[615] in peace2
the shape of the transformation...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Aimee L Smith)
Thu Mar 29 11:43:02 2001
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Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 11:42:41 -0500
From: Aimee L Smith <alsmith@MIT.EDU>
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The speech below puts things into sharp focus...
the time is now, and armed with facts that are all around us,
we can easily add to the rightful delegitimizing of the centralized and
unchecked institutions and "agreements" that make poverty and
irreversible environmental degradation expand and thrive...
Trans National Corporations (TNCs), The World Bank, IMF, WTO, FTAA
The time is now to pull back the curtain of PR, spin, propoganda and
outright lies that shields the very very tiny few who dominate us...
choose your method, choose your sustainable commitment level, but don't
be silent and don't dare be discouraged. The stakes are as high
as they get -- risk of ending all life as we know it on this planet --
but behind that curtain, the window of opportunity is open, and we just
need to spread the word one way or another and move on through it...
OK, sorry if anyone is put off by the impassioned plea. I'm turning 30
today, so humor me!
In hope and unity,
Aimee
"NO ONE CAN DO EVERYTHING...BUT EVERYONE CAN DO SOMETHING."
All power to the people!
The Global Conjuncture: Characteristics and Challenges
by Walden Bello
(Co-authored with Nicola Bullard. Keynote speech at
the National Convention against Globalization, New
Delhi, India, March 21-23, 2001.)
Today the movement against corporate-driven
globalization is at a decisive juncture. There are
different proposals on how to move forward.
Oftentimes, clarification of the demands of the moment
are clouded by what are, in effect, non-issues. For
instance, among many of those who support attaching
environmental and labor clauses to the World Trade
Organization, one often encounters the feeling that
the opposition of many social movements and civil
society organizations to this approach stems from
either lack of sympathy for labor rights and the
environment or “softness” towards authoritarian
regimes. This is regrettable since many of those most
opposed to the social clause approach are also
oftentimes strong backers of labor rights, labor
organizing, and environmentally sensitive development
in their countries.
Values are not the issue. Whether or not we adopt the
social/environmental clause approach to constraining
globalization is largely, in our view, a matter of
strategy and tactics. And the question of what are
appropriate strategy and tactics for the moment can
only be determined by analyzing the current global
conjuncture.
Crisis of Legitimacy
The global conjuncture or, to use a more precise term,
the global correlation of forces after Seattle and
Porto Alegre is quite different from that in the
mid-1990’s. The founding and ratification of World
Trade Organization in 1994-95 (WTO) was the apogee of
capitalism in the era of globalization. Socialism had
collapsed and the Washington Consensus seemed to carry
all before it. There seemed to be very little space
for maneuver, and very little opportunity to influence
events except to play by the rules and get whatever
morsels of reform you could get. It was this sense of
being overwhelmed by a juggernaut that informed the
strategy of attaching social and environmental clauses
to the WTO and other trade agreements that some labor
and environmental groups came up with during that
period.
Today, the global correlation of forces is
different—some would say, quite different. A crisis
of legitimacy now envelops the key institutions of
global economic governance: the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the WTO. The Asian
financial crisis of 1997-1998 was the Stalingrad of
the IMF. It was clear to observers and ultimately to
some people in the IMF itself that the Fund, with its
prescription for capital account liberalization,
helped create the crisis, and with its cure of tight
money and tight budgets, converted a financial crisis
into economic collapse in Thailand, Indonesia, and
Korea. The now famous Meltzer Commission report and
the massive demonstrations against the World Bank in
Washington, DC, and Prague in 2000 combined to
precipitate the World Bank’s crisis of legitimacy.
The Meltzer report, which is likely to inform the new
Bush administration’s perspective on the Bank, argues
that the Bank is irrelevant to the question of solving
poverty and should be radically reduced in terms of
scale and functions. Seattle, of course, saw the
magic combination of massive street protests, a revolt
of the developing countries in the Seattle Convention
Center, and irreconcilable differences between the
European Union and the US scuttle the Third
Ministerial and place the WTO in a state of limbo.
Three quotations from extremely credible sources
underline the depth of the crisis of confidence of the
global elite in their key institutions of global
economic governance post-Seattle.
· The Economist: The protesters “are right that the
tide of
‘globalization,’ powerful as the engines driving it
may be, can be turned back...International economic
integration is not an ineluctable process, as many of
its most enthusiastic advocates appear to believe. It
is one...of many possible futures for the world
economy; others may be chosen, and are even coming to
seem more likely.”
· Stephen Byers, UK Secretary for Trade and Industry:
“The WTO will not be able to continue in its present
form. There has to be fundamental and radical change
in order for it to meet the needs and aspirations of
all 134 of its members.”
· C. Fred Bergsten, head of the Institute of
International Economics and prominent advocate of
globalization, in a speech before the Trilateral
Commission: “the anti-globalization forces are now in
the ascendancy.”
Implications for Strategy and Tactics
Today we are in a different ballgame from that in the
mid-nineties, when the social and environmental clause
strategy was devised. Whatever merits it may have had
then, today such an approach is unsound and
counterproductive, both tactically and strategically.
Tactically, it is unsound because the only way to
smuggle it into the WTO is by having a new trade round
that would simply open up the space for other forces
to add new agenda for liberalization and globalization
such as competition policy, investment policy, more
agricultural liberalization, a new round of industrial
tariff cuts, a TRIPs even more congenial to TNC
interests. A new round is a Pandora’s Box. The WTO,
says C. Fred Bergsten, is like a bicycle. It can only
remain upright by moving forward in terms of more
liberalization and globalization. Our immediate goal
must be to pin the bicycle down and out of locomotion
by preventing a new trade round.
More broadly, we are engaged in an epochal struggle
for legitimacy, and, as in every kind of warfare, the
strategy revolves around the issue of who has the
momentum, who has what Clausewitz called the “moral
initiative.” Strategically, the social and
environmental clause strategy is obsolete given the
new global correlation of forces. To borrow from
military strategy, using the social/environmental
clause strategy is like employing a pre-Stalingrad
strategy of defensive warfare to a post-Stalingrad
situation that demands offensive warfare.
The Soft Corporate Counteroffensive
The shifting balance of forces is causing the global
elite to reassess its own strategy and tactics, a
development indicated by the fact that a number of key
corporations, like Caterpillar and Boeing, as Naomi
Klein points out, are now endorsing social clauses as
a way to secure fast track authority for the US
president that would facilitate new round of
liberalization and globalization via the WTO and
regional free trade agreements like the proposed Free
Trade of the Americas Agreement (FTAA).
The global elite-the Davos crowd-is beginning to
embrace the social clause as part of a strategy to
relegitimize globalization. They do not have to read
Gramsci to know that unless legitimacy is regained,
global power structures whose cohesion is principally
dependent on the perception of legitimacy could begin
to unravel. But the social clause is not the only
element in what we might term the “soft corporate
counteroffensive.” There are two other moves that
must be highlighted.
One is participating in the Global Compact promoted by
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. A brainchild of
Annan and the Davos crew, the Global Compact is said
to commit corporations to nine principles, the most
important of which have to do with respecting labor
rights, human rights, and the environment. However,
compliance is voluntary and self-monitored, and
consistent corporate rights violators like Nike,
Shell, and Rio Tinto are making use of this platform
to bluewash their very tarnished image. Even George
Soros admits that the Global Compact is nothing more
than a device to whitewash the corporate image, and it
is unfortunate that some civil society organizations
have been manipulated into endorsing it.
A third prong of the soft counteroffensive is the
corporate embrace of civil society. In a manner
similar to the way they coopted gender diversity and
racial diversity into their drive to market dominance
(a process so insightfully analyzed by Naomi Klein in
her classic book No Logo), the smart corporations now
see “civil society”-meaning us—as the key to both
legitimacy and marketing success. NGOs are now being
literally deluged with requests to join this
corporation’s NGO advisory committee or that
multilateral organization’s NGO consultative group. A
few weeks ago, even the IMF held its first NGO
consultation in Singapore. Of course, the Davos elite
club has begun to justify its existence by saying that
it has began to incorporate labor unions and NGOs into
its annual retreat held in Switzerland at the end of
January. In the leadup to this year’s meeting, for
instance, Davos chiefs Klaus Schwab and Claude Smadja
made sure to trumpet the fact that “a thousand
business leaders from the forum’s member companies
will be joined by dozens of heads of state or
government and nearly 70 representatives of civil
society to discuss, and hopefully advance, the major
issues on the global agenda.” The idea is to project
dialogue when in fact monologue governs and to gain
legitimacy via the mere mention of “consulting civil
society.”
A new civil society-labor strategy needs to be
elaborated to respond to the dangers, openings, and
opportunities of the new conjuncture. We would like
to present a strategy that 1) addresses the soft
counteroffensive, 2) delineates the line of struggle
or line of march against the key global institutions,
and 3) proposes an alternative paradigm of global
economic governance.
Countering the Soft Counteroffensive
Allow us to first address the soft corporate
counteroffensive. We must meet the challenge of
relegitimization of the globalist project head on by
discarding the labor and environmental clause strategy
when it comes to the WTO and other trade agreements.
We must also oppose and expose the Global Compact as a
whitewash mechanism and ask NGOs and labor unions that
have joined it to withdraw. We must, furthermore, be
very discriminating about lending our participation to
consultation initiatives launched by the mutilaterals
and corporations. Clearly, it is time to boycott the
Davos meetings and the Davos process, which has become
the premier site for developing corporate cultural
hegemony over the rest of us by drawing the
participation of some of us.
Moving to the Offensive
Moving on to an offensive strategy against the key
institutions of globalization, priority must be put on
stopping a new trade round from being launched at the
Qatar Ministerial in November of this year. Beyond
this, we must support the moves of many peasant and
farmer groups like Via Campesina to remove agriculture
from WTO discipline. We must ensure that no consensus
emerges in the current negotiations on the GATS, the
General Agreement on Trade in Services, which would
stalemate the process. We must likewise put ourselves
squarely behind the drive to place public health above
TRIPs and profits by supporting the drive to reproduce
and mass-market patented AIDs drugs at cheap prices.
We must campaign to enshrine the priority of the
precautionary principle above free trade, deriving
momentum from the GMO, mad cow and foot-and-mouth
eco-health disasters. Likewise, we must place
ourselves firmly behind the South’s demand for the
recognition and institutionalization of “Special and
Differential Treatment”-that underdeveloped countries
require a different set of trade rules-in trade
negotiations among countries. The overall strategy is
to disempower or radically “shrink” the WTO so that it
becomes simply another forum, with very limited and
very diluted coercive capabilities, for trade
negotiations.
When it comes to the IMF and the World Bank, the time
is ripe to press and build up a global campaign for
decommissioning or neutering these institutions.
Currently, there are a number of influential
appointees in the economic agencies of the Bush
administration who favor either eliminating or
radically reducing the role of the Bretton Woods
institutions. With many Republicans and Democrats in
Congress evincing similar sentiments, international
civil society and labor unions might add their weight
to form a critical mass that would determine the
future of these institutions. As the head of one
international agency who follows politics in this area
fairly closely told us, “The mutilateral institutions
are today very vulnerable to a pincer movement carried
out by, on the one hand, the conservatives in the new
administration and, on the other, international civil
society.” It might be added that another factor that
should spur decisive action on our part is that the
staffs of both institutions are severely demoralized
currently by the combination of external criticism
and/or internal mismanagement. Windows of opportunity
are rare, and we better move before this one slams
shut.
Next, unions and civil society organizations must band
together to scuttle—while they are still in the
dockyard the Free Trade of the Americas Agreement and
similar global free trade treaties that are now being
pushed—partly as a substitute for the stalemated WTO.
These regional or bilateral agreements are as much
guided by the destructive principles of
neoliberalism-liberalization, deregulation, and
privatization-as the WTO. Here it must be noted that
full opposition to both the FTAA and a new trade round
were two of the agreements contained in the common
statement signed by hundreds of unions and civil
society organizations at the World Social Forum in
Porto Alegre a few weeks ago.
Finally, we must extend the crisis of legitimacy from
the multilateral institutions of global governance to
the engine of globalization itself: the transnational
corporation. TNCs are in disrepute today, and even in
the US a recent survey has shown that 70 per cent of
the people feel that TNCs have too much power over
their lives. Corporations find it less and less
possible to operate without engaging in criminal
activity. This similarity between the mafia and the
TNC is something that we must continually stress in
this campaign of delegitimation. It is only when we
realize how great is the potential of campaigns to
unmask the criminal that is at the heart of the
corporation that we begin to see how inappropriate and
untimely is Kofi Annan’s Global Compact and understand
how it functions less as a lifesaver for society than
a lifesaver for TNCs.
Promoting the Alternative
Finally, to the question of the alternative. Our side
has always been criticized for only opposing and not
proposing. Well, that is no longer valid—if it ever
was—after Porto Alegre. Under the banner “Another
World is Possible,” the 12,000 people who came to the
southern Brazilian city not only wrested the moral
ascendancy from the Davos crowd, as the Financial
Times pointed out in its feature piece “Attack on
Planet Davos.” They also came to engage in hard
discussion on how to create an alternative world in
non-utopian and pragmatic ways.
We disagree with the view that thinking about the
alternative is a task that for the most part is still
in a primeval state. In fact, we feel that that many
or most of the basic or broad principles for an
alternative order are already with us, and it is
really a question of specifying these broad principles
to concrete societies in ways that respect the
diversity of societies.
Work on alternatives has been a collective past and
present effort, one to which many North and South have
contributed. Allow us to synthesize the key points of
this collective effort under the rubric
“deglobalization.” While the following model addresses
principally the situation of countries in the South,
many points have relevance as well to societies and
economies in the North.
Deglobalization
What is deglobalization?
We are not talking about withdrawing from the
international economy. We are speaking about
reorienting our economies from the emphasis on
production for export to production for the local
market;
· about drawing most of our financial resources for
development from within rather than becoming dependent
on foreign investment and foreign financial markets;
· about carrying out the long-postponed measures of
income redistribution and land redistribution to
create a vibrant internal market that would be the
anchor of the economy;
· about deemphasizing growth and maximizing equity in
order to radically reduce environmental
disequilibrium;
· about not leaving strategic economic decisions to
the market but making them subject to democratic
choice;
· about subjecting the private sector and the state to
constant monitoring by civil society;
· about creating a new production and exchange complex
that includes community cooperatives, private
enterprises, and state enterprises, and excludes TNCs;
· about enshrining the principle of subsidiarity in
economic life by encouraging production of goods to
take place at the community and national level if it
can be done so at reasonable cost in order to preserve
community.
We are talking, moreover, about a strategy that
consciously subordinates the logic of the market, the
pursuit of cost efficiency to the values of security,
equity, and social solidarity. We are speaking, to
use the language of the great social democratic
scholar Karl Polanyi, about re-embedding the economy
in society, rather than having society driven by the
economy.
Deglobalization or the re-empowerment of the local and
national, however, can only succeed if it takes place
within an alternative system of global economic
governance. What are the contours of such a world
economic order? The answer to this is contained in
our critique of the Bretton Woods cum WTO system as a
monolithic system of universal rules imposed by highly
centralized institutions to further the interests of
corporations-and, in particular, US corporations. To
try to supplant this with another centralized global
system of rules and institutions, though these may be
premised on different principles, is likely to
reproduce the same Jurassic trap that ensnared
organizations as different as IBM, the IMF, and the
Soviet state, and this is the inability to tolerate
and profit from diversity. Incidentally, the idea
that the need for one central set of global rules is
unquestionable and that the challenge is to replace
the neoliberal rules with social democratic ones is a
remnant of a techno-optimist variant of Marxism that
infuses both the Social Democratic and Leninist
visions of the world, producing what Indian author
Arundathi Roy calls the predilection for “gigantism.”
A Plural World
Today’s need is not another centralized global
institution but the deconcentration and
decentralization of institutional power and the
creation of a pluralistic system of institutions and
organizations interacting with one another, guided by
broad and flexible agreements and understandings.
We are not talking about something completely new.
For it was under such a more pluralistic system of
global economic governance, where hegemonic power was
still far from institutionalized in a set of
all-encompassing and powerful multilateral
organizations and institutions that a number of Latin
American and Asian countries were able to achieve a
modicum of industrial development in the period from
1950 to 1970. It was under such a pluralistic system,
under a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)
that was limited in its power, flexible, and more
sympathetic to the special status of developing
countries, that the East and Southeast Asian countries
were able to become newly industrializing countries
through activist state trade and industrial policies
that departed significantly from the free-market
biases enshrined in the WTO.
Of course, economic relations among countries prior to
the attempt to institutionalize one global free market
system beginning in the early 1980’s were not ideal,
nor were the Third World economies that resulted
ideal. They failed to address a number of needs
illuminated by recent advances in feminist,
ecological, and post-post development economics. All
we wish to point out here is that the pre-1994
situation underlines the fact that the alternative to
an economic Pax Romana built around the World
Bank-IMF-WTO system is not a Hobbesian state of
nature. All we want to stress is that the reality of
international relations in a world marked by a
multiplicity of international and regional
institutions that check one another is a far cry from
the propaganda image of a “nasty” and “brutish” world.
Of course, the threat of unilateral action by the
powerful is ever present in such a system, but it is
one that even the most powerful hesitate to take for
fear of its consequences on their legitimacy as well
as the reaction it would provoke in the form of
opposing coalitions.
In other words, what developing countries and
international civil society should aim at is not to
reform the TNC-driven WTO and Bretton Woods
institutions, but, through a combination of passive
and active measures, to either a) decommission them;
b) neuter them (e.g., converting the IMF into a pure
research institution monitoring exchange rates of
global capital flows); or c) radically reduce their
powers and turn them into just another set of actors
coexisting with and being checked by other
international organizations, agreements, and regional
groupings. This strategy would include strengthening
diverse actors and institutions as UNCTAD,
multilateral environmental agreements, the
International Labor Organization, and evolving
economic blocs such as Mercosur in Latin America,
SAARC in South Asia, SADCC in Southern Africa, and a
revitalized ASEAN in Southeast Asia. A key aspect of
“strengthening,” of course, is making sure these
formations evolve in a people-oriented direction and
cease to remain regional elite projects.
But above all, it would support the formation of new
international and regional institutions that would be
dedicated to creating and protecting the space for
devolving the greater part of production, trade, and
economic decision-making to the national and local
level. The primal role of international organizations
in a world where toleration of diversity is a central
principle of economic organization would be, as the
British philosopher John Gray puts it, “to express and
protect local and national cultures by embodying and
sheltering their distinctive practices.”
More space, more flexibility, more compromise—these
should be the goals of the Southern agenda and the
international civil society effort to build a new
system of global economic governance. It is in such a
more fluid, less structured, more pluralistic world,
with multiple checks and balances, that the nations
and communities of the South-and the North— will be
able to carve out the space to develop based on their
values, their rhythms, and the strategies of their
choice.
In conclusion, in this post-Seattle, or should we now
say, post-Porto Alegre world, our side has the
momentum, the initiative, the ascendancy. Of course,
the structures of global capitalism seem as firm as
ever. While guarding against unwarranted optimism, we
must also not underestimate the possibilities in the
more fluid situation of the moment. Let us remember
that power structures ultimately cannot survive
without the perception that they are legitimate. The
other side knows this, which is why the invocation of
“civil society” has become more desperate, more
shrill. From the WTO to the corporation, the key
institutions of capitalism in this era of
globalization are undergoing a profound crisis of
legitimacy. Let us not waste the opportunities
opening up by being wed to the thinking, calculations,
and strategies of the past.
· Walden Bello is the Executive Director of Focus on
the Global South
