks is one comprised of the following elements:
- American indecision, owing to internecine command battles, delays a full-scale assault on Baghdad.
Outright military defeat for the US is not a likely outcome, though some very credible experts like Scott Ritter, the controversial former UN arms inspector, says that the US military might be forced to stage a desert version of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. The Challenge to the Global Peace Movement In the context of a military stalemate within a widening war, the role of international protest and diplomacy becomes all the more critical. Washington might have been able to turn a deaf ear to other states in the global community when it was confident of its strength. It may no longer be so brash when it is confronted with a no-win military situation. For forces opposing the war, now is the time to press on with the demand for unilateral withdrawal of the US and UK from Iraq. At a time when the situation is far from being resolved on the battlefield, it would be betraying the Iraqi people to shift the struggle to the politics of reconstruction-to the false debate of whether it should be the UN or the US that should manage post-war Iraq. This debate would only have the effect of legitimizing the ongoing invasion. Support for the Iraqi people’s defense of their homeland, not support for UN-led reconstruction, should remain the overriding stance of the international community. Indeed, this should be the case even if Baghdad falls, for the fall of Baghdad will not mean an end to the war. In this context, international diplomacy must support such initiatives as the Arab League’s effort to get a Security Council resolution demanding an end to the invasion and, failing that, to bring the matter to the General Assembly. For the impressive international civil society movement against the war, this is a time for even bigger demonstrations demanding withdrawal of the US and UK. It is also time to move from spontaneous, country-by-country action to greater global coordination. The international legal machinery must be set in motion to try Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld and other key decision-makers for violations of international law and war crimes. Where Washington and London block UN and other official judicial processes, international people’s tribunals involving leading anti-war personalities would be a good substitute. Aside from efforts to strip the stalled war effort of its last ounce of legitimacy, the movement should launch punitive economic campaigns, such as coordinated international boycotts of US and British corporations such as Macdonald’s, Coca Cola, Exxon, and Shell. With the sources of profits of American-owned corporations having become globalized, such campaigns could erode support for the war from a key constituency of the Bush administration. The American Problem Needless to say, winning the American people away from support for the war is one of the greatest challenges of all. Bush is the ultimate unilateralist. So long as he is confident of domestic support for his war, his response to battlefield reversals, as Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton administration diplomat, has noted, will be to "escalate". There are three key prongs to a successful strategy to win over public opinion, and each will have to be mounted with more care and planning than has gone to the US military’s strategy in Iraq:
- a massive effort to win over and consolidate the key pillars of a popular anti-war movement: labor, women, minorities, and students.
If Bush can unswervingly push a unilateralist line, it is because he is confident that since September 11, he and his clique have reshaped the popular consensus that serves as the underpinning of an imperial democracy such as the United States. Dismantling that consensus can only be successful by appealing to interests, though appeal to principles must continue to be made. Breaking the current American consensus that is based on the idea that imperial expansion is the ultimate solution to security is a precondition for ending this war and preventing future wars. This is a tall order, but it is one that the US and global anti-war movements have no choice but to tackle head-on. Pax Romana versus Pax Americana: Contrasting Strategies of Imperial Management (23 April 2003)
After its successful invasion of Iraq, the US appears to be at the height of its power. One can understand why many feel the US is supreme and omnipotent. Indeed, this is precisely what Washington wants the world to think.
No doubt, the US is very powerful militarily. There is good reason to think, however, that it is overextended. In fact, the main strategic result of the occupation of Iraq is to worsen this condition of overextension. Overextension Overextension refers to a mismatch between goals and means, with means referring not only to military resources but to political and ideological ones as well. Under the reigning neoconservatives, Washington's goal is to achieve overwhelming military dominance over any rival or coalition of rivals. This quest for even greater global dominance, however, inevitably generates opposition, and it is in this resistance that we see the roots of overextension. Overextension is relative - an overextended power may in fact be in a worse condition even with a significant increase in its military power if resistance to its power increases by an even greater degree. This point may sound surreal after the massive firepower that we witnessed on television night after night over the last month. But consider the following and ask whether they are not signs of overreach;
- the failure to consolidate a pro-US regime in Afghanistan outside of Kabul;
Just a few days after its military victory over a fourth-rate power, we are already witnessing the political quicksand that the Americans have stepped into in Iraq, as fundamentalist Islamic political currents among the majority Shiites appear to be the political inheritors of the deposing of Saddam Hussein. If a stable pro-US order in the Middle East is Washington's goal, then that is nowhere in sight. What is likely instead is greater instability that will tempt Washington to employ more military power and deploy more military units, leading to a spiral of violence from which there is no easy exit. Pax Romana versus Pax Americana Nearly three millennia ago, another empire confronted the same problem of overextension. Its solution enabled it to last 700 years. The Roman solution was not just or even principally military in character. The Romans realized that an important component of successful imperial domination was consensus among the dominated of the "rightness" of the Roman order. As sociologist Michael Mann notes in his classic Sources of Social Power, the extension of Roman citizenship to ruling groups and non-slave peoples throughout the empire was the political breakthrough that won the mass allegiance among the nations dominated by the Romans. Political citizenship combined with the vision of the empire providing peace and prosperity for all to create that intangible but essential moral element called legitimacy. Needless to say, extension of citizenship plays no role in the US imperial order. In fact, US citizenship is jealously reserved for a very tiny minority of the world's population, entry into whose territory is tightly controlled. Subordinate populations are not to be integrated but kept in check either by force or the threat of the use of force or by a system of global or regional rules and institutions-the World Trade Organization, the Bretton Woods system, NATO-that are increasingly blatantly manipulated to serve the interests of the imperial center. Though extension of universal citizenship was never a tool in the American imperial arsenal, during its struggle with communism in the post-World War II period Washington did come up with a political formula to legitimize its global reach. The two elements of this formula were multilateralism as a system of global governance and liberal democracy. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, there were, in fact, widespread expectations of a modern-day version of Pax Romana. There was hope in liberal circles that the US would use its sole superpower status to undergird a multilateral order that would institutionalize its hegemony but assure an Augustan peace globally. That was the path of economic globalization and multilateral governance. That was the path eliminated by George W. Bush's unilateralism. As Frances Fitzgerald observed in Fire in the Lake, the promise of extending liberal democracy was a very powerful ideal that accompanied American arms during the Cold War. Today, however, Washington or Westminster-type liberal democracy is in trouble throughout the developing world, where it has been reduced to providing a fa?ade for oligarchic rule, as in the Philippines, pre-Musharraf Pakistan, and throughout Latin America. In fact, liberal democracy in America has become both less democratic and less liberal. Certainly, few in the developing world see a system fueled and corrupted by corporate money as a model. Recovery of the moral vision needed to create consensus for US hegemony will be extremely difficult. Indeed, the thinking in Washington these days is that the most effective consensus builder is the threat of the use of force. Moreover, despite their talk about imposing democracy in the Arab world, the main aim of influential neoconservative writers like Robert Kaplan, Robert Kagan, and Charles Krauthammer is transparent: the manipulation of liberal democratic mechanisms to create pluralistic competition that would destroy Arab unity. Bringing democracy to the Arabs is not even an afterthought as a slogan that is uttered tongue in cheek. The Bush people are not interested in creating a new Pax Romana. What they want is a Pax Americana where most of the subordinate populations like the Arabs are kept in check by a healthy respect for lethal American power, while the loyalty of other groups such as the Philippine government is purchased with the promise of cash. With no moral vision to bind the global majority to the imperial center, this mode of imperial management can only inspire one thing: resistance. Challenges to the Empire The present in Afghanistan is likely to be the future in Iraq - that is, an inability to consolidate a stable political order, much less a truly representative and democratic one. The combination of their policies of internal repression and their failure to come to the aid of the Palestinians and the Iraqis is likely to put the Arab regimes allied to the US - the most noteworthy of which are the governments in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt - in an even more precarious position with respect to the Arab masses. A strengthening of political Islam is a likely result, and Islamic groups are likely to either come to power or be serious contenders for power in many of these countries. Ironically, a democratic opening up of the political systems in these countries - which Washington is said to be desirous of - is likely to lead to this outcome, even in Iraq, where the radical stream of Shiite Islamic politics is dominant. The same boost to Islamic groups is likely to be the result in the rest of the Muslim world, especially in two places considered extremely strategic by the US: Pakistan and Indonesia. Like Washington's security, Israel’s security, the enhancement of which has been a primordial objective of neo-conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol, will be compromised even further. This, as well as the bigger frustration of failing to create a stable political base for American hegemony via formal democratic mechanisms, will lead the US to contemplate an unpalatable choice: withdraw or impose direct colonial rule. It will, however, try not to face this choice as long as possible and continue to pour more money and resources to unworkable political arrangements. At the same time, local variants of the new global civil society movement for peace and against corporate-driven globalization will achieve power or threaten to come to power in other parts of the world, particularly in Latin America. The examples of Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela will become more attractive as neoliberal economics becomes even more discredited in the context of prolonged economic stagnation at the national, regional, and global level. With the US increasingly seen as a universal threat and with their economic interests increasingly at odds with Washington, France, Germany, Russia, and China will consolidate the balancing coalition that emerged during the Iraq crisis. Some of the more weighty developing countries, like Brazil, India, and South Korea, might eventually join this formation. This balancing coalition is likely to be a permanent fixture, though its members may change. One consequence of this diplomatic alliance will be closer coordination in military matters. Indeed, the formation of a European Defense Force distinct from NATO is likely. Another will be increased military spending, arms buildups, and arms research by members of the balancing coalition, whether separately or in cooperation with one another. Still another will be greater economic and technological cooperation to create the economic infrastructure for protracted military competition. Ironically, Washington’s crusade to monopolize weapons of mass destruction will lead to greater investment in the development of such weapons among its big country rivals, while not stopping their development by smaller countries or by non-state actors. Global economic stagnation and US unilateralism will lead to a further weakening of the IMF and WTO and a strengthening of trends towards protectionism and regionalism. Regional economic arrangements, combining trade preferences, capital controls, and technological cooperation will become even more attractive in opposition to both multilateral free trade arrangements and bilateral trade deals with the US and the EU. Trade wars will become more frequent and more destabilizing. One actor will be central in all this: China. As the American economy is mired in stagnation and Washington is overextended military and politically, China will grow in relative strength. The unilateralists will grow more and more preoccupied with China’s growing strength and will sharpen their political and ideological competition with Beijing. At the same time, their options will continue to be limited given Wall Street’s increasing financial stakes in China, American corporations’ increasing dependence on investment in that country, and the US consumers’ escalating reliance on imports from China, from low-tech commodities to high-tech goods. Washington will not find an easy exit from its Chinese conundrum. Finally - and ironically, given recent events - the UN will enjoy a new lease on life, as countries realize that its ability to grant or withhold legitimacy remains an important tool in international realpolitik. The role of the UN as a mechanism for isolating the US will be enhanced, and Washington is likely to respond with even more vituperation and threats to cut off funding, though it will not be able to boycott the organization. Like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy prior to the Second World War, the US is likely to be more and more isolated in the community of nations while retaining the immense power to plunge that community into disorder. One thing is certain: if the Romans were around today, they would come up with one conclusion: this is no way to manage an empire. Why a Derailed WTO Ministerial is the Best Outcome for the South (4 September 2003)
With the fifth ministerial of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) fast approaching, the organisation that was hailed at its founding in 1995 as the crowning point of global economic governance is in gridlock.
Despite an obvious effort to put a positive spin to negotiations over the last two years, the recently issued draft ministerial declaration evinces little consensus on all the burning issues dividing WTO members. Stalemated Talks WTO Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi trumpeted a "successful" last-minute compromise on the contentious issue of the relationship of trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs) and public health in the manufacture and import of vital drugs. Many analysts contend, however, that the compromise leans more toward protecting the patent rights of Northern pharmaceutical companies than promoting access to life-saving or life-prolonging medicine for millions of people in the South suffering from HIV-AIDS and other epidemics. It is very doubtful that it can unblock negotiations in the other areas, where North-South differences as well as internecine disputes among the rich countries, are more solidly entrenched. Prior to the compromise, the talks had been stalemated by the US' refusal to budge from its position that loosening of patent rights should be limited only to HIV-AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis drugs, defying the declaration of the Fourth WTO Ministerial in Doha, 2001, which clearly placed public health issues above corporate intellectual property rights. A last-minute attempt by the European Union and the United States to set up a negotiating framework to revive the stalled talks on agricultural liberalisation appears to have backfired, as developing countries bitterly criticised the two trading superpowers for regressing to their behaviour during the last years of the Uruguay Round (1986-94), crafting a backroom deal with no participation from the 144 other member countries. Brazil, India, and China -the powerhouses of the developing world- immediately responded with a paper telling the Europeans and Americans to quit beating around the bush and radically cut the high levels of subsidisation responsible for the dumping of cheap grain and meat on world markets that is putting hundreds of thousands of developing country farmers out of business. There has been no movement whatsoever on negotiations to ring under WTO jurisdiction the so-called ''trade-related'' issues of investment, competition policy, transparency in government procurement, and trade facilitation, which Brussels and Washington have regarded as the centrepiece of the Doha Declaration. Indeed, there is fundamental disagreement over whether or not there is a mandate to even begin negotiations. The developing countries assert that the ''explicit consensus'' of each member country must be obtained to launch negotiations. The European Union (EU) and other developed countries, on the other hand, claim that there is already agreement to negotiate and it is only the ''modalities'' of the negotiations that need to be ironed out. The Civil Society Factor Some observers say that the three key ingredients of the ''Seattle scenario'' are emerging, alluding to the ''formula'' that produced the famous collapse of the Third Ministerial in Seattle in December 1999:
- the EU-US stalemate in agriculture is again at centre-stage;
The civil society factor must not be underestimated. The numbers are not clear, but at least 15,000 people from all over the world may show up in Cancun. This would be the equivalent of five percent of Cancun's population of 300,000 - a critical mass if any. At the moment, up to 10,000 peasants led by the Mexican farmers' group UNORCA and the global peasant federation Via Campesina are planning to march to the Convention Centre located in the restricted section of the hotel zone to deliver a message to the ministerial assembly demanding that the WTO ''get out of agriculture''. Another coalition called ''Espacio Mexicano'' is setting up a week-long ''Forum of the People'' that will climax on September 13 with a march coordinated with demonstrations in scores of other cities throughout the world on the theme ''Against Globalisation and War''. Perhaps the most significant development is the decision of the Zapatistas, the armed insurrectionary force based in indigenous and peasant communities in the forests and highlands of Chiapas in southern Mexico, to throw their weight behind the protests. ''If the Zapatistas join the mobilisation against the WTO, then because of their great prestige throughout Mexico, the whole situation will be transformed,'' says Hector de la Cueva, one of the coordinators of Espacio Mexicano. With thousands of Mexicans inspired to go to Cancun and anti-WTO actions throughout Mexico, the Zapatista decision could transform what is still seen by most Mexicans as a foreign gathering in a ''Yankee tourist colony'' into a massive national protest. Mexican authorities are agitated, despite efforts by leaders of the international movement against corporate-driven globalisation to assure them that their demonstrations and meetings will be non-violent. It turns out, in fact, that the federal government has been compiling an ''enemies' list'' of people to closely monitor during the ministerial. Leaked to the press in mid-August, the government memo contains about 60 names, among them Ecuadorian Indian leader Blanca Chancoso, Indian physicist Vandana Shiva, and American agro-ecologist Peter Rosset, who were designated as ''ultras.'' Institutional Crisis The current travails of the WTO are a continuation of the institutional crisis that first broke in Seattle in December 1991, triggered by resistance of civil society groups to the WTO's drive to subordinate critical dimensions of social life to corporate trade, by developing countries' resentment of a few developed countries imposing a doctrinaire global liberalisation programme inimical to their interests, and by the widespread repudiation of an undemocratic decision-making structure. The depth of the reform needed was underlined by then UK Secretary of State Stephen Byers a few days after the Seattle collapse: ''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.'' No reforms followed in the wake of Seattle, and only US-EU strong-arming of the developing countries in the context of the 9-11 events produced a declaration mandating a limited set of negotiations to further trade liberalisation during the Fourth Ministerial in Doha, Qatar, in November 2001. But the so-called ''Doha Round'' quickly degenerated into a stalemate. Crisis of Globalization The WTO's institutional crisis, however, is itself a reflection of an even deeper, more comprehensive crisis -that of the globalist project of accelerated integration of production and markets. One key trigger of this crisis was the Asian financial crisis of 1997, which brought home the lesson that the capital account liberalisation that was a centrepiece of the globalist ideology could be profoundly destabilising, resulting in such tragedies as that of Indonesia, where 22 million people fell below the poverty line in the space of a few weeks. This discrediting of the presumed benefits of unfettered capital mobility could not but provoke a wide-ranging examination of the claims of another key tenet of the globalist project: that trade liberalisation promoted prosperity. The results of many investigations of this assumption carried out in the late 1990s were perhaps best summed up by World Bank researchers Matthias Lundberg and Lynn Squire: ''The poor are far more vulnerable to shifts in relative international prices, and this vulnerability is magnified by the country's openness to trade. At least in the short term, globalisation appears to increase both poverty and inequality.'' As the doctrine and institutions of capital mobility and trade liberalisation were increasingly eroded by a crisis of legitimacy, the globalist project was further undermined by another momentous development: the stock market collapse of March 2000, which inaugurated an era of global recession and deflation brought about by the excesses ofspeculative capital as well as global overproduction. Faced by an era of scarcity, rising joblessness, and slow growth, economic elites in both Europe and the US have increasingly turned away from promoting the project of an integrated global economy, with obstacles to capital and trade flows reduced to a minimum that served the universal interests of the global corporate class, and moved towards policies of protecting the interests of national or regional capitalist elites. The EU-US conflicts over agriculture, steel tariffs, pharmaceuticals, GMO's, aircraft subsidies, and Microsoft's practices in Europe reflect this rising protectionism in both Brussels and Washington. These economic conflicts have been exacerbated by the divergent political paths on Iraq and the Middle East taken by the US and the cornerstone countries of the EU - -Germany and France- which have unraveled the ''Atlantic Alliance'' that won the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Bush's unilateralist economics, in particular, marks a turning away from the condominium of global capital that underpinned the multilateral institutions -the IMF, World Bank, and WTO- during the Clinton era. It is a response to the crisis of the globalist project that, with its brazen defense of US corporate capital exemplified in its stand on TRIPs and public health, is likely to deepen that crisis and the crisis of the multilateral institutions that were used to advance the globalisation agenda. For with the EU and the US at loggerheads on a whole range of issues, it has become that much more difficult for both to mount a coordinated strategy to split and intimidate developing countries at the WTO on matters where the two capitalist centres share a common interest, like pushing through a WTO-enforced investment agreement, which the developing counties have stubbornly opposed. False Choices With the WTO framework failing, both the EU and the US have turned to bilateral and multilateral trade agreements as a vehicle for liberalisation that would serve their particular interests. The race is on, and the US appears to be ahead. Washington recently announced free trade agreements (FTA) with Chile and Singapore, and this coming October it will unveil an FTA with Thailand at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in that country. Moreover, over the last two years, the Bush administration has devoted far more effort to concluding the Free Trade of the Americas (FTAA) than to jump-starting the WTO. Developing countries are just as wary of FTA's as of they are of the WTO, recognising that they are just as much guided by the hegemonic interests of the stronger partners. To those argue that the WTO is better for developing country interests than FTAs because it has institutionalised rules and procedures that constrain the more powerful countries, developing country analysts such as Aileen Kwa, Geneva representative of Focus on the Global South and author of the expose ''Behind the Scenes at the WTO'', point to rich country governments' systematic intimidation and coercion of Southern countries in the last few years in an attempt to pry open their markets, hiding behind a thick veil of non-transparency. Indeed, developing countries must cease allowing themselves to be boxed into such false choices and start working on real alternative arrangements, such as creating regional economic blocs or restructuring economic existing ones such as Mercosur and Asean to serve as effective engines of coordinated economic progress via policies that effectively subordinate trade to development. Failure is Success One cannot discount that despite their deepening differences, the US and the EU may still pull together to coerce developing countries into approving new initiatives in trade and trade-related liberalisation in Cancun. However, the increasingly likely scenario is a ministerial that will produce no agreements for significant new liberalisation and essentially reproduce the stalemate in Geneva. For developing countries constantly under siege to open their markets or cede control of areas thus far the preserve of national policy-making -like investment and competition- to the Washington and Brussels-dominated WTO, a failed, stalemated ministerial is the best outcome. It gives them the breathing space to organise and coordinate their defense and allows them and global civil society the opportunity to mount the reversal of corporate-driven globalisation that even the free-trade mouthpiece Economist sees as a very real threat to the future of capitalism because of the ''excesses'' of global capital. WTO Ministerial Collapses in Cancun (14 September 2003)
In dramatic fashion, the World Trade Organization's Fifth Ministerial collapsed today. Irreconcilable differences among developed and developing countries put the finishing touches to a 1-1/2 year long global campaign to derail the Cancun meeting. Many members of organizations that participated in the campaign were at the Cancun convention center, and they erupted in joyous shrieks when informed that a "Green Room" of 33 countries had broken up in disarray over the Singapore issues, causing the chair of the ministerial, Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez, to declare an end to the ministerial.
According to a participant in the meeting, Korea and the African Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) grouping delivered the coup de grace to the meeting. The Koreans refused to agree to a proposal to "unbundle" the Singapore issues by beginning negotiations on government procurement and trade facilitation while initiating a process that would eventually lead to negotiations on investment and competition policy. The ACP, on the other hand, opposed negotiations on any of the issues, reasoning that there was no "explicit consensus" to begin negotiations as required by the Doha Declaration. The conflict was, however, merely the crowning point of five days of clashes between developing and developed countries on a number of issues, the sharpest being agriculture and the new issues. Developing country representatives uniformly blamed the intransigence of the US and EU for the failure of the meeting. Arguing that no agreement is better than a bad agreement, representatives of civil society concurred and said that the collapse of the ministerial was a victory for the peoples of the developing world. There is Life after Cancun (21 September 2003)
The WTO Cancun Ministerial has failed. It's Time for Global Civil Society to Work for Bigger Victories
When the chair of the World Trade Organization's Fifth Ministerial, Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Derbez, declared that there was no consensus and abruptly ended the meeting in mid-afternoon on September 14, his act had momentous consequences. First, the collapse of the WTO meeting represented a victory for people throughout the world, not a "missed opportunity" for a global deal between North and South. The so-called Doha Round initiated in Qatar during the fourth ministerial in November 2001 was never a "development round". And what little promise it offered for the poor countries had been betrayed long before Cancun. Emblematic of this state of affairs was Washington's refusal to live up to the Doha Declaration's placing public health concerns over the patent rights of its pharmaceutical corporations up till the eve of the ministerial and its agreeing only after it got the developing countries to agree to a cumbersome procedure that would make cheap imports of life-saving drugs for people suffering from HIV-AIDS and other dreaded diseases extremely difficult. Not even the most optimistic developing country came to Cancun expecting some concessions from the big rich countries in the interest of development. Most developing country governments came to Cancun with a defensive stance. The big challenge was not that of forging a historic "New Deal" but one of preventing the US and the EU from imposing new demands on the developing countries while escaping any multilateral disciplines on their trade regimes. In this regard, it was not the developing countries that brought about the collapse, as US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick implied in his final press conference. That responsibility lies squarely with the United States and Europe. When the second revision of the draft of the ministerial text appeared early on Saturday, Sept. 13, it was clear that the US and the European Union were not willing to make any significant cuts in their high levels of agricultural subsidization even as they continued to intransigently demand that the developing countries bring down their tariffs. It was also clear that the EU and US were determined to disregard the Doha Declaration's stipulation that the explicit consensus of all member states was required to begin negotiations on the so-called "new issues" of investment, competition policy, government procurement, and trade facilitation. Negotiate on our terms or not at all: that was the meaning of the second revision. Not surprisingly, developing countries could not lend their consensus to a framework of negotiations so detrimental to their interests. Second, the WTO has been severely damaged. Two collapsed ministerials (Seattle, Cancun) and one that barely made it (Doha) recommends the institution to no one. For the trade superpowers, it is no longer a viable instrument for imposing their will on others. For the developing countries, membership has not brought protection from abuses by the powerful economies, much less serve as a mechanism of development. This is not to say that the WTO is dead. There will be efforts to bring the WTO back from the brink, like the US and the EU did at Doha. But the likelihood is that, with lack of momentum from a successful ministerial, the machinery will slow down significantly. Zoellick was correct in doubting that the Doha Round will be finished by its deadline of January 2005 and European Union Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy was simply trying to put a bright face to a bad situation when he said that the WTO had completed 30 per cent of the Doha agenda. Aside from the loss of momentum and the impairment of the basic functioning of the organization's machinery, growing protectionism in the rich countries, a global economy plagued by long-term stagnation, and the unraveling of the Atlantic Alliance owing to political differences on issues such as Iraq do not provide a favorable climate for the WTO's serving as the main mechanism for trade liberalization and globalization. The WTO may eventually suffer the fate it helped inflict on the UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development): surviving but increasingly ineffective and irrelevant. This raises the question: even was we approve of the failure of a ministerial that was loaded against the interests of the developing countries, should we welcome the institutional weakening of the WTO? After all, some have argued, the WTO is a set of rules and machinery that, with the appropriate balance of forces, can be invoked to protect the interests of the developing countries. Partisans of this view say that one is better off with the WTO than with the bilateral trade deals that US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said at his final press conference would now receive Washington's priority after the failure of Cancun. The truth is that this is a false choice. The WTO is not a neutral set of rules, procedures, and institutions that can be used defensively to protect the interests of weaker players. The rules themselves - the main ones being the supremacy of the principle of free trade, "most favored nation" principle (that countries must provide to all partners the privileges they provide their most favored partner) and the principle of "national treatment" (that foreign service providers must have the same rights and privileges as domestic providers) - institutionalize the current system of global economic inequality. What weapons the weak countries have are few. The principle of special and differential treatment for developing countries (that they must have a different set of rules from developed countries owing to historical and structural differences), which was institutionalized in the predecessor of the WTO, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, has a very weak status in the World Trade Organization.. Indeed, in Cancun, the US and the EU completely banished from negotiations the special and differential treatment agenda that had been mandated by the Doha Declaration. The arrogant attitude toward such demands was exemplified in one US trade spokesman's dismissive statement that the WTO was "not a welfare organization but a trade organization". The WTO is not a truly multilateral organization. It is a mechanism to perpetuate the US-EU condominium in the global economy. Third, global civil society was a major player in Cancun. Since Seattle, the interaction between civil society and governments on trade issues has intensified. Non-governmental organizations have assisted developing country governments in the political and technical aspects of negotiations. They have mobilized international public opinion against the retrograde stands of rich country governments, as in the drug patents and public health issue. They have emerged as strong domestic coalitions that put their governments' feet to the fire to stiffen them against any further concessions to the rich countries. If many developing country governments resisted pressure from the US and the EU in Cancun, it was because they feared political retribution from civil society groups back home. With peoples' movements marching in the city center and NGO's demonstrating hourly inside and outside the convention hall from the opening session on, Cancun became a microcosm of the global dynamics of states and civil society. The suicide of Korean farmer Lee Kyung Hae at the police barricades warned everyone at the convention center that they could no longer take the plight of the world's small farmers for granted, and this was acknowledged by the governments with the one-minute moment of silence they observed in his memory. Truly, the collapse of the Cancun ministerial was another confirmation of the New York Times' observation that global civil society is the world's second superpower. Fourth, the Group of 21 is a significant new development that could contribute to altering the global balance of forces. Led by Brazil, India, China, and South Africa, the new grouping stalemated the EU and US drive to make Cancun one more sad episode in the history of underdevelopment. The potential of this group was indicated by Celso Amorin, the Brazilian Trade Minister who has emerged as its spokesman, when he said that it represented over half the world's population and over 63 per cent of its farmers. Amorin reflected the stance and potential of the new formation in his address to the ministerial: "We stand united, we will remain united. We sincerely hope that others will hear our message and, instead of confronting us or trying to divide us, will join forces in our endeavour to inject new life into the multilateral trading system. To bring it closer to the needs and aspirations of those who have been at its margins - indeed the vast majority - those who have not had the chance to reap the fruit of their toils. It is high time to change this reality. This should be the spirit of Cancun". Not surprisingly, US trade negotiators saw the Group of 21 as representing a resumption of the South's push for a "new international economic order" in the 1970's. However, much lies in the realm of possibility, and the potential of this new formation must not be overestimated. It is now mainly an alliance focused on radically reducing the subsidies of northern agriculture. And it still has to meaningfully address the desire for comprehensive protection of smaller farmers in the smaller countries that are mainly focused on production for the domestic production. The reservations of some of the smaller countries is understandable since the Group of 21's most vocal members are large agro-exporters, though most have significant domestic-market-oriented, peasant based production as well. Nevertheless, there is no reason that a positive agenda of small-farmer-oriented sustainable agriculture cannot be placed at the center of the group's advocacy. There is also no reason why the Group cannot extend its mandate to forging a common program on industry and services as well. Even more exciting is the possibility that the Group of 21 can serve as the engine of South-South cooperation that goes beyond trade to coordination of policies on investment, capital flows, industrial policy, social policy, environmental policy. Such forms of South-South cooperation centered on the priority of development over trade and markets provide the alternative to both the WTO and the bilateral free trade agreements now being pursued by the US and the EU. In articulating its agenda, the Group of 21 will find a natural ally in global civil society. With the US and the EU determined to defend the status quo and with both seeking to sow divisions among governments in the group, this alliance with civil society must be moved from potential to reality as soon as possible. It will not be easy of course. Progressive civil society groupings may be comfortable dealing with the Brazilian government headed by the Workers' Party, but they will be ill at ease with the Indian government, which is fundamentalist and neo-liberal or free-market oriented, and with the Chinese government, which is authoritarian and tilting towards neo-liberalism. Nevertheless, alliances are forged in practice and no government must be automatically categorized as impossible to win over to the side of people-oriented sustainable development. To conclude, shortly after the Doha Ministerial, a number of civil society organizations said that the interests of the developing world would be best served by derailing the coming ministerial in Cancun instead of trying to convert the ministerial into a forum for reforming the WTO. As Cancun approached, the intransigence of the powerful countries stalemated discussions with the South on almost all fronts. By the time Cancun came around, there was no more talk of reform. Things had become crystal clear. With the EU and US determined to get their way, no agreement was better than a bad agreement, a failed ministerial was better than a successful one that merely served as one more nail in the coffin of underdevelopment. After Cancun, the challenge for global civil society is to redouble its efforts to dismantle the structures of inequality and to push for alternative arrangements of global economic cooperation that would truly advance the interests of the poor, the marginalized, and the disempowered. Can't Buy the World But the opponents of doctrinaire liberalization and corporate-driven globalization do deserve a brief pause to celebrate the collapse of the Fifth Ministerial. Perhaps they might want to sing the adaptation of the Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love" that their comrades at the ground floor of the convention center in Cancun belted out upon hearing of the breakdown of the negotiations:
Our world is not for sale, my friend
No new issues in Cancun
Original FTAA Vision Scrapped as People pour into Miami for Anti-free Trade Protest (20 November 2003)
The United States will try to paint the Miami meeting of the Free Trade of the Americas (FTAA) as a success, but the reality is that the anti-FTAA side has pulled off a victory. This was the assessment of movement leaders as thousands of protesters from all over the Americas converged on this city for Friday's March for Global Justice and the Miami-Dade Country police mounted a massive show of force to intimidate the opposition.
Protesters not Intimidated That the people were not cowed was evident at the "Gala for Global Justice" on the evening of Wednesday, November 19. Opposition to the FTAA and people coming together for "another world" was the theme of event, which featured a program of music and speeches from activists from throughout the Americas. Representing the US labor movement in the program, Leo Girard, president of the United Steelworkers Union, declared, "We will not let them steal our sovereignty. This is not just about trade but also about investment and privileges for greedy investors and financiers. This fight is a fight for our children and grandchildren". He singled out the contribution of student activists against sweatshops, telling the story of how earlier in the afternoon, "on the way to Guzman Park to attend the People's Forum, we saw a group of students surrounded by cops and searched. And guess what, hundreds of steelworkers surrounded the cops and told them to let the students go. And they did". And that brought the crowd to its feet. Washington Retreats on FTAA The big news on Wednesday, however, was the scrapping of the original FTAA vision. "The US wanted a binding comprehensive agreement with disciplines all the way through", said one official delegate from a Latin American country who has participated in the negotiations. "The draft ministerial declaration coming out of the Trade Negotiations Committee clearly is a retreat from that". Instead, the draft proposes a "flexible" process where governments can decide to exclude some areas from FTAA negotiations for liberalization even as other governments negotiate liberalization in these areas. As the declaration unambiguously states, "Ministers recognize that countries may assume different levels of commitments...In addition, negotiations should allow for countries that so choose, within the FTAA, to agree to additional obligations and benefits". This will allow Brazil and the other members of the Mercosur trade area to withdraw from negotiations on investment, intellectual property, government procurement, services, investment, competition policy, and other areas they do not wish to subject to mandatory liberalization. At the same time, it will allow the US to continue its policies of massive subsidization of its agriculture by not joining negotiations on agriculture. The result is what pundits have called "FTAA lite" or "FTAA a la carte". Essentially, the ministerial declaration is the one tabled by Brazil at the Trade Negotiating Committee meeting in San Salvador last July. As the Latin American negotiator put it, "Brazil was saying, look, 2003 is different from 1994, when Clinton launched the FTAA negotiations. Free trade policies has brought about bad results throughout Latin America. People have ousted neoliberal governments. There was no way the US was going to get the comprehensive free trade agreement it wanted today". To the surprise of many, the US agreed to the Brazilian compromise a few weeks before Miami. But, according to the Latin American negotiator, the alternative was another Cancun, referring to the collapse of the fifth ministerial of the World Trade Organization, owing to widely disparate positions between Brazil and its allies and Washington, Canada, and their supporters. This was not another high-profile setback the Bush administrator could afford coming into an election year. Despite the US stand-down, says Timi Gerson, a trade campaigner with Public Citizen, it will paint Miami as a success. "They'll say the train has not be derailed, as in Cancun, that it is leaving Miami with nine boxcars or negotiating areas intact. What they'll try to conceal is that those boxcars are empty because people throughout the Americas have refused to go aboard". Activists Caution Vigilance To counter Washington's spin on events while calling for continued vigilance among FTAA forces, the broad alliance Continental Campaign against the Americas issued the following statement on Wednesday, May 19, shortly after the appearance of the draft declaration: "We are witnessing in Miami the failure of the original FTAA project, and at the same time the emergence of a new and perhaps more dangerous proposal for negotiations. "The United States will try and present the ‘flexible' proposal to move the negotiations forward as a success of the Ministerial Meeting. But this is only a fa?ade...Miami has revealed that the United States has lost its capacity to convince people of the virtues of its ‘free' trade project, and is using force to impose its objectives, trying to isolate the governments of the continent that are proposing a different vision". To Brazilian trade organizer Fatima Mello, although the original FTAA vision has been disrupted, "So long as the FTAA's framework and basic principles remain intact, the imposition of neoliberal trade policies will remain a threat, so it is important to oppose even this watered-down version of the FTAA". To cover its tactical retreat on the FTAA, US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick announced on Wednesday that Washington would launch negotiations for bilateral free trade pacts with the Dominican Republic, Panama, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. To Sarah Anderson, trade analyst of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, the US move is a confession of weakness. "They're admitting they can't get what they want via the FTAA, and that's because people and governments are resisting throughout the Americas". |