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A global tug-of-war splits nations over World Trade Organization
A global tug-of-war splits nations over World Trade Organization
U.N. Observer & International Report, June 1998
As world leaders gathered in Geneva in May to trade praise and plans for a borderless economy, activists were at the ready with a monkey wrench for the new world order.
The Second Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization was more than a meeting, more than a 15th birthday party for the multilateral trading system. It was a battleground for the future.
Inside, WTO leaders sang the virtues of globalized trade—what they call “commercial common sense” and a recipe for world prosperity. Outside, activists for People’s Global Action (PSA) decried the “globalization of misery” by those who have the gold to make the rules.
“This is completely illegitimate. They’re deciding the future of humanity behind people’s backs,” says Sergio Hernández, a Spanish PGA organizer. “They only consider the interests of multinational corporations. They’re destroying the planet and condemning a lot of people to misery, using and abusing power structures that practically no one is familiar with.”
Hundreds of protestors gathered in the square outside the conference building. Their objective: an open microphone— a chance to share a radically different view. Blocking them were Geneva riot police, unswayed by French-language calls of “Let us pass . . . please!” Protestors hoisted individual activists above the crowd and passed them over their heads, trying—unsuccessfully—to toss them over the police line.
The police replied with clubs, entering the crowd to arrest specific organizers. Nearly 2,000 people walked gagged and hand-cuffed through Geneva to illustrate their lack of voice. They staged a funeral for “the victims of an economic war that treats people like merchandise.” In a city fond of order and tidiness, youth street riots spawned broken glass, burnt cars, broken bones, nearly 200 arrests, alleged police brutality requiring hospitalization, and one mission accomplished:
Many Genevans had never heard of the WTO, but the name now rings familiar.
After nearly half a century tweaking the nuts and bolts of global commerce, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade won institutional power. On 1 January 1995, the WTO was born. With 132 member nations, a staff of 500 and an annual budget of nearly $100 million, the WTO is GATT with teeth.
Gatt was a provisional forum and series of agreements on trade in goods, never legally recognized as an international organization. GATT members approved the WTO in 1994 “to help trade flow as freely as possible, to achieve further liberalization gradually through negotia tion, and to set up an impartial means of settling disputes.” This new body incorporated GATT, added language on services and intellectual property, and became the only global body with power to rule on trade between nations.
At their First Ministerial Conference (Singapore, 1995) leaders laid the foundations of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), a proposed treaty to allow transnational companies to invest across borders with the same rights as local firms and to create an environment favorable to those investments. When countries like India slowed negotiations by claiming rights to protect local industry, parallel MAI talks began in the Organization of Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD).
In 1996 the WTO signed a cooperation agreement with the International Monetary Fund—and in 1997 with the World Bank—to “achieve greater coherence in global economic policy-making.”
Critics say this convergence of economic strategies castrates national sovereignty, letting transnational capital play global hopscotch with no accountability to workers or environment.
Globalized trade, says PGA, “only benefits multinational business elites while increasing numbers of people are going hungry, unable to afford basic health care and education and forced to cope with environmental destruction.”
Unwilling to accept “forced competi tion,” a grassroots alliance of civic groups from 56 countries first descended on Geneva in February. About 300 delegates held the first world Congress of indigenous peoples, environmentalists, labor unions, feminists, intellectuals, the landless, the homeless and the unemployed—and any group with an anti-capitalist axe to grind—to form “People’s Global Action.”
PGA coordinates almost 200 groups with a combined membership of nearly 2 million people. The roster includes Argentine teachers, Filipino peasants, French farmers, India’s National Alliance of People’s Movements, Nigeria’s Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, the Indigenous Women’s Network of North America, Brazil’s Landless Movement, Nicaragua’s Sandinistas and Mexico’s Zapatistas that joined others to directly confront neoliberal policy through nonviolent civil disobedience.
The PGA is diverse, but united by a belief that the “invisible hand” of the marketplace needs a swift slapping— before it crushes them. Against lobbies or reform, the PGA seeks to destroy the WTO and liberalization pacts like NAFTA and the European Union. Nixing nationalist solutions, activists work across borders in a struggle they see as global. The Geneva protests tested their strength.
For a decentralized organization with
r otating representatives speaking dozens
of languages, scaling the tower of Babel isn’t easy. Bilingual volunteers interpret for those in need, translate documents and put them on
the Internet. Better educated delegates debate the fine print of written declarations and are usually
the ones to preserve contact between
groups.
Getting to Geneva—and staying there— isn’t cheap.
“There’s usually a lot of solidarity in these things,” says Aida (surname withheld by request), a member of Play Fair Europe! If a group needs to send a delegate, but doesn’t have the money, “an effort is made among everyone to pay for the ticket.”
Back at GATT’s anniversary shindig, life wasn’t all champagne and birthday cake. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair celebrated the achievements of free trade, Cuba’s Fidel Castro and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela were there to blow out the candles.
At the end of the conference, ministers signed a declaration celebrating “the system’s important contribution . . . to growth, employment and stability by promoting the liberalization and expan sion of trade,” but agreed “that more remains to be done to enable all the world’s peoples to share fully and equitably in these achievements.” Even so, the ministers defended open markets and rejected protectionism in all its forms.
But with thousands of activists demonstrating against them, they recognized “the importance of enhancing public understanding of the benefits of the mutilateral trading system in order to build support for it.” They agreed to work toward this end.
PGA countermeasures in Geneva were just the beginning. Activists at the Montreal OECD meeting (24 through 27 May) blocked participants’ entry. Thousands took to the streets in Brazil and India. PGA groups continue to pressure their local governments, set up continental meetings and plan global conferences three months before WTO meetings.
“No more WTO conferences,” says a PGA communique, “in any case not without us.”
The next PGA conference will be held in April 1999 at Bangalore, India.
— Brett Allan King
Copyright by Brett Allan King and/or publication in which story first appeared
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