NGOs AND THE REAL LOSERS AT SEATTLE. The battle at the WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle was only the latest and most visible in a string of recent NGO victories, says the Economist (p.18), including the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and the "Fifty Years Is Enough" campaign at the World Bank's anniversary meeting in 1994. Citizens' groups are also increasingly powerful at the corporate and national levels.
How they have become so, and what this means, are questions that urgently need to be addressed, the story says. Are citizens' groups, as their supporters claim, the first steps towards an "international civil society"? Or do they represent a dangerous shift of power to unelected and unaccountable special-interest groups?
The losers in this power shift, says the story, are international organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF, the UN agencies or the WTO, which lack political leverage. Add to this the poor public image that these technocratic, faceless bureaucracies have developed, and it is hardly surprising that they are popular targets for NGO "swarms".
Less obvious is whether NGO attacks will democratize, or merely disable, these organizations. At first sight, Seattle suggests a pessimistic conclusion. History, however, suggests a different outcome. In 1994, the "Fifty Years Is Enough" campaign was a prototype of Seattle. Now the NGOs are surprisingly quiet about the World Bank.
The reason is that the Bank has made a huge effort to co-opt them, says the story. World Bank President James Wolfensohn has made "dialogue" with NGOs a central component of his institution's work. More than 70 NGO specialists work in the Bank's field offices. More than half of World Bank projects last year involved NGOs.
Wolfensohn's efforts have diluted the strength of the "mobilization networks" and increased the relative strength of the technical NGOs, for it is mostly these that the Bank has co-opted. From environmental policy to debt relief, NGOs are at the center of World Bank policy. The new World Bank is more transparent, says the story, but it is also more beholden to a new set of special interests.
In a related editorial, the Economist (p.13) comments that five billion people living in the developing countries, who include the poorest of the world's poor, are the real losers from the whole sorry episode of the failure of the WTO meeting in Seattle. Free trade, like freedom in general, is not a panacea. It is not likely to bring better welfare on its own. But also, it is not likely simply to enrich multinationals and destroy the planet. Trade is about greater competition, which weakens the power of vested interests. It is about more countries joining the handful-Japan, South Korea, Singapore and a few more-that in this century have closed the gap with the West and transformed the lives of their people.
Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal editorial (online version) reports as the melee in Seattle was televised around the world, people were especially touched by the Knight-Ridder account of a teary 21-year-old bank teller denouncing vandals who broke the bank's windows in the name of opposition to the WTO. "This is my job!" she cried, "This is how I eat!" If the rioters get their way, her fate will be shared by millions of even less fortunate people around the world. So she is a powerful metaphor for what happens when business and politicians allow trade to become hostage to special interests.
Once established, any labor-environment working groups will be impossible to get rid of. Soon they will be determining everything from minimum wage rates to environmental standards that would preclude all sorts of development -- with big business going along (a la IMF bailouts) to get its niche trade favors. Already the Third World has begun to express its concerns, as well it should. It's hard to see why countries trying desperately to bring prosperity to their peoples should sign on to a deal giving politicians from rich countries the right to dictate Third World domestic policies in order to appease First World special interests and dilettantes, the story adds.
Separately, a Journal of Commerce op-ed (p. 8) entitled: "Re-start WTO talks - and do the job right" written by US Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on International Trade, notes we need to give the world's developing countries more incentive to joint the talks by recognizing their rights to participate in the fruits of globalization.
"We [the US] need to go forward and succeed for the sake of our farmers and small businesses ? who most depend on open markets ? and for the world's poorest countries," Grassley adds.