W.T.O.: A SKIRMISH IN THE WAR OF THE 21ST CENTURY

What happened at the WTO conference in Seattle, says the following article, was perhaps the first real skirmish in the war of the 21st century, the war of the rich against the poor.

By Jeremy Seabrook

January 2000

After Seattle, the defenders of Globalisation - who normally pride themselves on a magisterial objectivity - gave way to an uncharacteristic intemperance. The protesters were described as 'mindless' and 'confused', at worst, they were 'vandals' and 'wreckers'.

The Economist carried no less than three articles on the theme - all of them unsigned, as is the custom with the Economist, the views of which are propounded with a scriptural oracular anonymity. It spoke of 'the militant dunces parading their ignorance through the streets of Seattle', and then demanded that governments explain 'that trade is first and foremost a matter of freedom - if a government forbids its citizens to buy goods from another country it has infringed their liberty'.

The liberty of those making such goods has little place in this reductive view of human freedoms: in a hotel in Dhaka in November 1999, a man who was recruiting labour for export to his garment factory in the United Arab Emirates, amiably informed me that he was in the business of slavery - the workers are incarcerated in their barracks, in a country the language of which they do not understand, subject to the disciplines of work until they drop. 'This is modern slavery,' he said smilingly, 'and I am well-rewarded for it.' The Economist then urged governments to 'explain that trade makes people better off, especially the poorest people in the poorest countries'. Secure in the certainty that its readers will never encounter the poorest people in the poorest countries, the Economist can freely indulge its tenderness for them. Free trade in (for example) shrimps in Bangladesh has deprived the very poor, women riverine shrimp-gatherers of their livelihood, and has ruined the paddy-fields of poor farmers; a pattern that has been repeated all over Asia.

The third demand of the Economist is that governments explain 'that trade improves the environment, because it raises incomes, and the richer people are, the more willing they are to devote resources to cleaning up their living space'.

Here, we have an example of the very thing that caused such outrage to the protesters in Seattle - the invincibly monocultural view of the rich: the environment of Dhaka, Jakarta or Mumbai has become very degraded indeed, precisely in the name of 'liberalisation', of which free trade is such a conspicuous ornament. To those suffering from TB, respiratory disorders, water-borne sickness and malnutrition in these places, the prospect of 'paying more' to clean up the environment figures somewhat remotely in their priorities.

The Economist soon gets to the point. It is in the business of attacking governments, ostensibly for their failure to arrive at Seattle with an agenda, but in fact because governments pose obstacles to the irresistible and wholly benign forces of Globalisation. In this view, governments are short-sighted instruments of mere democracy, which are so pitiful in the presence of free markets, which offer a daily plebiscite on what the people really want, as they vote with their wallets and purses.

It seems that governments, democracy and the will of the people must wither away under the blinding revelations of freedoms according to the global market. 'When it comes to trade,' says the Economist severely, 'governments entertain no presumption that people might actually know for themselves what is best.'

Which people? Those with the power to express their preferences in the global market, the rich and very rich, not those who lack the necessities for survival, and whose needs do not register in the delicate sensory mechanism of the market which can detect only money.

Elsewhere, opponents of the World Trade Organisation were called 'a furious rag-bag of anti-globalisation protesters' and 'hordes of angry activists'. It was a 'grotesque pantomime'. The arguments with which the organisation was assailed were 'preposterous non-arguments'. The WTO has become the focus for all kinds of contradictory groups - 'old-fashioned protectionists such as trade unionists are making common cause with an unruly alliance of greens, human-rights campaigners, consumer-rights groups, sovereignty-obsessed nationalists and others'.

Sovereignty-obsessed means those who do not wish to see elected governments (however unsatisfactory) by-passed by more powerful unaccountable and unchosen interests. 'The danger is not that globalisation has gone too far, nor that expanding trade is impoverishing the Third World or workers in the rich countries, nor that the WTO has usurped the proper role of national governments, nor that trade wrecks the environment, nor any of the rest of this rubbish.'

So much for the proponents of open debate and rational argument. When rattled, privilege dissolves into an indignant huffing and puffing, since it is accustomed to hearing nothing but sycophantic assent to its version of wisdom and truth. Above all, coherence must be denied to those resisting an easier passage for freedoms which global capital wishes to promote as inevitable as sunrise, as irresistible as a force of nature - the very nature it is doing its best to usurp and extinguish.

A disingenuous sense of aggrieved innocence marks the defence of the WTO, this 'neutral' mechanism for settling disputes, this doughty champion of the poor, this paragon of fairness, this best hope of the dispossessed. If it promises to dismantle advantages which the rich enjoy - the European Union agricultural policy, for example - this will occur only when compensatory gains are won for the already privileged - notably in financial services, intellectual property, 'core labour standards' and any other 'universal' rules which may freeze their dominance of a global economy in which the poor have been allotted only a walk-on part.

When certain countries could not even afford to send delegates to Seattle, others suffered from 'a shortage of skilled negotiators', and a third of its members 'didn't even know what the rules are', we can see exactly how this organisation is designed to protect the poor.

One thing that all the efforts to discredit opponents of globalisation have in common is their loathing of anything that savours of self-reliance. There is good reason for this. Since self-reliance has been destroyed beyond recall in the West, both at the level of countries and individuals, its survival elsewhere is a reproach and an affront to the global future envisaged on the terms defined by the West. Its vaunted devotion to 'pluralism' and 'diversity' is revealed as myth.

No alternative to market-dependency is to be countenanced anywhere in the world; and this is why all traditional cultures that depend directly and sustainably upon the resource-base of the earth, must be snuffed out. They must enter the global market, so that they may learn the folly of modest resource-use, of sufficiency, of contentment with what they have, and learn by the uncovering of vast properties that had slumbered unsuspectingly in their millennial unconscious, the superior virtues of a wanting without end.

Let the Yanomami, the Lumad, the Aetas, the Penan, indigenous peoples everywhere, the subsistence farmers, the forest-dwellers and fishing-people, the tribals and unreconstructed humanity of self-reliance enter the modern world; they can squat in the slums of Manila, Sao Paulo or Mexico City, and dream of their vanished world with the consolations of alcohol and drugs.

The recalcitrants of globalisation must be represented as scattered and incoherent, for that is what the WTO is. For the WTO is unable to make up its mind whether it is in favour of regulation or deregulation. Its defenders - including Clare Short, exasperated by the collapse of the talks, said this would badly affect developing countries. 'The world will go back to the system where the big guys dominated everything' - the institutionalising of this in the WTO is precisely what its critics are complaining about.

Similarly Andrew Marr wrote in the Observer, 'The WTO is on the side of the angels. It is what the world's poor need most - a system of trying to agree on trade rules that puts pressure on the rich to open markets.' This commentator saw the WTO as a harbinger of 'real globalisation' as opposed to dominance by the powerful. There was clearly a concerted effort to portray the WTO as the contrary of what the protesters were saying it is; this is how a startling unanimity runs through the press - as though all right-thinking people had had the same idea spontaneously. An amazing unanimity.

Larry Elliott in the Guardian - the furthest Left commentators can go - said the same thing: 'Trade is normal and natural. Nor is the idea of the WTO a bad idea in itself. Having a system based on rules is better than one in which the big countries can frighten and bully the small ones into submission.'

That this was what many delegates from the South were complaining of in Seattle scarcely influences the conviction of the West that the WTO is a legitimate forum for what they have begun to call 'governance' (a grandiose term designed to lend millennial status to their squalid dominance) in the 21st century.

This is also apparent in the sentimental attachment of the WTO to the fate of the poor. Mike Moore said piously in the Financial Times that his life has been based 'on helping those in struggle, those who have the least'. Elsewhere, he stated that 'a world in which three billion people still survive on $2 a day shames us all.'

What is astonishing is the extent to which which 'the poor' have become a major counter in the deliberations of all the global institutions. The International Monetary Fund, the world's biggest money-lender, now advertises its dedication to the poor, while the World Bank announces that poverty-alleviation is its paramount mission. The Asian Development Bank likewise discovered the poor in November 1999, 'in a dramatic change of policy', according to BBC World.

The Economist in a poetic passage, declared that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor the WTO 'has in all likelihood done more to attack global poverty and advance living standards right across the planet than has any other man-made (sic) device'. The rhetoric changes, but its underlying purposes, which have made the rich richer and the poor poorer since all these institutions began their busy work in the world, remain the same.

One of the most significant aspects of free trade was scarcely touched on in Seattle, and that is the growing range of illicit, banned or prohibited goods and services that are traded round the world; a necessary corollary of the deregulating global regime that is regarded as the best - indeed the only - hope of the people.

At its crudest, there are more people in slavery now than there were at the time of its formal abolition: women and children abducted for the global sex industry, the traffic in enslaved servants, captive labour of all kinds, on construction sites, in factories and mines, the vast trade in 'economic migrants', a glimpse of the freedom of the trade in whom is sometimes to be gained when a cargo of refugees are suffocated in a burning truck in Eastern Europe, or the wreckage of an overloaded ship from Haiti or Cuba is washed up in the Gulf of Mexico.

The enormous unofficial trade in arms, from individual Kalashnikovs to the material for the making of nuclear weapons, the billions of dollars spent on drugs which have done so much for the quality of life of rich and poor alike, not to mention the free trade in more mundane objects - diamonds and gold, ivory and endangered species, birds, butterflies and animals, tropical hardwoods - free trade is increasingly contaminated by the freedom of mafias, criminal gangs, smugglers, and all the other unofficial enterprise which has served to exacerbate inequality in the contemporary world.

The Financial Times, which, unlike the Economist, maintained its air of lordly detachment throughout, declared, 'Governments and business must reclaim the moral high ground from the legion of the misguided and self-interested now encamped there. It is necessary to argue again and again that trade liberalisation poses no threat to the global environment, and is, in addition, a necessary component in any effort to end mass destitution.'

In this way, the manufacture, transport and distribution of the 18-fold increase in volume of world exports since 1950 have nothing to do with global warming, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, spread of monocultures, degradation of soil, water and air.

The real prohibition is upon any alternative. When Andrew Marr writes with contempt in the Observer of the aims of the protesters in Seattle - 'alternative economic and social structures based on co-operation, ecological sustainability and grassroots democracy', he said it sounded like 'the Communist manifesto re-written by Christopher Robin'. Anything but more of what already exists is now unthinkable. This is why Marr sees 'pressure of population' as the cause of environmental and economic pressure on the world.

He, like the more avowedly right-wing commentators, thereby betrays his true ideological ancestry - nothing wrong with more trade, generation of more wealth, using up of resources, more hyperconsumption by the rich - all the problems are the fault of the poor.

What was happening in Seattle was perhaps the first real skirmish in the war of the 21st century, the war of the rich against the poor, in which the only question that arises is whether more of them can be encouraged to die through the unnatural selection of poverty, hunger, disease, AIDS, and such 'natural catastrophes' as global warming (which would conveniently wipe out Bangladesh), or whether more stringent forms of triage will be required to maintain privilege where it already exists so comfortably in the world. - Third World Network Features

About the writer: Jeremy Seabrook is an author and freelance journalist based in London.

1990/2000