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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
As anti-globalization protesters ask themselves, "Where do we go from here?" Seattle enters the lexicon of civil disobedience.
Dec 8, 1999 | Anyone awakening from a week in a coma could be forgiven for feeling disoriented: The protestors now departed from Seattle's streets have shifted the nation's political reference points by 20 years. While Wall Street and Washington reconvened Monday morning for business as usual, it is already evident that Seattle is one of those critical incidents in the political culture, like the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings or the Tet offensive, after which the language of public debate is never the same.
A week ago, anyone who questioned the World Trade Organization and the broader logic of the global corporate marketplace was spitting in the historical wind -- an object of derision by free-marketeers, a tedious, pietistic windmill-tilter to the media.
The remarkable events in Seattle changed that. "We're seeing a lot of new things in Seattle. Some things that haven't happened in a long time, and some things that are not supposed to happen at all." That was CNN's low-key but astute political analyst Bill Schneider, feeling the earth move under his feet.
According to the conventional wisdom of post-Reagan America, nothing that happened in Seattle computes. But with the crosscutting spectacles of street protest and collapsing trade talks, the political center of gravity has moved several steps leftward. President Clinton abandoned seven years of free-trade orthodoxy -- and infuriated his advisors -- by proposing that labor standards be brought to the WTO table. Even laissez-faire Republican William Safire writes this week that any commerce system that ignores sweatshops "does not deserve the name 'free trade.'" The question is not whether the terms of debate have shifted, but why -- and where the argument goes from here.
Many commentators quickly compared Seattle to the 1968 Democratic Convention. But a more telling comparison is the emergence of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s.
Like Solidarity's birth in the Gdansk shipyards, Seattle was (as Canadian journalist Naomi Klein put it in a keenly observed New York Times op-ed) the "coming-out party" for a long-evolving coalition: not only those Teamsters marching happily alongside environmentalists in sea-turtle suits but religious communities, college anti-sweatshop activists and advocates for third-world debt relief.
And like Solidarity, Seattle happened because a new generation of union leaders listened to thoughtful radical intellectuals, who proposed that the real issue was not simple job protection but global democracy, and a broad vision of inclusive, equitable society.
Those reporters and commentators who portrayed Seattle as a festival of paranoid, Pat Buchanan-style economic isolationism simply had not been listening to the labor movement lately. "The real debate is not over whether to be part of the global economy," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a little-remarked National Press Club speech last month, "but over what are the rules for that economy and who makes them" -- a comment that would be unthinkable from the mouths of any of his buy-American predecessors, or from Sweeney himself until recently.
