Resisting the World Trade Organization's brand of globalization
George, Susan
YOU'RE SITTING there reading Dissent in the new millennium and I'm sitting here at the end of September 1999 with carte blanche from the editors: "Say what you like." Easy enough for...
...beef...
...For the first time in history, the minority dictating political truth proclaims that the market is not merely a means but a political end in itself...
...This question seems, at least to me, suddenly relevant because, from a purely mathematical point of view, globalization can't include everyone and is, in fact, leaving more and more people out...
...Suddenly, one can actually use such words again...
...This fight is, however, about more than just entrecôtes...
...ATTAC, the Association for a Transactions Tax in Aid of Citizens, is another new factor on the European scene...
...Their charismatic leader, Roquefort producer Jose Bove, has a luxuriant Asterix mustache and political savvy to match...
...The primary question it asks is neither "Who occupies what rank on the social ladder...
...Globalization now seems well on the way to destroying the classic welfare state and is BRAVE NEW GLOBE leading us toward a politics of the third kind— not at all the same thing as the third way...
...Founded in France in 1998 to advocate taxation of international capital to help poor citizens here and in the third world, it has now broadened its mandate to include campaigning on the WTO as well...
...It is simply the nature of the beast to take the best and leave the rest...
...whereas European scientists in their finding for the European Union claim that at least one of the hormones used, 17-beta estradiol, is carcinogenic...
...And yet, as Karl Polanyi recognized more than half a century ago, the market, left to itself, will destroy society and ensure the demise of countless individuals who contribute nothing either as consumers or as producers...
...Even more to the point for those who oppose the WTO is its complete lack of respect for the "precautionary principle" which states that the burden of proof ought to lie with the United States to prove that its beef is safe—not with Europe to prove that it isn't...
...Although most European countries are now nominally socialist, the Blairs and the Schroeders are widely seen by progressives here as trying to paint a social-democratic glaze on the same old Thatcherite or Kohlist policies...
...I sense that the very nature of politics is changing as globalization alters the face of society...
...This organization, in all its decisions, refuses discrimination between similar goods from members countries...
...but "Who has a right to survive and who does not...
...It is self-regulating and we should trust it, in its wisdom, to ensure optimum resource allocation—whether of manufactured, natural, financial or human resources...
...Consequently, under the WTO proDISSENT / Winter 2000 n 13 BRAVE NEW GLOBE visions of "cross retaliation," the United States slapped 100 percent duties on various European foodstuffs, including foie gras, Dijon mustard, and the prince among cheeses, Roquefort...
...DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 15...
...As for France, confronted with the downsizing of 7,500 French employees of the venerable and symbolic French transnational tire company Michelin (profit increase this year: 17.8 percent), Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announced on television that governments can't actually do much about the economy...
...Or did mass protest by people in Seattle and worldwide at the end of November prevent the WTO from having any agenda at all...
...He suggested that the downsized "mobilize...
...Society, not the market, made the rules, however awful those rules might have been...
...Globalization pushes wealth and power upward, from the bottom to the top of society...
...We are heading toward a new kind of "creative destruction" and it's actually a great time to be politically alive...
...Easy enough for them—but what happened on the way to 2000...
...This redistribution needs to be overseen not just by a greatly discredited United Nations but also by new institutions combining the skills of all segments of society including, yes, business, which has a role to play so long as it's not trying to play all the roles...
...From the earliest times, human beings have for better or for worse organized their collective lives around a political project...
...nor "Who gets the juiciest slices of the pie...
...We need to tax international capital and redistribute it—just as happened a century ago with graduated income taxes...
...Retaliating against the retaliation, members of the progressive small-farmers organization la Confederation Paysanne duly dismantled a McDonald's building site as the symbol of all things American, thus getting themselves thrown in jail, not to mention huge media coverage...
...The economy was only a part of it, subject to its dictates...
...It used to be axiomatic that you couldn't get "ordinary people" excited about international questions, yet the hottest topic of "la rentree" (the post-holiday period when everyone "re-enters" the city and real life) is turning out to be the World Trade Organization...
...A product is a product, period, and the WTO does not want to hear about how it was produced, by whom, nor under what conditions...
...After the great national bourgeois revolutions, the central political question shifted to something closer to pie-sharing...
...An anti-WTO appeal with whiffs of 1789 rhetoric has just been published and signed by 125 "personalities," including internationally famous ones like actresses Jeanne Moreau and Juliette Binoche...
...Meanwhile, the world's population is growing and more prospective losers are born every day...
...Although matters of rank and position were clearly not eliminated, politics had to deal primarily with arbitration between competing groups...
...Rich counties are not immune: forty-five million Americans have no health insurance and nearly as many are classed as poor in the EU, that supposed bastion of the welfare state...
...Profit will measure economic efficiency, and all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds if only the market is allowed to get on with its political task...
...Refusing to post bail until it was supplied by international [including American small farmer] solidarity, Bove has become a national hero...
...In other words, people are revolting against faceless, antidemocratic, corporate-friendly bureaucracies and the WTO, along with the transnational corporations that support it, is rapidly becoming the epitome of all you love to hate...
...SUSAN GEORGE is associate director of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam and president of the Observatoire de la Mondialisation (Globalization Observatory), Paris...
...Half the Mexican population now lives below the poverty line, famine is returning to Indonesia, life expectancy for males in Russia has dropped seven years in a decade—a phenomenon unprecedented in the twentieth century...
...Citizens noisily engaged in contesting present shares and in convincing their representatives that a different allocation would be not only welcome but fairer...
...YOU'RE SITTING there reading Dissent in the new millennium and I'm sitting here at the end of September 1999 with carte blanche from the editors: "Say what you like...
...The hopes first...
...My vantage point is France, then Europe, only distantly the United States...
...When capital deserts the "emerging markets" it leaves human disaster in its wake...
...The Americans won their case, despite the fact that even some U.S...
...This is why it is urgent to defeat antidemocratic international institutions like the WTO and start working on instating international democracy—just as our ancestors did on the national scale...
...B B UT THAT'S also where my fears come in...
...Economic growth was supposed to increase the size of the pie...
...The French Campaign for Citizen Oversight of the WTO is now umbrella for over seventy member organizations from widely differing backgrounds—trade unions, environment, human rights, feminism, North-South solidarity, farmers, consumers, teachers, cultural professions, and other constituencies are amply represented...
...scientists say that the food safety issue here is a very tough call...
...International coalitions are burgeoning with electronic speed and people sense that they are engaged in an epic battle for civilization and freedom against barbarism and tyranny...
...The political bottom line is that it has absolutely no plans for "the rest...
...What did the assembled worthies finally place on the negotiating agenda of my bete noire, the World Trade Organization...
...In France ATTAC has more than 12,000 individual members (including a group of a hundred in parliament) with 50-some new ones 14 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 joining every day...
...Her most recent book is The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the 21st Century...
...If politics cannot transcend the market...
...I fear it is only a matter of time before such people are tacitly or explicitly declared superfluous, useless, and unworthy of notice...
...Thousands are, and not just over such immediate, anxiety-ridden issues as job losses...
...From the king to the beggar, everyone knew his place (her place was only too well defined) and the whole social fabric depended on granting favors to those below you while seeking them from those above...
...Has the now-teetering stock market crashed, putting 1929 to shame...
...It's not just France or Europe...
...This is why no labor or environmental standards can be invoked, with only goods proven to have been produced by prison labor excepted...
...Did the much-touted Y2K bug actually pounce or did it turn out to be an insignificant insect...
...Deep philosophical and ethical questions are involved—but not for the WTO...
...In any event, Europe has stood firm, refusing to apply the World Trade Organization's ruling to allow this beef into our shops and onto our plates...
...The victory last year against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment has provided momentum...
...Huge and growing income disparities in virtually all countries are well documented...
...For centuries, the central political question was hierarchy, or where you stood on the social ladder...
...A bit of background on the triggering factor in France: the United States and Canada lodged a complaint against Europe at the WTO because it refused to import growth-hormonefed U.S...
...They are demanding a moratorium on negotiations pending a thorough review by a world peoples' assembly...
...reasons to hope are manifold and manifest...
...It poses the question of scientific "truth," since human biology isn't like, say, astronomy, and it may take time before carcinogenic impact shows up...
...It is spreading to other European countries including Belgium, Holland, and Italy...
...I run on tea, not tea leaves and I won't try to second-guess the new century...
...But even without a crystal ball, the relentless march of globalization is crystallizing both my hopes and my fears...
...if it cannot place society above the economy and become more democratic worldwide in order to ensure the survival of the "superfluous," the "useless," then the twenty-first century may equal even the twentieth in barbarism and cruelty...
...Young people who were nowhere to be found a few years ago are also joining these campaigns in droves...
...Thus did the welfare state prosper...
...Most people get little benefit when volatile capital is abundant, but they suffer when it is brutally withdrawn...
...Wherever I travel, I find new energies rising to meet the challenge of globalization...
...people with often quite different politics have grown used to working together and have a genuine sense that they can win if they stay united...
...Some of these projects were repugnant, including slavery or serfdom, but at least they set themselves above the economy...
...As for the third world, it is now a privilege to be exploited: at least it means you have a job...
...In other words, everything, or nearly, remains to be done...
...They seem finally to be taking matters into their own hands and deciding that they will not passively accept globalization and all its works...
...Horrible as the French may find hormone-fed beef in the absolute (even if Americans don't seem to mind it) it has at least made every French citizen aware of, and wary of, the WTO...
...Over eleven hundred organizations from eighty-seven countries had, as of September 15, signed a statement demanding a moratorium on WTO negotiations with a thorough assessment to follow...
...governments were to deal with handing out requisite slices through taxation and redistribution...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
