Globalization and Democracy

...Thereafter, in Phase Two, it would be disbursed on a per capita basis to all qualifying countries...

...Nevertheless, other countries are beginning to take the lead on these issues...

...The amount of money it would raise, and how much of this sum would actually be paid by currency speculators, will have to be better researched and debated...

...In the jargon of the European Union, this competitive bidding down of taxes and standards is called "social dumping...

...A social democratic form of globalization would not aim to increase capital mobility and corporate property rights against governments as quickly as the new agreements do—if at all...

...5 James Tobin, "A Proposal for International Monetary Reform," 4 Eastern Economic Journal (1978), pp...

...But such mobilization is often met with repression, as in contemporary Guatemala...

...national debt in a little more than three years and that of the rest of the developed countries in another three to four years...

...The construction of national market economies required large-scale state initiatives of two basic sorts...

...Democracy collapsed in all six of the countries in which the richest 20 percent of the population received more than 54 percent of national income.' The upshot is that the higher the levels of economic inequality, the lower the quality of democracy, and the lower the quality, the more likely it is that democratic government will fail...

...This essay also sketches and responds to six common objections to a strong international social dimension...

...The charter would set out basic worker rights and labor and environmental standards that all members of the GATT, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the other international organizaSUMMER • 1995 • 377 Globalization and Democracy tions would have to meet...

...Neoclassical economists have long recognized that trade liberalization can drive down wages in sectors where imports, produced by lower paid foreign workers, directly compete with domestic products...

...Pushing the Tobin tax proposal is useful in this context...

...They argued that interested citizens and nonprofit organizations were excluded from the consultations with American corporations that shaped the U.S...

...A referendum, in particular, would have disciplined political elites otherwise inclined to define the national economic interest as promoting the profitability of domestically owned transnational corporations...

...These constraints are not confined to the items listed in the new legal texts...

...Many of the equivalent organizations, and some others besides, opposed the free capital agreements in Canada and Mexico as well...

...In Phase One, lasting between eight and ten years if these estimates are correct, a global structural fund based on such a tax could be used to eliminate all of these debts...

...We can therefore expect substantial increases in income inequality...

...The European Union's social dimension—except for its agricultural price support system—started out very small...

...In Polanyi's formulation, what distinguished the laissez-faire or liberal approach to the construction of a national market economy in the United Kingdom was the insistence on treating land and labor as commodities, like corn or steel, with their values—rent and wages—determined by largely unregulated markets...

...The principal vehicle for getting a different message to the public must be the array of social movements and nonprofit organizations that cooperated in the struggle against NAFTA and Uruguay GATT...

...The United Nations Development Program's most recent annual report also proposed the Tobin tax as a means for funding an international social dimension...

...If Canada and the United States had applied the pre-Maastricht formula to their poorer NAFTA partner, Mexico would be receiving $10 billion a year—about what it paid in interest on its foreign debt each year in the 1980s...

...Such a trend can provoke popular mobilization, with the result that the cycle of democratic decline is broken...

...Moreover, the American people never got an opportunity to ratify the new international economic constitution under which they and their government would have to live...

...The perfunctory appeals process within the WTO is secret...

...3) freedom from forced labor for prisoners and children...

...We need to put neoliberals in a position where they have to be candid about the wellsprings of the sado-monetarism they practice on us, and the Tobin tax is useful for this purpose...

...2) the right to engage in collective bargaining and to strike when such bargaining does not resolve the issues...

...Skeptics will argue that no nation can unilaterally impose such a tax successfully, and that is true...

...153-9...

...So understood, the agreements are the principal instrument of what we might term the Second Great Transformation— the shift from a world economy that is an aggregation of national market economies, quite varied in their regulatory and redistributive principles, to a global market economy governed by a uniform set of rules...

...This new leverage is already being used to demand reductions in taxes, regulations, and wages that are said to reduce profitability and competitiveness...

...As with the first Great Transformation, so SUMMER • 1995 • 373 Globalization and Democracy with the second: a market economy can be organized along laissez-faire lines or along lines that pay greater attention to its social and political costs...

...But the citizens and governments of democracies such as Canada were once free to disagree with neoliberal economic dogmas, and to pursue policies predicated on other assumptions, without having to pay corporate tribute or suffer U.S...

...But by the end of the NAFTA fight, a consensus was emerging that the common enemy was neoliberal globalization rather than any particular trade deal, and they had begun to work on developing a common alternative to that vision...

...It increases inequalities in political influence because access to financial resources, and associated goods such as leisure and education, are so important to effective political participation...

...As for the Tobin tax, even under the intense pressures of Republican budget cuts to core social programs and the Mexican peso crisis, the Clinton administration has not seen fit even to float the idea, much less to advocate it...

...Political Prospects Such a prodemocratic approach to globalization could not be implemented without the strong support of the United States...

...Even before they began to bite, corporate taxes diminished as a share of total government revenues in twelve of seventeen OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Develoment) countries...

...In any event, the point at this stage is not to convince mainstream parties, tied all too closely to corporate interests, that it makes economic sense to promote social democratic globalization...

...Corruption becomes widespread, further contributing to the delegitimation of democratic institutions...

...Two things are required to overcome this lag...

...For example, if Ontario sought to introduce public auto insurance, on the model that currently exists in Manitoba, it would have to pay compensation to any American insurance companies that would lose business as a result...

...Democracy survived where it was long and well established, so that governments had to respond to popular demands for social democratic reforms —unemployment insurance and welfare benefits, the protection of basic workers' rights, Keynesian counter-cyclical macroeconomic policies, and so on—before economic and political polarization went too far...

...Many argued that there should have been national referendums—as with the Maastricht Treaty in France, Denmark, and Ireland...

...Since the developed countries hold most of the world's debt, they would be the principal beneficiaries of Phase One...

...and a prohibition of any independent appeals of WTO tribunal decisions...

...There is merit in this critique...

...International economic integration under neoliberal rules will tend to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of those who already have it, eroding the quality of democratic politics, and with it, the legitimacy of democratic political institutions...

...Of the thirteen Latin American countries for which income distribution data at the beginning and end of the 1980s were available, the share of national income going to the poorest 20 percent of the population declined in nine...

...By 1997, these funds will transfer about $68 billion U.S...

...However, like national market economies, a global market economy could also be governed by social democratic principles...

...They would also help pay for the upgrading of standards and infrastructure, and the promotion of economic development in depressed regions...

...First, reduce the legal restrictions on democratic governments associated with the investor, intellectual property, and technical standards provisions briefly discussed above...

...suppression of the briefs and other documents presented by governments that are parties to disputes before these tribunals...

...Thus, it paves the way for mergers and takeovers that could make these new property rights much more important over time...

...The most detailed expression of this vision to date is "A Just and Sustainable Trade and Development Initiative for the Western Hemisphere" (November 1994), developed by the Alliance for Responsible Trade, the Citizens Trade Campaign, and the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade...

...Unions face transnational corporations from a much weaker bargaining position than national or subnational governments...

...The impact of increased capital mobility on corporate taxation is exactly paralleled by its impact on corporate regulation...

...The document has also been endorsed by the umbrella group for Canadian opposition to the free capital agreements, the Action Canada Network.' It is too early to know whether this vision can inspire the "common front" of social movements that will be necessary if the social democratic vision of globalization is to prevail politically in the United States...

...How much time have they devoted to negotiating the kind of tax base SUMMER • 1995 • 379 Globalization and Democracy needed to cope with the human costs of the economic restructuring that this new GATT will accelerate...

...Wall Street, needless to say, would not approve...

...The per capita principle of distribution that would operate in Phase Two is crude, but it is understandable and has a certain prima facie fairness to it—it treats one human life as equal to another...

...Moreover, given the current distribution of the world's 378 • DISSENT Globalization and Democracy population, and population growth trends, this principle would ensure that less developed countries got the lion's share of the structural funds in Phase Two...

...As this "exit" option becomes more credible, corporate bargaining power increases...

...The answer, of course, is not one hour...

...Prior to that transformation, national economies were aggregations of local and regional markets, governed by their own rules and customs, and interacting with one another only to a limited degree...

...Tax policies, for example, are largely exempted from the free capital agreements, provided they are not used to give a competitive advantage to specific national producers...

...The investment chapter also reduces restrictions on foreign ownership, even in such sensitive sectors as financial services...

...In this period, income inequality in the three countries that pursued neoliberal policies most rigorously—the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand—increased more rapidly than in the other OECD countries...

...Poverty also increased: the World Bank's "poverty index" for the Latin American region rose from 26.5 to 31.5 percent in this decade.' Growing income inequality reduces the quality of democratic politics...

...The Tobin tax would also reduce international currency speculation of the sort that undermined the European Monetary System and is currently exacerbating Mexico's economic difficulties...

...Canada's finance minister, in the wake of the worst social program cuts in postwar history, announced that he would seek to place the Tobin tax on the agenda of the next G-7 summit, scheduled for June 1995...

...Thus, rising inequality is strongly correlated with democratic instability...

...Second, neutralize the social dumping pressures associated with the high levels of capital mobility that will exist in any global market economy...

...We must do everything we can to strengthen the political tendency they represent...

...Democracy Neoliberals believe that their preferred form of globalization is the single best strategy for promoting stable and high quality democracies throughout the world...

...This "common front" included the labor movement, most of the environmental movement (particularly with GATT), family farm organizations, consumer protection groups, women's and student organizations, anti-poverty coalitions, international development organizations, and religious groups promoting human rights, peace and development...

...To qualify for their share of the structural fund, governments would have to respect and protect the four basic labor rights that constitute the social charter...

...Where quality and legitimacy are already low, further erosion threatens to undermine the stability of democratic institutions as well...

...Many of these critics focused on problems with the processes by which the agreements were negotiated and ratified...

...But the unwillingness of Democrats and Republicans alike even to discuss the idea, much less put resources into researching it, is revealing...

...But as integration accelerated in the latter half of the 1980s, its structural funds doubled in size twice...

...Democracies in the North and South alike would be able to build the more humane economy that most of their citizens desire, and pay for it too...

...Success in this regard will undercut the hegemony that neoliberal economic ideas currently enjoy...

...In addition, they would have to meet one political condition—they would have to be democracies...

...However, such procedural criticisms are not as far-reaching or important as two other types that received less attention in the course of the fight over NAFTA...

...Unless fully compensated for the loss of sales that would result, such a "taking" violates NAFTA protections, and would open Canada to retaliation by the United States...

...Among other things, states are barred from requiring foreign investors to transfer technologies, and from mandating that a share of the materials used in production be locally purchased, or that production be geared to continental or world markets rather than strictly national ones, or that raw materials be processed to a certain level before export, or that a certain share of production be exported, or that a certain share of profits be locally reinvested...

...The movement toward uniform international property and regulatory regimes, based on principles deriving mainly from American law, will reduce the risks, complexity, and uncertainty of foreign investment for transnational corporations...

...Because neoliberals oppose "state intervention" in the economy, they see no sacrifice in the subordination of democratic governments to these rules...

...If the quality of democracy is falling, the legitimacy of the regime can be expected to deteriorate...

...In fact, these agreements went far beyond the traditional purpose of free trade agreements: reducing quotas and tariff barriers to international trade in nonagricultural goods...

...To date, most attention has been directed at the public face of this power transfer...

...One intriguing candidate for this role is the tax on international currency transactions first proposed byYale economist James Tobin in 1978...

...Because their most important impact is the promotion of capital mobility, and with it, freedom from the constraints of democratic governments and unions, these deals are more appropriately called "free capital" than free trade agreements...

...The average level of decline was 17.6 percent...

...The United States has a long experience of municipalities and states bidding down their property and corporate taxes in the competition for private investment...

...Do our current elites want to eliminate these debts or not...

...At the same time, they create what amount to rudimentary international property, corporate, and competition laws, backed by the threat of trade sanctions against those who refuse to accept them...

...There is nothing to prevent governments from competing to offer concessions to corporations in return for their investment, and much that encourages it...

...Conversely, one can have the best labor standards in the world on paper, but if unions are not free and democratic, standards will not be effectively monitored or enforced...

...Thus, there is also great potential for international alliances against neoliberal globalization...

...If they did, they would be exploring all their options—including the Tobin tax and other forms of international corporate tax treaties—before determining that the only viable response is to cut spending on education, welfare transfers, school lunches, and the like...

...Their critics argued that NAFTA and Uruguay GATT—and, by extension, neoliberal globalization as a whole—would dilute and weaken democracy...

...Such a "self-regulating market," Polanyi argued, entailed tremendous costs—economic and social polarization—providing the political basis for successful attacks on democratic institutions by fascists on the right and communists on the left in many countries...

...This growing imbalance is likely to lead to policies favoring those that already have the most, setting in motion a vicious cycle of increasing political and economic inequality...

...The most important new legal restrictions on democratic states have to do with investment, intellectual property rights, and technical standards...

...In the process, it would create more policy autonomy for central banks, which (under a new generation of administrators) might conceivably use that enhanced autonomy to reduce interest rates and unemployment—the principal underlying causes of rising national debt in the 1980s...

...The free capital agreements embody a laissezfaire approach to the regulation of the global market economy...

...These objectives should be the principal focus of binding, enforceable international agreements for the next ten or twenty years...

...Only by exposing the coercive and anti-democratic character of neoliberalism can we create the political space in which to pursue progressive economic and social policies, whether domestically or internationally...

...But the major economic powers spent almost a decade negotiating the last GATT...

...Third, create new mechanisms for redistributing a substantial portion of the economic gains from globalization to those individuals and nations most in need...

...As with existing structural funds, these would be targeted to specific types of programs, such as universal public education and health care...

...It could eliminate the entire U.S...

...Access to this money would create powerful incentives for countries that do not meet the conditions to move toward them...

...But the free capital agreements limit the state's capacity to fund the existing social wage, much less expand its scope through the introduction of new programs...

...These innovations will substantially increase capital mobility...

...But many activists in these movements are coming to the conclusion that they must now dedicate themselves to this end...

...Democratic Quality and Stability Such asymmetries exacerbate the inequalities in bargaining power between increasingly mobile transnational corporations, on the one hand, and immobile governments and unions on the other...

...As this happens, more and more people become willing to cheat the system in one way or another...

...Moreover, the administration may well retreat further under pressure from a Republican Congress that has recently declared that it will only support the extension of NAFTA to other countries if the side deals are not applied to the new entrants...

...We should acknowledge that the tax is no panacea...

...2 These complaints are certainly valid, but the emphasis is questionable...

...The labor and environmental side-deals to NAFTA revealed how far the Clinton administration was prepared to go on the social and environmental charter side of things...

...5 Tobin recently estimated that, given the current volume of global currency transactions—about $1.28 trillion a day—a tax of 0.5 percent would yield approximately $1.5 trillion in revenues every year, even allowing for a 35 percent decline in the volume of transactions as a result of the tax...

...First, the state had to tear down many of the old institutions that had regulated local and regional markets and impeded the free movement of land, labor, goods, services, and capital within the nation...

...3 See World Bank, Poverty and Income Distribution in Latin America: The Story of the 1980s (Washington: Technical Dept., Latin America and the Caribbean, 1993), pp...

...In the short run, any such international social dimension would be very limited...

...However, it could be large enough to make a difference, and it could be expanded over time...

...Any regulation can become the object of downward market pressures simply by virtue of the fact that transnational corporations regard it as a cost...

...However, as most people recognize, tax policies are highly vulnerable to capital mobility...

...368-9...

...and second, through the market pressures that intensifying competition for scarce private investment imposes on national and subnational governments...

...Their central innovations lay in (1) the creation of new international property rights for foreign investors and intellectual innovators...

...There are thus incentives for both the North and the South to support such a plan...

...Even the fairest, most open and transparent process, administered with perfect impartiality, will not generate good outcomes if the rules that supranational tribunals are required to interpret and enforce are inappropriate...

...Now this will be much more difficult, even after they have thrown out governments espousing neoliberal ideas...

...and (3) the application of traditional GATT principles (that is, "national treatment" and "most favored nation") to trade in agricultural goods and all categories of services...

...the absence of conflict-ofinterest standards for the tribunals' three trade specialists, who act as judges and may simultaneously pursue private business careers...

...The more fundamental problem is the devolution of democratic power to transnational corporations...

...This is enough to eliminate the foreign debt of all less developed countries in about two years—and foreign debt is the lion's share of their government indebtedness...

...This list is hardly adequate, but if unions were strong and democratic, their members would be able to mobilize in pursuit of stronger standards, as in the early industrializing countries...

...In the last year, France has been at least as vocal as the United States in calling for a social charter component to GATT...

...Nor can governments create public corporations, embark upon new programs, or introduce new regulations that reduce the "reasonably expected" value of foreign investments without paying compensation, unless they wish to run the risk of trade sanctions...

...q Notes I See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957...

...380 • DISSENT...

...The ban on performance requirements protects corporations from competing against one another to give governments concessions in return for the right to invest...

...If Canada had not already had a national health insurance program, the same might have been true for American health insurance businesses operating in Canada...

...As we learned from the Clinton health care reform debacle, it is essential that even the most ambitious and far-reaching reforms be kept simple...

...Democratic Leadership Conference types will then declare that there is no realistic alternative on their left, while they are to be preferred to the Republicans because they will implement the necessary neoliberal reforms more humanely...

...Neoliberal Globalization vs...

...For many of the leaders and activists in these organizations, their cooperation in the fight against NAFTA and Uruguay GATT began as a marriage of convenience...

...Corporate capital was already highly mobile, by historical standards...

...This competition, and its negative impact on tax revenues and expenditures, has intensified within the United States in recent years...

...Putting a simple yet radical alternative form of globalization on the political agenda weakens their standard argument—" there is no alternative...

...A more promising strategy is to demonstrate to democratic publics that the neoliberal form of globalization is not natural, inevitable, or desirable...

...It would protect just four basic worker rights: (1) the right to organize unions that members control democratically...

...The form of globalization promoted by the free capital agreements is likely to exacerbate the already rising inequalities attributable to neoliberal policies—antiunionism, deregulation, privatization, tax cuts, monetarism, and so on—pursued in many countries since the late 1970s...

...Democratic Scope Free capital agreements reduce the scope of democracy by transferring the power to make decisions on important social and economic issues to unaccountable supranational public and private bureaucracies...

...The first of these looks at ways in which the free capital agreements narrow the scope of democratic control over social and economic policies, transferring authority over such things as the conditions under which firms may be bought, sold, or closed by foreign investors, from democratically accountable governments to the transnational corporations that control more and more of world trade...

...Second, the state had to replace these with something new—comprehensive bodies of property, contract, tort, labor, corporate and competition law, together with new enforcement mechanisms...

...France might well support a more serious social charter than that which the Clinton administration secured in the NAFTA side deals...

...Second, the redistribution of a substantial part of the economic gains from globalization to those who are most in need and most vulnerable to the massive restructuring that globalization brings in its wake...

...The experience of the last fifteen years supports this expectation...

...denial of citizens' right to petition...

...Thus, contrary to the neoliberal conceit, far from promoting democratization, neoliberal globalization is likely to undermine many of the vulnerable new democracies that have emerged in the last fifteen years and to reduce the quality of democracy in the countries where it survives...

...Any good or service that is domestically produced but might be produced elsewhere is vulnerable to 376 • DISSENT Globalization and Democracy corporate pressures to cut wages and benefits in order to reduce the attractiveness of shifting production overseas...

...First, the regulation of international competition among states and firms so as to yield socially and environmentally desirable outcomes...

...Analogously, the free capital agreements can be understood as instruments that, in the name of reducing barriers to trade, alter or negate national laws, policies, and customs that stand in the way of the global market economy...

...He did not say how he thought the revenues from the tax ought to be distributed...

...But the point here goes well beyond that...

...2) the creation of new legal restrictions on government regulations...

...The chief countermechanisms are state taxes and transfers in support of the "social wage" (that is, policies such as unemployment insurance, public health, and public education), and union-led collective bargaining...

...The revenue source for the structural funds, and the formula by which they would be allocated, could also be kept very simple...

...Together, these movements and organizations represent a substantial part of the American population...

...In that spirit, I would propose a very simple global social charter to begin with...

...Edward Muller found that, controlling for per capita income levels, income inequality differences accounted for about 60 percent of the variation in democratic regime stability among thirty-three countries between 1960 and 1980...

...bargaining position...

...Social Democratic Globalization A pro-democratic form of globalization would have to achieve three things...

...Free Trade Agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) portrayed all these as mere extensions of trade liberalizing initiatives familiar in the United States since the dark days of the Great Depression...

...trade sanctions...

...6 This scheme is outlined in more detail in Ian Robinson, "The NAFTA Labor Accord in Canada: Experience, Prospects and Alternatives, " Connecticut Journal of International Law (Summer 1995), forthcoming...

...From a social democratic perspective, the social dimension of international economic integration lags far behind already existing levels of capital mobility...

...There is not space here for a comprehensive overview of all the new provisions that prevent democratic governments from regulating transnational corporations...

...50-68...

...The free capital agreements do this in two basic ways: first, through the legal restrictions they impose on the policies that governments may adopt...

...Heightened international capital mobility increases market constraints on governments, democratic or otherwise...

...Finally, the technical standards provisions of the free capital agreements make it significantly more difficult for governments to defend regulations more stringent than an international minimum, requiring them to demonstrate that a challenged regulation is the "least trade restrictive necessary" to achieve a "legitimate" public objective...

...Under the Maastricht formula, that amount would rise to $20 billion...

...Among less developed countries, the region whose elites embraced neoliberal reforms most expansively—Latin America—also experienced substantial income redistribution away from the poor...

...The left will get nowhere with the electorate as long as our position—more or less explicit—is: "We accept the neoliberal premises about the character and dynamics of globalization, but we reject the need to make the cuts that logically follow from them...

...Candid neoliberals will reply, "But what would discipline democratic populations if their national debts were erased...

...The free capital agreements encourage a parallel international competition among nation-states...

...Challenging the myths of globalization is where we must begin...

...The second criticism focuses on how neoliberal globalization is likely to affect economic 374 • DISSENT Globalization and Democracy inequality...

...dollars a year to poorer parts of the Union...

...It is estimated that more than 25 percent of the world's economic activity now comes from the two hundred largest corporations...

...The last two elements, taken together, are what Europeans call the "social dimension" of international economic integration...

...This proposal was endorsed by French president Francois Mitterrand at the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, on March 11...

...As long as we're stuck in that mold, we look like nice, well-intentioned people who won't face up to the nasty new realities...

...Conversely, if these international agreements reflected a social democratic vision of globalization, rather than a neoliberal one, these flaws would be much less important...

...Up to 33 percent of all world trade, and more than 50 percent of all Canadian trade, takes place among different units of a single corporation, rather than among different firms...

...The structural funds would transfer resources from those who gain from market restructuring to those who lose...

...When Canada's minister of health announced that she would introduce legisSUMMER • 1995 • 375 Globalization and Democracy lation requiring that all cigarettes be sold in plain packages, Carla Hills (in her new incarnation as a big league international trade lawyer) appeared on behalf ofAmerican cigarette manufacturers to tell the Canadians that such a policy would constitute a "taking" of their intellectual property (specifically, their trademark...

...Instead, the deals were hurried through Congress under a "Fast Track" process that allowed little time for evaluating long and complex texts and left no scope for amendment by the legislative branch...

...7. It is available from the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C...

...It will not accept binding international worker rights or minimum labor standards...

...Indeed...

...A global social dimension, on the European model, would have two basic components: a social and environmental charter and structural funds...

...These power inequalities, in turn, increase inequalities in wealth and income...

...The capacity of unions to reduce or stabilize income inequality through collective bargaining is also weakened...

...NAFTA's investment chapter, for example, prohibits a wide variety of"performance requirements"— that is, conditions that governments might require foreign investors to meet in return for the right to invest in a country...

...4 Edward Muller, "Democracy, Economic Development and Income Inequality," 53 American Sociological Review (February 1988), pp...

...and (4) freedom from discrimination in hiring, promotion, or remuneration...

...It suggests that neither party wants a relatively quick and clean resolution to the debt "crisis" that has become their principal justification for dismantling popular social programs and refusing to embark on new initiatives...

...2 Ralph Nader, "Drop the GATT," The Nation (October 10, 1994), pp...

...The certain prospect that such benefits would immediately be suspended would also create a powerful economic disincentive for right-wing elements considering a crack-down on democratic trade unions or military elites considering the overthrow of a democratic political regime.' Thus, while neoliberal globalization is hostile to democracy, social democratic globalization would both actively promote and help to fund the social preconditions of high quality democracy...

...For example, the central thrust of Ralph Nader's attack on the World Trade Organization (WTO), the body created to interpret and administer the Uruguay GATT, was that its operations violate basic due process norms: They include a lockout of the press and the public from WTO tribunals...

...We should not be under any illusions as to the willingness of either the Republican or the Democratic parties, as they currently exist, to support such a vision...

...NAFTA's intellectual property provisions are similarly restrictive...

...In countries where foreign corporations constitute a significant portion of a sector such as insurance, the necessity of paying such compensation could make new policies prohibitively expensive, whatever the public interest...

...The agreements can be expected to accelerate this trend...

...It will now be easier and more attractive to shift investment from domestic to foreign sites...

...Such devices have been used by many countries seeking to catch up technologically, to diversify their economies, and to increase the value-added manufacturing potential of their raw materials...

...Thus, the tax could also help to prevent a recurrence of such indebtedness...

...The regime then becomes more vulnerable to overthrow, whether from egalitarian insurgencies from below or from pre-emptive anti-egalitarian coups d'etat from above...

...Phone: 202-234-9382...

...16, 48, 58...

...Whatever they are called, they go a long way toward the creation of a global "market economy," in Karl Polanyi's sense of that term.' Polanyi argued that the construction of national market economies—rather than industrialization—was the "Great Transformation" that the nations of Western Europe and North America underwent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...

...In keeping with this marketing strategy, they insisted on labeling them "free trade agreements"—a comforting term for many...

...If popular reform efforts prove too weak to be effective, or are repressed, a growing number of citizens will become alienated from the political process...

...Further progress will be possible internationally as the domestic balance of political power is altered in the less developed countries, increasing the receptiveness of their governments to a more comprehensive international social charter...