Out of the ashes

The terror attacks have put globalization's critics on the defensive -- but have also given new momentum to their struggle.

By Mark Schapiro

Nov 16, 2001 | Nine days after the World Trade Center attacks in New York, a little-noticed story in the New York Times reported on the Italian Parliament's vote to absolve the police of responsibility for brutality against anti-globalization protesters, one of whom was killed, at the G-8 meeting in July in Genoa, Italy. The seven-paragraph Times dispatch, buried on the inside pages, seemed to float disconnected from the new world we entered after the horrific events of Sept. 11.

The news from Italy, however, in a week saturated with images of the destruction of the world's premier icon of globalization, provided a jolt of recognition of how deeply those events have demarcated our recent history into two parallel realities. On the one side, pre 9-11: a time when abuses from that process of financial, cultural and political integration that has come to be commonly referred to as "globalization" had ignited a worldwide citizens movement. Over the past two years, millions of people have hit the streets in more than a dozen major cities around the world -- including Genoa; Prague, Czech Republic; Ottawa, Ontario; and Seattle -- to protest a global trading system they claim is skewed in favor of the rich. To avoid such demonstrations of public sentiment, the World Trade Organization -- for many, the villainous face of globalization -- opted long before Sept. 11 to hold its annual meeting this weekend as far off the dissident trading routes as possible: in the Persian Gulf principality of Qatar.

On the other side of the divide, post 9-11: the extraordinary global response to the deranged concoction of primeval theology and 21st century technology that led to the destruction in New York. In this parallel universe, the one we now inhabit, George W. Bush -- for the moment -- appears on his way to giving his presidency triumphal definition, while fears of Republican isolationism and the concerns of the movement that had sprung up to combat the inequities of the global trading system appear to be fading in the face-off against global terrorism.

But as the war unfolds, television viewers will find a most surprising bridge between these two parallel realities. On CNN and other news outlets flickers the banner of Al-Jazeera TV, the source of hard-to-get video footage of Afghanistan -- including Osama bin Laden's now infamous videotape that aired after the start of the U.S. bombing campaign -- broadcasting from none other than the Persian Gulf principality of Qatar.

Thus do our two parallel realities converge. The WTO holds its meeting in a quarantine of sand -- the Qataran government denied thousands of visas to anti-globalization activists, who have been isolated from the proceedings in a fenced-in zone of Doha, the capital -- while the country's state-subsidized Al-Jazeera television beams us images of the war next door. The Jihad meets McWorld.

As of Sept. 10, the loose alliance of citizens groups that constitutes the anti-globalization (anti-McWorld) movement -- really a loose constellation of labor, environmental, human rights and development activists, along with avant-garde economists, punks and anarchists -- had become a potent force on the world scene. Every meeting of multilateral financial institutions -- the G-8, the World Bank and IMF, the WTO -- had been greeted by mass public protests, while some of the movement's central principles were beginning to wind their way into the upper echelons of the global political structure.

The just-concluded WTO meetings themselves could be seen as offering an example, however qualified, of how deeply concerns from developing countries are now being felt. Trade ministers from more than 140 countries agreed to remove tariffs on textiles, farm trade and steel and to waive patent restrictions to make cheap generic drugs available to poorer nations. The United States, in particular, showed greater flexibility than some observers expected in its response to what have long been hot-button issues dividing developed from developing nations -- a stance likely due to its desire to reduce global tensions while waging the war against terrorism.

Other developments also demonstrated new thinking on global inequities. The European Union's Finance Committee began this fall to consider implementing a tax on speculative currency transactions -- known as the Tobin tax, after the Nobel Prize-winning economist who first proposed the measure almost 20 years ago -- as a means of financing sustainable development initiatives in Africa, Asia, the Mideast and Latin America. The G-8 countries agreed earlier this year (at least on paper) to "halve" the rates of poverty by the year 2015, a commitment that at a minimum sets a guidepost for measuring progress in dealing with the some 7 billion people that the United Nations estimates live in conditions of abysmal poverty.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration's unilateral withdrawal from a spate of international treaties was beginning to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its European allies, who were also feeling increasing pressure from their home constituencies not to dance to the United States' free-trade tune. Even the crusty president of France, Jacques Chirac, was moved to comment after the demonstrations in Genoa that he "understood" the demonstrators' call for reduced globalization of trade.

Last spring, a Canadian polling firm, Environics International, released the results of a survey it conducted of citizens in the world's 20 largest economies, which suggested potential trouble ahead for free trade's most ardent advocates. The survey revealed that more than a quarter of the respondents -- including the United States, France, Great Britain, Indonesia, Brazil and China -- held a deeply negative view of the globalization process. Only 10 percent viewed it as having an unambiguously positive impact on their lives. Most striking was that 65 percent expressed greater trust in the ability of NGOs and faith-based organizations to better reflect the "best interests of society" than governments and private corporations. (Notably, Saudi Arabia, among the world's largest economies and home to many of the hijackers, was excluded from the survey since Environics was unable to find a suitable polling firm with which to partner in that country -- an indication, perhaps, of how little interest the United States' major economic ally in the region, ruled by a corrupt monarchy, has expressed in the views of its own people.)

Rob Kerr, a senior consultant for Environics who supervised the survey from the company's headquarters in Toronto, comments: "We were surprised to see that the [globalization] agenda was being pushed so hard by organizations who were so little trusted by the government. Behind the fences and under police protection were government leaders and paying business leaders who were pushing forward this agenda. Outside the fence were those [citizen groups] who were the most trusted; inside the fence were those who were the least trusted. This fit right in with our data."

Next Page: How the attacks stopped the movement -- but could help it

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