10 Years Later: The Battle in Seattle and beyond
By Maude Barlow
October 2009
For many people, the mass demonstrations ten years ago in Seattle against the World Trade Organization appeared entirely spontaneous. In fact, they were the result of an unprecedented solidarity among disparate social groups and civil society organizations convinced that corporate globalization was failing the world, worsening environmental damage, and creating - not solving - global poverty.
The WTO was therefore already deeply controversial in the lead up to the 1999 Seattle summit. Overseeing a huge array of trade agreements on everything from food production and intellectual property to financial services and investment measures, the WTO had already been throwing its weight around with a powerful set of enforcement mechanisms since its birth in 1995. Unlike the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was effectively a business contract between nations, the WTO had been endowed with a “legal personality” and formidable powers of enforcement. It had also become clear that, in spite of the fact that decisions were to be made by vote or consensus, the real decision-making power was coalescing in the powerful countries known as the QUAD – the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Canada. Already a great divide was opening up between the global North and the global South.
Seattle was chosen to be the site for this summit because, for the first time, the event was largely funded by the private sector and it was necessary to find a city with deep-pocketed corporate funders. Bill Gates of Microsoft and Phil Condit of Boeing hosted a formidable team of corporate backers who were given privileged access to WTO officials and negotiators in exchange for financial backing. President Bill Clinton was hugely proud to sponsor this summit in his country and much was made of the welcome delegates and the 3,000 journalists from around the world would find in America.
What almost no one in authority foretold was the massive number of protesters who would also descend on Seattle (delighted that the less accessible Honolulu had not been chosen), deeply concerned about the ambitious corporate-friendly nature of the agenda and the fact that the event itself was so heavily dependent on corporate money. Protesters were dismissed as “a Noah’s Ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unionists and yuppies looking for their 1960’s fix” by the New York Times, which was not alone in underestimating the legitimate, sophisticated and growing body of criticism against the WTO around the world.
Early morning before dawn, thousands of youth protesters converged on the Paramount Theatre near the Washington State Convention and Trade Center where the official ceremonies were to take place, and ringed it with a human chain impossible to break through. Highly disciplined groups placed themselves at strategic spots, blocking key intersections and preventing delegates from leaving their hotels. Official opening ceremonies were cancelled and for the first time in the city’s history, the mayor of Seattle called in the National Guard. By noon, an estimated 60,000 people left a rally at a downtown stadium, and while many headed for buses and home, many others headed to the convention center to join the thousands of direct action protesters on the streets.
Without warning, thousands of police and National Guard started firing tear and nerve gas and rubber bullets, indiscriminately pepper spraying and randomly attacking protesters with truncheons. Anyone walking, sitting or even going to work was in danger, and all city buses were cancelled. Blood and broken teeth were scattered on the streets, local shops were boarded over and local residents were beaten up. More than 600 young people were arrested and many were held for days without blankets, food and water. Criminal proceedings against most were dropped eventually while some sought and were give compensation for the treatment they received at the hands of the police.
Inside the convention center, WTO officials did their best to ignore the violence on the streets, but to their dismay, they could not control the outbreak of democracy inside the summit itself. Delegates from the global South were furious at the high-handed treatment they were receiving from northern countries and the broken promise that this round would deal with outstanding issues of North-South power imbalances left over from the Uruguay Round. One had only to observe the differences between the official country delegations walking the halls of the convention center. The QUAD countries all had hundreds of delegates attended by trade lawyers, spin-doctors, and government officials and supported by state-of-the-art technology. Many poor countries had only two or three delegates who had to attend multiple meetings, with no aides, no spin-doctors and not even cell phones.
Tension quickly built. Global South delegates started demanding a democratic process in the meetings and paralysis ensued. They were in contact with their civil society counterparts and credited the street protests with giving them courage. Papua New Guinea trade secretary Michael Maue said, “The people who demonstrated basically represent the world’s silent majority.”
Late that evening, U. S. President Bill Clinton phoned Charlene Barshefsky and told her to shut the summit down. The news spread through the convention center and spilled out onto the streets like and electric current. Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach summed up the mood of the crowd with the words, “The allegedly unstoppable force of globalization just hit the immovable object called grassroots democracy. The world will never be the same again.”
AFTER SEATTLE
So complete was the rout that took place, there was even speculation that the WTO might disintegrate. But powerful forces behind the scenes in Washington, London and Geneva, and in corporate boardrooms, fought back hard over the next 10 years – not just at the WTO but with ambitious attempts to expand current agreements such as NAFTA into the Free Trade Area of the Americas and, when that failed in 2004, a desperate rush on the part of Europe and other QUAD countries to sign bilateral “free trade” deals with developing world countries. With the exception of various new bilateral deals, it is important to note that almost all attempts to develop global or regional consensus agreements have failed, despite heavy lobbying from larger and richer countries.
Following the failure in Seattle, the U.S. and EU set out to mend fences through their top trade bureaucrats, Pascal Lamy and Robert Zoellick, who shared a hardline position on trade. The two men toured world capitals on a desperate lobbying campaign to kick-start new global trade talks. Michael Moore, then director-general of the WTO, also set out to mend fences with the developing world, carrying with him the message that “free trade” was their best option, and that the NGOs and labour groups in the North that protested in Seattle just want to protect their jobs and lifestyles and don't care at all about the world's poor. Moore promised that the WTO would treat Developing Countries' concerns as a top priority and succeeded in having the next meeting called the "Growth and Development Round."
In November 2001 the Doha Round took place in Qatar. It was unfortunately declared a defeat for the developing world as the final declaration generally furthered developed world demands for liberalizing agricultural rules, while also pushing ahead on new issues, such as industrial tariffs and the “Singapore issues” of investment and competition policy. But as Walden Bello, founding Director of the policy think tank Focus on the Global South, pointed out shortly after the Round, developing nations were much better prepared as a result of working with Geneva-based civil society groups, and almost held together against furious divide-and-conquer tactics from the QUAD countries. “Doha was a low point in the GATT-WTO's history of backroom intimidation, threats, bribery, and non-transparency,” wrote Bello. “But take it from the horse's mouth itself: no less than the EU's Trade Commissioner, Pascal Lamy, described the Doha process as ‘medieval.’”
Cancun, Mexico, September 2003
By the next ministerial in Cancun, Mexico, developing countries had regained their footing and their united position. The more accessible location also made civil society mobilization more attractive. Despite the continuing gloomy mood post-September 2001, more than 10,000 people, including farmers and landless peasants from across the world, marched on September 10, 2003 – the day the fifth Ministerial formally got underway. Filling the streets with music, drumming and dancing, protestors wound their way through the area until they reached the summit barricades. A solemn procession of about 200 South Korean farmers was particularly moving, with banners that read “WTO KILLS FARMERS” and traditional songs of struggle.
A defining moment came when Lee Kyung-Hae, a 56-year-old farmer and former president of the South Korean Farmers Federation, climbed the barricade, faced toward where the WTO delegates were meeting, and plunged a knife into his heart. Kyung-Hae swayed back and forth for a few seconds and then fell to the ground below. He died in hospital a few hours later, surrounded by distraught colleagues. Kyung-Hae had been fighting the WTO for years. He had lost his farm due to the dumping of heavily subsidized American and European exports that dramatically undercut his income and then went on to work with other farmers also losing their farms.
Except in Canada, Mr. Lee’s political act of suicide got headlines all over the world. He carefully chose the opening day of the talks, it was widely reported, so that everyone would know that WTO negotiators were not dealing with technical machinations with no bearing to the general public, but with issues of life and death for millions of people around the world. And for the remainder of the summit his death site became a shrine.
While these outside activities were taking place, members of Our World Is Not For Sale (OWINFS) worked to ensure a steady stream of protests and actions inside the convention centre every day. At the opening, NGO delegates stood as Director-General Supachai Panitchpakdi rose to give his opening remarks, and then covered their mouths with tape and held up signs reading “WTO – OBSOLETE.” Every day there was an action: a skit with people playing the key officials from the QUAD countries (Canada, U.S., Europe, and Japan); a “die-in” to put the spotlight on farmer suicides in India; a banner dropped down the side of a makeshift overpass; and illegal street protests outside the talks.
It became clear that the Cancun talks were doomed. Larger developing countries had regrouped under the banner “the G-21” and rejected the inclusion of investment, procurement, competition and trade facilitation if agricultural subsidies in the North were not also on the table. They were joined by another group of 70 developing nations that had refused to negotiate the “Singapore issues” at the outset. Canada’s International Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew was called in to resolve the differences, but ended up manufacturing a consensus document that infuriated the massive opposition. No agreement was reached, not because of Third World protest but because of First World inflexibility, and jubilant celebrations erupted outside the meeting’s closed doors.
The WTO was given a lifeline by member states in 2005 with a promise to complete the Doha “development” round over the next year, but it did not survive much longer and currently languishes while Director-General Lamy struggles to move sectoral agreements, modifications to GATS, and financial services liberalization forward. The less than enthusiastic response from developing and also developed countries – the new Obama administration in the U.S. has yet to appoint many senior trade officials who would participate in global talks and are needed to move them forward – is partially a response of successful civil society mobilization and partially of a global economic crisis that many economists blame on precisely the same deregulation of markets the WTO and other agreements were created to support.
Global civil society is once again making the links between poverty, inequality, development and environmental collapse, and the global “free trade” model that supports all of these unnecessary evils. In 2004, we celebrated the death of the Free Trade Area of the Americas – an effort to expand the NAFTA model into Latin American – while cautiously preparing to fight an equally dangerous but now defeated plan to deepen NAFTA through the 2005 Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). We learned in August this year that even the SPP had been abandoned by the U.S. government after it had become politically poisonous in all three NAFTA countries.
Canada takes a lead on continuing trade liberalization
But as the large-scale agreements perish one by one, and the WTO continues to languish, the Canadian government in particular has been actively deregulating and re-regulating our national economy using WTO and even MAI priorities as a template. It is also speeding up bilateral free trade agreements with developing nations in Latin America and beyond while ignoring public demands that human rights and environmental protections be given prevalence in foreign affairs.
At home, provinces are signing new ‘free trade’ and investment agreements that bring WTO and NAFTA dispute settlement procedures right down to the municipal level. The B.C.-Alberta Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement, for example, states there should be “no obstacles” to trade and investment flows between provinces. Differences in health, environmental and other public policies are to be eliminated in the interest of streamlining business costs. TILMA includes an investor-state dispute process that essentially eliminates Canadian courts by allowing companies to challenge local government policy at unaccountable trade tribunals. The ambitious new generation trade agreement achieves at the provincial level what the OECD had been trying to implement internationally through the MAI – a stable investment infrastructure that subsumes most government policy to corporate interests.
In three consecutive federal budgets, the current Harper government has proclaimed it wants to see TILMA spread across the country and has even promised European trade negotiators that he will force the provinces to acquiesce in order to satisfy a key EU requirement on procurement and services liberalization. Despite reluctance among European nations to relinquish control over much public policy, the EU Trade Commission expects Canadian provinces to harmonize their regulatory systems and open up provincial and municipal procurement to European companies who see dollar signs in Canada’s network of public services – health care, child care, water delivery, etc.
The Prime Minister would like to support the EU’s agenda, which complements his party’s ideological support for privatization and deregulation, but he is clearly thinking beyond trade with the EU in all of these efforts – to kick-starting global talks at the WTO level. A significant rapprochement between Canada and the EU on trade would put pressure on the U.S. to sign a similar deal, and perhaps force other countries to sit down again to negotiate with a newly merged cross-Atlantic alliance.
The year 2009 is momentous not just because it is the ten-year anniversary of the largest civil society demonstration against the WTO and its bleak vision of globalization. It is notable because even more than 10 years ago it is so clear that this vision is pushing human and ecological limits to the breaking point. A global economic depression, worsening climate, food shortages and growing income inequality have irrevocably discredited the kind of world that Harper and leaders like him are trying to create through ‘free’ trade. Thankfully, a global solidarity is again forming on what needs to be done to stop it.
I have been personally involved, as an activist and UN senior advisor on water, in the international struggle for a Right to Water. Embedded in this right is the notion of water as a public good and part of the commons. It is the antithesis of the neoliberal conception of water as a commodity that can be bought and sold like running shoes. This idea of the commons must and will prevail and not just for water. Food, culture, the environment and even public services are also common goods that we cannot leave up to market forces to govern and distribute unevenly depending on ability to pay. This is a vision whose time has come. From international climate talks in Copenhagen to the planned WTO ministerial in Geneva, our leaders must once again hear the phrase that “Another World is Possible.”
And not just possible – inevitable.
Maude Barlow
October 2009
Originally published in French, Revue Relations (Seattle, dix ans après, Relations no 736 octobre-novembre 2009)
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