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TEXT OF REMARKS BY ALEJANDRO BENDANA, JUBILEE SOUTH AND INTERNATIONAL INITIATIVE ON CORRUPTION AND GOVERNANCE, NOVEMBER 26, 2001 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON USA
FROM SEATTLE TO SEPTEMBER 11
Alejandro Bendana
In radically different ways, the battle of Seattle two years ago, and those 9-11 as it is now called mark two epoch making moments. In the light of the fact the interim between the two occurrences is less than two years, it would mark one of the shortest epochs in history. Surely 'globalization' does not mean making history go fast forward!
Many commentators associated an 'end of innocence' with each of the events. The end of something perhaps but not of innocence. Seattle's importance is not diminished by September 11, and the only valid political connection that can be drawn between the two moments takes the form of elitist circles in government and the corporate world capitalizing on the 9-11 tragedy in order to try to take the world back to the pre Seattle period.
It won't work. Seattle represented the end of the end of history. Mass streets protests and the shutting down of the WTO placed a huge crack in the edifice of corporate neoliberal globalization. Not that globalization crumbled the same way the Trade Center towers did, but its legitimacy was fundamentally undermined. That legitimacy essentially took the form of the myth of inevitable unstoppable and irreversible globalization. The more people believed that alternatives no longer existed, the less the possibilities of effective resistance. Perpetuating the myth and with it the arrogance that the richest countries and corporations would govern the world institutions such as the World Trade Organizations and the Bretton Woods Institutions was a way of demobilizing those who challenged market capitalism. The term globalization itself is one that is meant and instilling in people that struggle against the system, national and international, was no longer possible and hence pointless.
Seattle marked the initiation of a positive history. Of course there were many Seattles in the South, from Indonesia to South Africa and Brazil, and in the North in a multitude of protests against the various environmental, economic and even cultural manifestations of corporate globalization. But Seattle was different for several reasons. First because it successfully took on the WTO and sparked the beginning of what we now called the antiglobalization movement, particularly in the North, as street protests followed in Washington, Quebec, Prague, Genoa and elsewhere. Second, in the North, the protests accompanied the meetings of the economic elites invading their meetings, their streets, their press, and worst of all, in so many cases, by their kids.
Third, Seattle was an enormous shot in the arm for resistance movements in the South. Until then many of us in the South observed with pessimism and regret that, important exceptions aside, the challenging of neoliberal globalization was largely left to researchers, activists and NGOs. As the televised and press images of people taking their protest to the streets, to engage in active resistance invoking an anti-globalization and even an anti-capitalist one, there was a surging of moral for so many movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America a feeling of not being alone, a felt need to link up and increasingly accompany those actions in the North with redoubled efforts in our own countries. A new page in the history of social resistance had been termed, increasingly global in content yet national inform. "A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine", said Stephen
Biko. After a relative post Cold War hiatus, the vehicle was moving again.
Fourth, as one Seattle gave way to another, each with its own specificity and wonderful and often puzzling mixture of local and regional dynamics, the crisis of legitimacy set in and deepened. The elites could no longer dismiss the uproars as even the media, officials, mainstream economists and corporate pundits began to admit the "imperfections" of globalization.
The capitalist genie was out of the seemingly unbreakable post Cold War bottle. The globalizers failed to what was their key strategic post-Cold War task of convincing the global South of the "end of history" and the victory of capitalism over foes past and present. The anti-globalization movement, on the streets engaged in mass organized nonviolent protest had stood up and resisted the full weight of economic, political and cultural power of the Empire.
Terrorism and the Next Fight
If Seattle marked the end of history, then September 11 marked the end of the post Cold War period also associated with Western
triumphalism, and this time at the hands of a nearly pre-historic force. Many feared that the anti-globalization movement would join the list of casualties provoked by the counter-response to the dastardly attacks on New York and Washington. Would US wrath focus on Bin Laden, go on to please the "get Saddam" crowd in Washington, and culminate with the anti-globalization dissidents, now that the U.S is "on a roll" as State Department Richard Armitage put it_
A New York Times reporter casually noted that "There is talk of a new American empire of a world that presents the global superpower with a unique opportunity to exploit a victory in Afghanistan to help the world unify against a new array of threats, to force decisions in every capital to draw aline against terrorism, and to rethink the principles around which nations cooperate". [1]
Indeed Washington's response to 9eleven reminded everyone that the empire had repressive means of dissuasion, to complement economic, political and cultural instruments. Not only in the US but elsewhere criticism of the US-led corporate globalization came to be denounced and even silenced as evidence of disloyalty or lack of solidarity with the US victims. US officials went on the counter offensive, and not merely by resort to bombs, but by angry diatribes against globalization critics, foreign and domestic, while pushing the free market agenda with new zeal. As Walden Bellow put it, the smoke was still erupting from the Twin Towers when the US Trade Secretary declared that advancing liberalization was also a means of fighting terrorism.
It would be naive to believe that the governing corporate elites will waste the golden opportunity to go on the ideological and political offensive. September 11 has opened a new phase for US-led corporate rethinking and restrategizing the battle around globalization. And it is for the anti-globalization forces now to face the challenges and implications of new strategies that may, more than before, resort to international intervention and domestic repression.
If the elites are out to wage a war on "terrorism", the anti-globalization must also adjust strategy and corresponding educational/mobilization work.
Three tasks, lines of research, argumentation and engagement must be developed and refined, drawing out the connection between:
Extremism and neo-liberal economic policies.
Corporate globalization economic prescriptions, including privatization and liberalization, among other factors, breeds extremism and conflict. Global and national economies based on the neoliberal model, and pushed by the IFIs and the
WTO, develop unjust, unequal and undemocratic resource distributions. Exclusion and disempowerment breeds contestation, democratic and
nondemocratic, cultural and otherwise.
Washington-induced impoverishment and Conflict.
Increases in absolute poverty in countries of South and Central Asia, noticeably Pakistan, are related to contraction of state support for social development, while debt repayment drains budgets. Poverty and inequality induced by structural adjustment and debt repayment leads to injustice, disempowerment and political/ideological rebellion.
Economies of War and Militarization.
New levels of "defense" spending, in rich and poor countries, are bound to affect social services budgets. The accelerated convergence of security agendas and corporate business interests spells further concentration of income and power, along with a stepped up drive to secure oil and mineral wealth. Internal and external security "interests" assume an even greater role in the determination of political priorities and the "stabilization" of national and global economies.
Economic Terrorism and Death.
There can be no losing sight of the fact that poverty and disease claim much greater fatalities daily than those claimed by direct terrorist acts.
- Excluding China, there are 100 million more poor people in the world today in developing countries than a decade ago
- 50, 000 people die every day as a result of poor shelter, polluted water and inadequate sanitation.
- 11,000 children daily every day of hunger
- Since 1990 life expectancy has declined in 33 countries
- Mortality rate for children under 5 is 8 per 1000 live births v. 169 in the developing countries (World Bank figures)
- 826 million suffer from chronic hunger and undernourishment (70% of them women and children), although the world could easily feed 12 billion, twice the world population without any problem
E. Extreme Wealth can breed Extreme Reactions
- Assets of the world's 200 richest people increased from 40 billion to more than 1 trillion between 1994-98
- Assets of 3 richest persons is more than the combined GNP of the 48 least developed countries
- 475 people are worth more than the combined income of the poorest 50 percent of the world's people
- 200corporations account for 28% of economic activity
- 500corporations for 70% of world trade
- Between upper fifth and lowest fifth of countries: doubled from 1960 to 1990 from 30 to 1 to60 to 1, and increased to 78 to 1 by 1998
- In US the net worth of the top 1% of US households now exceeds that of the bottom 90% (Boston Review)
September 11 marks a reverse for the antiglobalization movement, at least until it can best learn to deal with the stepped up intimidation, which was already being directed against the movement before September. However tactical adjustments are called for as the movement must increasingly tackle the militarism and war. Fortunately as the result of police repression in Seattle and elsewhere, the anti-globalization movement has discussed and appropriated strategies of nonviolent engagement and civic disobedience. September 11 has also reinvigorated the peace movement, albeit more in Europe than in the US. In the course of resistance, more comprehensive alternatives are also coming into being as alternatives are born in the course of engagement within and across nations.
[1] Patrick Tyler, "In Washington a Struggle to Define the Next Fight", The New York Times, December 2, 2001.
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