Magazine Issue 5&6 - Winter 1997
COUNTER-GLOBALISATION

Creative and flexible forms of global organisation are being developed to resist the World Trade Organization (WTO) and related global monstrosities. Phil McLeish observed some of these developments at the International Autumn University on North-South Relations and the Environment: “Surviving in a Gloablised World” in Aachen, Germany organised by Play Fair Europe! (Sept. 27 - Oct. 11)

Hitching to Aachen. Need to get off this island again, explode my cramped London-centric narrowness. Arrive late. An amazing atmosphere - hundreds of activists from all over Europe and beyond are enjoying each other. Spanish madness breaks out - spontaneous collective eruptions of singing and clapping (particularly when anyone leaves or arrives). I’m cursing myself for missing the ‘seminar part’ - want to KNOW all this depressing stuff when what actually counts is DOING something - right? WRONG. We don’t know anything like enough. Global Institutions like the World Trade

Organisation (WTO) are rapidly seizing control of our economic, governmental and social systems and no one’s even talking about it. The WTO, created in 1994 during the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) seeks to impose crippling economic sanctions on any nation that demands that its goods be produced according to higher health, environmental or ethical standards than those of the rest of the world. According to the WTO, these standards constitute a ‘barrier to trade’. For example, the US is currently using the WTO to try and force European markets to accept beef that contains bovine growth hormones, and to terminate their preferential trading relationship with the banana-producing Caribbean nations, in favour of bananas produced on vast, TNC-owned plantations in Latin America.

Institutions such as the WTO, for all their real power, are like conspiracies in their intangibility. How to take ‘direct’ action against treaties, international law and secretive Geneva secretariats? This was of secondary concern at Aachen. Participants’ primary concern was to widen the conversation - to improve dialogue and co-ordination between activists working on environmental, labour, and trade issues in both the North and South. This tactic seems to makes sense if what we are seeking is political action with GLOBAL IMPACT.

Historically unprecedented opportunities for co-ordinated global action are slowly but decisively emerging. New, decentralised networks of global resistance are developing in response to the increasing power of a handful of unelected governing bodies, lending institutions, and transnational corporations (TNCs). Poor people’s movements from around the South, often the movements of factory workers, peasants and indigenous peoples, are trying to figure out how they can better co-ordinate their own efforts, and those with Northern environmentalists, labour unions, and social justice campaigners. The problems faced by poor, disadvantaged and marginalised people around the world are increasingly the same: enclosure, corporate power, the erosion of democracy. As a result, their demands are also converging: land, autonomy and more democracy.

As soon as one of us discovers an amplifying device that enables us all to speak these demands with the same metre and rhythm - TOGETHER - then the political ice age that has frozen out collective action for the last two decades will begin to thaw.

Spring 1998 will be very exciting in this regard. The network I saw emerging in Aachen will go public in February. The Hunger Gathering in Rome during the FAO Summit and the Land and Ecology table at the Encuentro in Spain last summer were both key to the development of the new network. There will be a large gathering in February in Geneva for between six hundred to eight hundred activists. The co-ordinating committee for this gathering includes representatives of some of the most dynamic movements of recent years - the Brazilian Movimento dos Sem Terra (Brazil), the Zapatistas (Mexico), the Ogoni group MOSOP (Nigeria), as well as peasant organisations from India, the Philippines and Nicaragua. The aim of the gathering will be to achieve parity between Northern and Southern participants, and will signify the launch of the “People’s Global Action Against “Free” Trade” (PGA).

PGA will be “an instrument of co-ordination, not an organisation”. It will consist of regular gatherings (every two years), a set of inter-linked Web sites and a bulletin designed to communicate and co-ordinate resistance to the WTO and other similar agencies. Parallel to this main assembly will be a series of other discussion tables on various issues, including biotechnology, women’s rights, and the rights of indigenous peoples, which, it is hoped, will eventually lead to the development of networks. The initial focus for all this discussion and networking will be the 50th birthday of GATT, which will be ‘celebrated’ in May next year, also in Geneva. The plan is to organise actions in Geneva and around the world to challenge this birthday... but how? What kind? Watch this space... ...or start with the Diary on the back cover.
Further Information:

Play Fair Europe! e.v., Turmstr. 3,52072 Aachen, Germany. Tel: +49 241 80 3792 fax: +49 241 88 88 394 Email: playfair@asta.rwth-aachen.de Web: http://www.asta.rwth-acchen.de/orga/ir/au97.html
Phil McLeish: c/o email: rts@gn.apc.org
Recommended Reading: ‘The Case Against the Global Economy’, E.Goldsmith and J. Mander, Sierra Club Books, 1996.

Corporations rule, O.K?
Nation states have been downgraded to the role of providing basic infrastructures and amenities. Currently two-thirds of international trade is accounted for by just 500 corporations, and 40% of this trade is between different parts of the same TNC. In fact, TNCs are so powerful and wealthy, that of the world’s 100 largest economies, 50 are TNCs. For example, Toyota’s corporate sales are worth more than the gross national product of Norway or Poland or Portugal. In fact, the world’s 10 largest TNCs have a total income greater than that of 100 of the world’s poorest countries.

Robbed of all real political power, nation states now function as little more than local governments within the world system. Meanwhile, in 1994 the World Trade Organisation lumbered out of the murky depths of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), during its seventh ‘Uruguay Round’. Secretive, and lacking any democratic mandate, this Geneva-based international secretariat was empowered to hand out trade penalty rulings. Made up of 121 governments, the WTO now wields more real political power than the United Nations. Along with the new Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights regime (TRIPs) and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), a new global legal and political infrastructure is being put in place that will underwrite and extend corporate dominance throughout the next century.