PARIS After its sudden rise, anti-globalization activism has been stunned into a phase of relative quiet by the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
But the movement is looking for a second wind, and it may find it in recasting itself - partly and for the time being at least - as a force linked to protests against the American military response in Afghanistan.
As an example of their retrenchment, organizers called off counter-capitalism demonstrations they hoped would bring tens of thousands of militants to challenge the policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at their annual meetings in Washington in September. Also scratched: a gathering of leaders of Europe's Socialist-led governments who planned to spend a day together in Stockholm analyzing (or perhaps laying plans to co-opt) what seemed then like a potentially significant new political movement.
Essentially, the problem for the globalization movement had suddenly become its focus of anger and energy against the United States and other rich countries at a time when those countries are engaged in a widely supported, mortal struggle with terrorism. Moreover,geographically at least, terrorism is based in the Third World that the globalization activists say they seek to defend.
These days, Mobilization for Global Justice, a U.S.-based advocacy group that was planning the demonstrations in Washington, describes itself as centering its activities on its old mission, including a demonstration Nov. 9 against the World Trade Organization, but with "new colors and shades" that reflect its members' preoccupation with terrorism and the Afghanistan conflict. One of the first of the anti-globalization groups in the United States, Global Exchange, has taken a position summed up in a statement on its Web site called "No More Innocent Victims." It asserts "Retaliation, we believe, will offer no consolation."
"As we in the United States endure our suffering, we must pledge ourselves not to visit similar suffering in others," it says. The biggest European anti-globalization group, Attac, in a current newsletter, now makes a link between trade liberalization and war. "Despite bombing, anthrax, despair and death," the newsletter says, "trade must go on. In all the political tools used, war is in the forefront of further liberalization around the world."
Focus on the Global South, described as a Bangkok-based advocacy group that had concentrated on globalization issues, goes further in directly identifying the United States as the source of its own grief with terrorism. In an article, its executive director says "that terrorists like Osama bin Laden, an ex-CIA protégé, have learned their lessons on the strategic targeting of the civilian population from Washington's traditional strategy of total warfare where damage to the civilian population is not simply seen as collateral but as essential."
>From all this, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Greens member of the European
Parliament and a member of Attac, says he believes the
anti-globalization groups "are beginning to see themselves a little as
a Peace Movement II." But because the anti-globalization forces, a
loose network of groups with similar views of imposing a tax on
financial transactions or a re-regulation of international trade or
Third World debt relief, have no single organizational center or
recognized spokesman, it is difficult to characterize the movement's
attitudes with certainty.
Speaking for Mobilization for Global Justice, Robert Weissman said: "A lot of people who are involved in the movement against corporate globalization are active in opposing the war. But I think there is no exact identity between the movement and the anti-war people."
In reporting on a meeting of activists and campaigners in London, the Bretton Woods Project, a British foundation close to the anti-globalization movement, said the group "expressed fear that the globalization-resistance movement built up since Seattle, Prague and Genoa may now start to lose momentum."
"Many felt that the movement, which had been gaining a decent level of legitimacy, may now be undermined," it said.
The report described "civil society groups and globalization watchdogs" as not knowing how to position themselves in what was acknowledged as a new political context. It suggested they had been destabilized by "the general tone of global cooperation rhetoric employed by Western leaders," and told of some campaigners who "have decided to suspend or spike campaigns which appear to be 'anti-American.'"
In the last weeks, some of the component groups appear to have attempted to knit together the idea that Third World poverty, when not American imperialism, is responsible for terrorism and that, therefore, terrorism could not be uprooted by a military response.
Mr. Cohn-Bendit described the anti-globalization activists in Europe as being divided between backers of the "old, ultra-left ideologies that are hiding inside" the movement, and young people who are in favor of democratization of the market economy at a time when "the American political class still only half understands that looking at the world's economic imbalance is a very reasonable thing to do." "The big weakness of the movement," Mr. Cohn-Bendit said in an interview, "is that it counts up all the errors of American policy and turns that into its single decoding of the world. But to say that it's the same United States that represents freedom in the great historical moments when security is threatened - they don't see that." On the same line, one of the emblematic figures of the European peace movement of the 1980s, the Dutch political activist Mient Jan Farber, asked why he was not joining anti-war demonstrators, said last weekend that terrorism had to be combated. In a television appearance, Mr. Farber, who is a participant in the Netherlands Inter-Church Peace Council, described the American action in Afghanistan as defense, not revenge.
What effect this kind of argument will have on the anti-globalization movement is far from clear. Last month, Attac sprouted a chapter in Germany that invited Oskar Lafontaine, the former German finance minister, to its first public meeting. Almost reflexively, speculation followed that Mr. Lafontaine, who fell out with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in 1999 and left the government, might be regarding the movement as a lever for a return to active politics in a zone without a clear leadership figure. Still, Mr. Lafontaine was in very much the margins for the time being.
Rather, reports from correspondents in attendance for both the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany and Le Monde in France clearly indicated that it was focused on the American involvement in Afghanistan.
For the conservative German newspaper, "anti-American reflexes predominated at the convention." In parallel, the left-of-center Le Monde gave this description of the proceedings:
"Everyone insisted that they were not anti-American and that they were horrified by terrorism, but the long and constant repetition of the U.S. Army's interventions in the world over the last 50 years limited the effect of these statements while responsibility was clearly designated: The single party responsible for what has happened to the United States is the United States itself and the globalization it has imposed."
This portrayal of the meeting's dominant tone enraged Bernard Cassen, the president of Attac-France, who attended the event in Berlin.
"Since Sept. 11, there has been an attempt to say that anti-globalization equals anti-Americanism," Mr. Cassen said from Brazil in a telephone interview. "That's repulsive. That's using cadavers to attack a movement."
"In fact," Mr. Cassen said, referring to the current effort to control international financial transactions that could benefit terrorism, "Bush was never as close to Attac as he is now. With a little effort, maybe he could become a member."
As for a cautious American view of how the anti-globalization movement was changing, Mr. Weissman, said, "anti-globalization has several strands. The different strands react in their own way."
Far from being muted, Mr. Cassen said the anti-globalization movement in Europe would be involved in major demonstrations to coincide with a meeting Nov. 10 of the World Trade Organization and a summit gathering on Dec. 15 of the European Union. And he played down Mr. Lafontaine's role, or the organization's own in upcoming European elections, saying, "The movement is hostile to personalization."
A German official, who has followed the evolution of the anti-globalization groups, also minimized Mr. Lafontaine's prospects.
Rather, the official expected the further implantation of anti-globalization ideology in both the extreme left and extreme right, which he said naturally fed into anti-United States rhetoric. In some countries susceptible to ideology and conspiracy theories, he saw little chance the movement would die out soon.
But in Germany, he went on, where exports accounted for a significant part of its economy, there was instinctive understanding of the importance of free trade, which the globalization critics abhor. In contrast, the official said, Mr. Schroeder often stressed that Germany had to be made fit for globalization, and not try to run away from it.
Perhaps a more finely tuned gauge of the movement's political potency was likely to appear in France, where Attac claims 30,000 members.
Before Sept. 11, it was expected that the Socialist Party campaign for the presidency next May would make use of anti-globalization rhetoric to coat its platform with a left-wing ideological veneer attractive to elements of a floating electorate.
Now the movement in France is reported to be increasingly aligned with the thinking of Jean-Pierre Chevenement, an independent presidential candidate and one-time Socialist defense minister who quit that post to protest France's alignment with the United States in the Gulf War. Mr. Chevenement's campaign is one of left-wing nationalism and strong calls for the preservation of French identity.
For Mr. Cohn-Bendit, if the globalization movement became more clearly a political vehicle, and less obviously a transmission belt for international public opinion, its implosion would become a risk.
With its developing role as a megaphone for opponents of the U.S.-led anti-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan, that transformation could be at hand.