In case it's of interest, here's a post of mine which is part of an ongoing argument within the social democratic milieu of a list run by Oz Labor Party MP Lindsay Tanner. Does it hold water, d'ya reckon?
Cheers, Rob.
http://conference.socialchange.net.au/openaustralia/discuss/date.html#242
Thanks for the note, Lindsay.
Well, mebbe I did pay for my polemical excesses with some loss of focus - but we do seem to agree on the only real point I was trying to make. After all, you very succinctly write:
"Underneath all of these issues is a core tension which can be found within individual countries as much as globally: the tension between democracy and money."
Bewdy! So I suspect the greater part of our disagreement comes from how important (or inevitable) we think this is and how we come into ideas about 'the economy' in general and the WTO in particular.
As Georg Simmel once said, there is such a thing as a forest, in all its objective wholeness. But a logger does not see what a tourist sees, and she does not see what an environmentalist sees, and neither sees what an administrator sees. To each of us, only part of the whole is given. Perhaps the first thing some see the subordination of the polity to the economic - where you see a needlessly skewed and uncertain global/international economy. The two are quite tenably part of the same whole, but the WTO would consequently be cast in very different lights.
I would not like to see the US turn its back on multilateral bodies at all - its might would be all the more overpowering in bilateral dealings, after all. I do not favour, nor think realistic, a Fortress Australia scenario. And, no, I am not the love child of Pat Buchanan and Pauline Hanson. I haven't argued against trade at all, actually - although I do believe the WTO ain't the place *to start* on what has to be done, and I am inclined to be more suspicious than you seem to be of the claims made for the Friedmanite world-to-come (that delicious Bob Ellis quote about a couple of hundred successfully competing economies comes back to mind).
What bothers me most is how a talk-fest of finance and trade ministers, and their emerald pass guests, would actually *perceive* the issues they arrogate unto themselves.
Would they see labour issues as the ILO would see them? Nope. To financiers and economic managers, labour is but a factor of production, and thus a salient cost centre. I agree with you that it's down to nation states that the ILO hasn't lived up to its potential. So I'm saying the WTO cannot do what the ILO could if we worked on making it what an ILO could be. That's the social democrat's brief, doncha reckon? I admit socdems ain't what they used to be around the world, but at least there are a few in power with whom some sort of concerted rejuvenation of the ILO could be broached (Jospin would be easier than Clarke, who'd be easier than Schroeder, who'd be easier than M'beke, who'd be easier than Blair who'd be easier than Clinton - but a social democrat has to start somewhere, doncha reckon?).
Would the WTO see environmental concerns as environmentalists see them? Nope. The environmentalists were successful in establishing an environmental working group within the WTO, only to watch it slowly transform into a body whose focus was the allocated cost of environmental protection rather than that of a stuffed environment. As Lori Wallach of the American 'Citizens Watch' says, it has been much like "putting the Endangered Species Act in the middle of the bankruptcy code." As the *London Observer* noted, "The WTO does not recognise the 'precautionary principle', and overrules all other international agreements. This, together with the perceived agenda-setting of the talks by big business, is what mostly concerned the environmentalists and labour groups protesting at Seattle."
Would the WTO see technology transfer (the only way LDCs are really going to come right, in my view) as an LDC would see it? Nope. For a start, most LDC delegates to the WTO were locked out of the important wheeling'n'dealing sessions (which, I submit, had more to do with Seattle coming a cropper than just about anything else. 'No one combs our hair in our absence,' said one furious Ugandan delegate). More importantly, the WTO is about seeing all as trade, hence seeing all as commodities - which, in the case of technology (information), means securing the necessary exchange value by a strongly enforced intellectual property regime. Information economists have never convincingly come up with a model by which true technology transfer might take place (and, remember, some of this information is from and about LDC people, but patented in the 'north'). I submit it *can't* take place. Firms, competitiors and monopolists alike, are not in the business of 'free trade' in this sense, and the WTO is precisely about restricting free trade in this sense.
Would they see culture as a member of a particular culture might see it? Nope. Much of culture is 'done' through audio-visual communications, and these, too, are seen as commodities. Every Australian producer knows, for instance, that, although Ozzies love high-quality local product, imported stuff costs about a tenth of what it would cost to produce locally (usually the import has already made its money in the American market, so its export/syndication is all cream). Subsidies or quotas are a no-no. Which all makes absolute economic sense, of course. Just not cultural sense.
I shan't bore you with more of the same. But I hope I've clarified what I'm on about: the subversion of the democratic by a particular take on the economic. There's stuff a WTO-type body simply can't do. Sure, its proponents would argue it's only on about trade issues. But trade issues are about everything else, too (all the more so under the metaphysically hubristic scientism of prevailing economics). And a lot of that stuff is altered simply in the act of casting it all as just so many issues in trade.
To quote Martin Khor of the Third World Network: "The democratic system is not working. It's bust. It needs more than WTO reform." To that, I'd add that democracy needs articulating and institutionalising BEFORE it can be preempted by the ubiquitous tendrils of an effectively world-defining WTO. To the degree that the WTO's issues are urgent, all the more so is rejuvenating democracy - globally where possible, nationally where necessary.
Some on this list (and a few million elsewhere) do not see democracy, health, education, regional services and culture as trade issues, do not want them seen as such, and consequently feel rudely spat out by their polity.
That's how our bipartisan narrow neoliberalism produces its social stratifications, its busted parliament house doors, its Hansons, its dark suspicions of the men and women who seek to represent them, its institutional crises, and, I still dare hope, a coherent and articulate shift in the direction of democratic socialism - whether it be within or without the ALP.