“Stronghold.”
How can the corporate
bottom line be eclipsed with the least economic damage?
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“Why, then the world’s mine
oyster, Which I with sword will open.”
The
Merry Wives of Windsor, William Shakespeare,
English dramatist and poet (1564-1616)
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Despite their vastly different
agendas, NGOs stand united in their plea for stemming the power of transnational
corporations through more plural global structures
 As
protest movements go, the mass gatherings that shouted down trade representatives
and finance officials over the past year in Seattle, Washington and Bangkok bore
few of the hallmarks of traditional opposition. There was no formal hierarchy to
speak of, no single nationality, no clear shared cause. In the eyes of one pro-business
group, the new genre of activism mimicked a political “swarm.”
Yet though the diversity of the groups—from northern steel unions to disappearing
tribes—seemed to many critics like rank incoherence, the movement’s leaders stress
that this very variety stands at the heart of their political project. In place of
the uniform spread of commercial values, derided by leading U.S. campaigner Lori
Wallach as a “one size fits all philosophy,” they plead for new distribution of power
that is porous enough to allow room for other interests.
“There’s been an invasion in inappropriate spaces by unaccountable, unalterable trade
rules,” declares Wallach, whose public profile has soared since helping to co-ordinate
the Seattle protests as director of the Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “A version
of the rules has been imposed that has much more to do with corporate input than
the input from public interest . . . That’s the democracy deficit in the global economy.”
In the eyes of campaigners, the rapid, government-approved spread of the free market
has stripped political debate of any interest in the virtues that found a good society
or legitimate global order. But the questions remain: how can the corporate bottom
line be eclipsed with the least economic damage? What reforms are needed, and where?
According to Walden Bello, executive director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global
South, globalization must be rescued from its current “monolithic, uniform and universalistic
character” that has seen transnational corporations account for a majority of the
world’s exports and global inequality more than double since 1960.
A chief culprit, he argues, is “the free market biases of the framework pushed by
the trinity of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), which are fundamentally antithetical
to the sort of diverse world that is conducive to equity. It is vital to cut them
down to size—make them just ordinary actors among a plural set of actors in the global
economy.”
But the problem, as many activists agree, is that there are scanty fora for these
demands to be heard and acted upon. National governments are seen as weak in the
face of global finance, or in the case of developing nations, hamstrung by the obligations
of IMF -sponsored debt reduction programmes
and foreign aid. Business itself has no wish to see its wings clipped, while international
bodies—from the United Nations to the WTO ’s infamous “green room” trade
talks, allegedly dominated by rich nations—appear saddled with undemocratic structures
and practices. The only way out, campaigners argue, is a radical remake of governance.
In the short-term, the priorities are clear. For Wallach, the punch-drunk WTO
must be swiftly levelled: “it’s shrink or sink for the WTO,” she says. “Many of our current
environmental, labour and human rights agreements are illegal trade barriers under
WTO rules.” Besides a shrunken
trade organization, activists also call for the world’s two main lending bodies to
be stripped of the power to prescribe standard austerity packages. In Bello’s opinion,
the IMF and World Bank need to be balanced
by an array of other bodies including regional trading blocs like ASEAN,
strong labour and environmental agencies, and an official body to represent developing
countries. This would give “more space to take independent paths to development,”
he argues.
Over the longer term, the proposals become hazier. Essentially defensive in nature,
few NGOs involved in the campaign against globalization have drawn up detailed blueprints
for a new world power structure. The ideas that have been suggested tend to stress
the need to reinforce global bodies so they can patrol the new breed of footloose
corporations, while bringing the roots of power down to the local level, viewed as
the most accountable level of democracy. Some groups, like the Penang-based Third
World Network, advocates a whole arsenal of global governance: a more democratic
United Nations to include civil society representatives, a code of ethics for worldwide
businesses, and new global agencies for competition, investment and crime.
Of all levels of governance, the nation-state seems the least favoured by NGOs. Either
as a result of the flawed development and environmental destruction forged by countries
such as Brazil and India since World War II, or as a result of current political
failures, few groups favour giving greater powers to national executives. Even Wallach
is quick to stress that universal trade rules of a basic anti-tariff nature are essential.
In contrast, several activists in developing countries tout Europe, where the union’s
powers appear to co-exist reasonably well with local and national decision-making,
as an attractive model. But the “sovereignty mindset,” warns Jan Aart Scholte, reader
in International Studies at Britain’s University of Warwick, remains strong: “people
tend not yet to have the political imagination to think of governance beyond the
state as a place where their interests can be served.” In the case of proposed global
environmental and labour protection rules, for instance, developing countries have
already cried foul.
For some NGOs, however, neither global reform nor local powers are the key to greater
equity and sustainable development. Instead, the mission is to educate, enlighten
and convert, so that the driving force of corporate growth —the tastes of each global
consumer—are restrained. “If the world lived like the Americans or Europeans,” says
Ngai Weng Chan, chairman of the Malaysian Nature Society, “we would be doomed.”
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