Globalization Unravels III: The Debacle in Seattle Freedom, said Hegel, is the recognition of necessity. Freedom, the proponents of neoliberalism like Hegel’s disciple, Francis Fukuyama, tell us, lies in the recognition of the inexorable irreversibility of free market globalization. Thank god, the 50,000 people who descended on Seattle in late November 1999 did not buy this Hegelian - Fukuyaman notion of freedom as submission and surrender to what seemed to be the ineluctable necessity of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the mid-nineties, the WTO had been sold to the global public as the lynchpin of a multilateral system of economic governance that would provide the necessary rules to facilitate the growth of global trade and the spread of its beneficial effects. Nearly five years later, the implications and consequences of the founding of the WTO had become as clear to large numbers of people as a robbery carried out in broad daylight. What were some of these realizations?
By signing on to the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMs), developing countries discovered that they had signed away their right to use trade policy as a means of industrialization. By signing on to the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), countries realized that they had given high tech transnationals like Microsoft and Intel the right to monopolize innovation in the knowledge-intensive industries and provided biotechnology firms like Novartis and Monsanto the go-signal to privatize the fruits of aeons of creative interaction between human communities and nature such as seeds, plants, and animal life. By signing on to the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA), developing countries discovered that they had agreed to open up their markets while allowing the big agricultural superpowers to consolidate their system of subsidized agricultural production that was leading to the massive dumping of surpluses on those very markets, a process that was, in turn, destroying smallholder-based agriculture. By setting up the WTO, countries and governments discovered that they had set up a legal system that enshrined the priority of free trade above every other good - above the environment, justice, equity, and community. They finally got the significance of consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s warning a few years earlier that the WTO, was a system of 'trade uber alles.' In joining the WTO, developing countries realized that they were not, in fact, joining a democratic organization but one where decisions were made, not in formal plenaries but in non-transparent backroom sessions, and where majority voting was dispensed with in favor of a process called 'consensus' — which was really a process in which a few big trading powers imposed their consensus on the majority of the member countries. The Seattle Ministerial brought together a wide variety of protesters from all over the world focusing on a wide variety of issues. Some of their stands on key issues, such as the incorporation of labor standards into the WTO, were sometimes contradictory, it is true. But most of them, whether they were in the streets or they were in meeting halls, were united by one thing: their opposition to the expansion of a system that promoted corporate-led globalization at the expense of justice, community, national sovereignty, cultural diversity, and ecological sustainablity.
Seattle was a debacle created by corporate overreach, which is quite similar to Paul Kennedy’s concept of 'imperial overstretch' that is said to be the central factor in the unraveling of empires. (7) The Ministerial’s collapse from pressure from these multiple sources of opposition underlined the truth in Ralph Nader’s prescient remark, made four years earlier, that the creation of global trade pacts like the WTO was likely to be 'the greatest blunder in the history of the modern global corporation.' Whereas previously, the corporation’s operating within a more or less 'private penumbra' made it difficult to effectively crystallize opposition, he argued that 'now that the global corporate strategic plan is out in print... gives us an opportunity.' (8)