YDS > Resources

Search the YDS site:

site map \| printable version

from the activist...
Lookin' Out for Number One

by Bill Dixon

As the World Trade Organization's Third Ministerial Summit meets in Seattle this November, trade ministers and other responsible folk from all corners of the globe will gather and produce the customary rhetoric. Expand the markets, get government out of trade, and, at long last, let capitalism be capitalism! Or at least, that's what you'll hear if you get past all the noise from that other international event taking place nearby.

Which might not be easy, since tens of thousands of the WTO's opponents will be loudly demonstrating against the summit throughout its proceedings. Demanding an end to globalization as we know it, they will call for a more democratic, solidaristic, and ecological path toward world development. Among them will be environmentalists, union members, and consumer, farm, and public health activists, as well as progressive leaders from the US and around the world. Keenly aware that globalization comes to public view only too rarely in the form of tangible targets, organizers hope to hijack some of the meeting's publicity and turn the event into a lightening-rod for protest. Ironically enough, the summit's media-intensive pomp and splendor may make the occasion more productive for the activist opposition than for the actual participants.

Much more than symbolism makes the WTO a worthy target. For so long as the WTO itself remains in force, social justice will be the road not taken in the global economy. By its essential design, the World Trade Organization pits the most radical standard of market sovereignty against virtually anything which might diminish the rights of multinational capital to maximum profits. Simply put, the sole aim of the WTO is to turn the planet into one big marketplace, with a single set of pro-business rules binding all nations, rich and poor alike, at all times, at all costs. Until the work of the WTO is stopped, poor and working people across the globe will be officially bound by the ever-expanding control of a strange new capitalist order, one perversely dependent upon a strict system of rules and an elaborate bureaucratic administration.

The World Trade Organization is a recent creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. GATT was first negotiated after World War II by the major economic powers in order to strengthen the strategic interests of the capitalist West through reinvigorated international commerce. For the next forty years, GATT negotiations, called "rounds," proceeded to open markets by eliminating tariffs and import quotas slowly and selectively among countries within US and European influence. In 1986, however, GATT members began the Uruguay Round, which carried trade liberalization to historic new heights. At the Uruguay Round, in large part thanks to the Reagan/Thatcher axis, negotiations went far beyond tariffs and turned instead to the broader category of "barriers to trade." This rubric can include any policies, laws, or even cultural or religious customs which seem to interfere with the natural workings of supply and demand. Backing up this aggressive new approach to capitalist expansion is the WTO, established with the ratification of the Uruguay Round in 1994.

The WTO enforces GATT and settles trade disputes between member nations. These executive and quasi-judicial functions distinguish the WTO drastically from the pre-Uruguay GATT rounds, which allowed members exemptions from many provisions and kept enforcement powers to a minimum. The WTO arbitrates conflicts through special panels. The panels act like judges, hearing complaints that one member's practices violate GATT against the interests of another. If the panel rules against a member, it may authorize punitive sanctions against the guilty party or force it to eliminate the practice in question. Before Uruguay, GATT members had to unanimously vote for any action to be taken against a member. With the WTO, such action happens automatically with the panel's ruling.

The dangers of this process are difficult to overestimate. First, there are the WTO reviews themselves. The panels are composed of career trade officials and business experts drawn from a bureaucratically appointed roster, leaving the process wide open to influence peddling and conflicts of interest. The panel's deliberations are closed to the public and the press, but not to select advocates from the private sector. The standards of evidence, especially in cases involving public health, are lax at best and often arbitrarily disregard expert testimony and recognized scientific data. The standards for legal consistency and precedent aren't much better. Typically, WTO rulings rest on precious little in the way of actual law. In crucial respects the GATT text itself is often ambiguously worded, and WTO panels regularly ignore other multilateral agreements, particularly those involving environmental and labor issues.

Even more frightening than how the panels function is what they actually do, as shown by some of the high profile WTO cases. In the United States, the WTO has boldly struck down portions of the Clean Air Act, allowing Venezuelan gasoline to pollute US air at levels of toxicity deemed appropriate by Venezuela. Likewise, the WTO also supports US efforts to force the European Union to accept US beef from cattle treated with dangerous levels of bovine growth-hormone. The WTO has also challenged a Massachusetts selective purchasing law, which boycotts the military regime of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), on the grounds that human rights standards are really just protectionism in disguise. And recently, the WTO ruled in favor of the US-based Chiquita company, declaring that the European Union may not promote Caribbean agricultural development by giving preferential treatment to Caribbean-owned banana exporters. US companies Dole, Del Monte, and Chiquita together control forty-two percent of the EU banana imports. So far, this near-cartel of giant agri-business has successfully used the WTO to defend its dominant position in the market and threaten small producers - all in the name of fair competition.

As might be expected, sensational cases like these have provoked heated controversy, raising important questions within the WTO about how it should do business. Many countries have set forth serious if conflicting proposals for WTO reforms, such as more accountable and open enforcement procedures, greater respect for democracy and national sovereignty, real environmental standards, labor rights, and so on. At Seattle's Ministerial meeting, these issues will be taken up, but only in general terms. Ministerial Summits meet every three years to assess progress and deliberate over the broad outline for the WTO's future internal negotiations.

Blocking any real progress on any of these issues, however, is a kind of ideological wall beyond which WTO debates will never go. It rests on the grand assumption that market-led growth through multinational corporate profit-seeking can by itself sustain more or less equitable prosperity for the vast majority of the planet. Now, this is a whale of a premise, even for confirmed capitalists, but the alternatives (more international regulation, coordinated aid, investment, and planning) somehow escape serious mention in even the most heated WTO disputes. Yet once you accept that markets always know best and that governments can't be trusted with their own economies - let alone the world market - plausible arguments for "democratizing" the WTO become scarce indeed. That's why the WTO's reform-talk always gets lost in the ideological glare of this defining consensus, which over the years has eerily advanced to the point of sheer fanaticism. Opponents call it "trade uber alles," referring to the corollary notion that all of the social complexities of globalization should be reduced to the single goal of enlarging markets. Unfortunately, because the WTO is constructed exclusively for the purpose of putting this very idea into practice, the WTO's range of opinion will always be handicapped by nothing less than its entire reason for being.

Never has this bizarre impairment been more obvious than during the WTO debates over the Asian crisis. Not so long ago, after all, international investor panic nearly sunk the West along with most of the Third World into a deadly recession. "Stability" was restored only through massive intervention in the form of hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout packages and makeshift, band-aid style banking reforms. Even so, for most in the WTO the lesson of the Asian crisis is that, amazingly, global markets are not yet powerful enough! Blame for the Asian crisis goes instead to Asian backwardness, not to the investment markets where reckless speculation made disaster merely a matter of time. This same circular logic drives the WTO's current quest for expansion into China. The Chinese, to their credit, are understandably reluctant to accept US and EU demands that China open up its financial sectors to precisely those Western investors whose blind profiteering all but destroyed the economies of China's Asian neighbors.

It's anyone's guess how this weird dogmatism will explain some of the other portentous events of recent months, such as the revolt of Third World members in the bitterly contested WTO leadership election, or the intensified conflicts between the US, Japan, and the European Union over bananas, beef, and steel. For the moment, these dangers are boxed off as incidental obstacles to the ultimate mission of making markets "work," now no longer a strategy for growth so much as an end-in-itself. And so in the eyes of elite opinion worldwide, the WTO remains brightly affirmed as a more or less obvious measure of world-historic progress, rather like the Olympics or the Internet; problematic at moments, sure, but all in all a healthy sign of modernity on the march.

One way or another, that sunny capitalist delusion will come to an end. Globalization will never be the natural, frictionless process of markets-making-markets which the WTO was designed to quietly administer and enforce from on high. On the contrary, the transformations at work in the international economy are profoundly social, with implications that run far beyond the laissez-faire catechisms so carefully hardwired into the operational foundations of the WTO. The question is this: Will the failures of the WTO result in new movements, programs, and institutions capable of challenging global capitalism itself? Or will the planet instead be condemned to a new era of capitalism at its worst, only now larger than ever, and overseen by authorities who mistake catastrophe for success?

top