All Roads Lead to Genoa
Walden Bello
Red Pepper, July 2001
The meeting of the G8 in Genoa this month [July 2001] is taking place at a time when global capitalism has passed from triumph to a crisis of legitimacy. As the world stands on the brink of a deep recession, it is useful to reflect on the challenge this poses for the new protest movement.
The last decade of the 20th century began with the collapse of the socialist economies of Eastern Europe and much triumphalist talk about the genesis of a new market-driven global economy that rendered borders obsolete and rode on the advances of information technology. Yet even as the prophets of globalisation talked about the growing irrelevance of national interests, the main beneficiaries of the new global order were US transnational corporations. Supposedly an agent of free trade, the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) most important agreements promoted monopolies for US firms: the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement consolidated the hold of these corporations over high tech innovations, while the Agreement on Agriculture institutionalised a system of monopolistic competition for third-country markets by US and EU agribusinesses.
The increasingly brazen employment of the global multilateral system to serve the interests of the United States has been one of the reasons why the legitimacy of this system has collapsed. Equally important as a source of de-legitimisation was the spreading realisation that the system could not deliver on its promise. In the last five years of the decade, growing numbers of people began to realise that in signing on to the WTO, they had signed on to a charter for corporate rule that enshrined the principle of corporate trade above equity, justice, environment, and almost everything else. The streams of discontent and opposition converged in the streets to bring down the Seattle meeting of the WTO and trigger a severe institutional crisis from which the organisation has yet to recover.
The crisis of the multilateral system was, moreover, translating into a deepening unease with the prime actor of globalisation: the corporation. Several factors came together to focus public attention on the corporation - the most egregious being the predatory practices of Microsoft, the environmental depredations of Shell, the irresponsibility of Monsanto and Novartis in promoting genetically modified organisms, and Nike's systematic exploitation of dirt-cheap labor. A sense of environmental emergency was also spreading.
With the growing illegitimacy of corporate-driven globalisation and the growing divide between a prosperous minority and an increasingly marginalised majority, military intervention to maintain the global status will become a constant feature of international relations, whether this is justified in terms of fighting drugs, fighting terrorism, containing "rogue states", opposing "Islamic fundamentalism" or containing China.
It is not, however, corporate power or military power that is the US's strongest asset but its ideological power as the champion of democracy and freedom. In the last few years, however, Washington or Westminster-style democracies, with their focus on formal rights and formal elections and their bias against economic equality, have degenerated into stagnant and polarised political systems similar to those of the Philippines, Brazil and Pakistan. This has been paralleled by the realisation by increasing numbers of Americans that their liberal democracy has been so thoroughly corrupted by corporate money politics that it deserves being designated a plutocracy. The fact that a man who lost the popular vote - and according to some studies, the electoral vote as well - ended up president of the world's most powerful liberal democracy has not helped. The fact that the UK government will govern with 24 per cent of the vote points to the same crisis of legitimacy in the UK.
With such a collapse of legitimacy, it may only be a matter of time before the structures themselves begin to unravel, but the crisis of the system does not necessarily result in its replacement by a more benign one. Which is why the articulation of an alternative is so critical at this point in time. Creating this alternative vision centred on participatory democratic institutions that would once again subordinate the market to society, promote genuine equality, and establish a benign relationship between human communities and the biosphere remains the great challenge of the opponents of corporate-driven globalisation.
On the success of this enterprise depends our future.
Copyright 2001 Red Pepper
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