Powerless people
Robocops face down protesters in Seattle and London: the globe's citizens are helpless before the future.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- By JONATHAN FREEDLAND ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
WHAT else can they do? No wonder the Free Rebels Coalition and the Eugene Anarchists are reduced to leading a flotilla of turtles into central Seattle; no wonder America's steel workers find themselves dumping Chinese steel in the city harbour (only to fish it out again). The 50 000 protesters against the World Trade Organisation, now squaring off against the Robocops of the Seattle police, as well as those in London, have resorted to the demo and the TV-friendly stunt for the simplest, oldest of reasons: they have no other way of making their voice heard. It is a timeless rule of politics: people take to the streets when all other methods of persuasion have failed. They may chant about their power but, in truth, when any group is forced to mount a demonstration, what they demonstrate most eloquently is their own sense of powerlessness. It's the gesture of those who have nowhere else to turn.
This is the situation we are in today, although now the "we" is not just the anti-apartheid liberation meovements - it is the entire human race. Like the protesters of old, we face a range of forces out of our control and which we barely understand; they are beyond our reach. Back then it was the combination of galloping technology and energetic capitalism. Today it's the same dynamic duo, wreaking their havoc all over the planet. They called it industrialisation; we call it globalisation. But the challenge is eerily similar.
A century and a half ago, workers saw that their lives were being shaped by mill owners and factory magnates - and yet they could do nothing about it. The industrial revolution was remoulding the landscape, yet the politics of the day was still designed for a rural, semi-feudal society that had vanished. The cities were full of workers, yet the country was run by landed aristocrats. The economy changed, but politics failed to catch up.
Today does not seem that different. Once again the economy has moved ahead of politics. What are the big forces shaping the planet now? They are the likes of Microsoft and Monsanto, vast global corporations whose decisions influence every aspect of our day-to-day lives, from how we work to what we eat. Yet what tools do we have to restrain these global beasts? Our only weapon is national governments - and yet these have proven themselves all but powerless in the face of the mega-corporations, who grew beyond national borders long ago.
Everyone knows, as a matter of instinct, that even if Thabo Mbeki wanted to take on Monsanto, he could not do it. Not that Tony Leon would be any different. A vote in a South African general election can affect a lot - but it can barely touch the forces that are truly shaping our world. It is a drastic and dreadful conclusion: the present notion of democracy, the business of choosing national governments to express national sovereignty, is ever more redundant. It cannot do the job that's needed because it comes from a bygone era. Asking old-style, nation-state democracy to tame Microsoft is like trying to slow down a car by tugging on the reins.
Protesters in Seattle know that; that's why they're not wasting their time on conventional politics. By their actions, they are demanding a 21st-century equivalent of the shift from aristocratic rule to universal suffrage sought in the last century. Back then the political response to industrialisation was mass democracy. But what should the response be now?
No one seems to know the answer - yet increasingly politicians, and people, are asking the question. Until now, globalisation has been discussed as a matter of economics and even culture, but what should be its political form? What great idea will we dream up which might allow our politics to catch up with the new economics?
We cannot simply demand nation-states assert themselves more. Some have tried: the United States wanted to ban imports of shrimp from Asian countries whose fishing methods were unfriendly to turtles - the WTO said no. Okay, say others. Perhaps in this new global world, we need to pool our sovereignty and work as supranational blocks. Ardent Europhiles reckon a strong European Union could take on Bill Gates in a way a single government cannot. But even this might not work. The EU joined together to try to keep out North American hormone-treated beef. The WTO ruled against it.
No, the uncomfortable reality is that global forces need global restraints. We are going to have to devise worldwide political machinery to tame a worldwide economy. No one in America can utter such heresy, for such words smack of the ultimate X-Files villain: Global Government. And yet, just as the nations which took shape in the last century required modern states, so the one-world of the next century is crying out for its political companion.
What might it look like? Today, Bill Clinton will tell the delegates in Seattle that the WTO itself represents their best hope - that, far from being the satanic villain imagined by the eco-warriors shouting outside the hall, the World Trade Organisation is the planet's best chance to keep globalisation under control.
He wants to open up the organisation's secret deliberations, allowing observers to sit in. That will satisfy few critics of the WTO. In their mind, the body is bogus because it lacks all democratic legitimacy. But that view is too crude - after all, most of the 134 national representatives gathered in Seattle have been sent there by democratically elected governments: the WTO can even claim to be a kind of global parliament. But is it good enough? Not at the moment, it ain't.
It is too secretive, too remote from public scrutiny. And few citizens feel they are represented on it, even if, technically, they are. There are other possibilities. Gordon Brown, now installed in the chair of the International Monetary Fund's governing committee, is understood to favour a merged IMF and World Bank which could step in and help the planet's economic trouble spots - a kind of rapid response force for globalisation. And there's always the United Nations.
Whichever form it takes, we have to think of something. Our world is changing so fast and our ideas of sovereignty and power are lagging far behind. No one has the answer - but few dispute that this could be the most pressing political question of the coming century.
-- The Guardian, December 1 1999.