I had the good fortune to be able to be in Seattle at the end of November for the 3rd Ministerial meeting of the WTO. As NDP Trade Critic I have attended all three such meetings, the 1st, in Singapore in 1996. The 2nd in Geneva in 1998. And Seattle in 1999, which was supposed to be the launch of the so-called Millennium Round. Instead, it became the last big protest of the century, and it was some protest, remarkable not for its violence (because that was a small and over reported dimension), but for its effectiveness in initially preventing the WTO meeting from opening, for its unity in bringing so many people and causes together from around the world, and for its success in profiling the issue of the WTO, putting the WTO debate on the map, and humbling those who thought they could go on forever without serious challenge, designing a world with and for the big multinational corporations.
The last big protest of the century was the end of an era. The worldview of the WTO, and its supporters, has been humbled. It is still dominant. But it is humbled and somewhat confused as to what to do next. The protest succeeded, and the conference, when it opened, ultimately failed. It should be a time for re-thinking the values and the goals of the WTO. Embarrassingly, for Canada at least, it is not. Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew seems to see Canada’s role as leading the search for a way to salvage the WTO as it is and was, instead of learning the lesson of Seattle and seeking an entirely new set of multilateral trade rules in which the market ethic and corporate interests are subordinate to democracy, social justice, environmental integrity, and cultural diversity, with democracy being the overriding value. It is, after all, through the democratic process that we make those decisions in the interests of social justice, environment, and cultural diversity. And it is in the interests of democracy and democratic values that the battle in Seattle was fought.
The protesters, and a minority of politicians at the meeting, like myself, want a world in which the democratic decisions of various nation states, decisions taken in the interests of environment, or cultural diversity, or food safety, or whatever, are not trumped by a global organization that judges every policy by one benchmark, by one value, i.e. whether a particular policy impedes trade or not.
Renato Ruggiero, former Director General of the WTO, said of the work of the WTO "We are writing the constitution of a single global economy". Any such constitution making is pre-eminently a political task, and it is amazing just how much success the WTO has had until now in making people think that it was just dealing with purely economic matters, as if there were such a thing anyway, and not political matters. But this is the "genius" of the market ethos, the way it seeks to de-politicize issues by rendering them purely economic, therefore opening them to the unrestricted influence of corporate values and closing issues off from interpretation and understanding that seeks to see all issues in a fuller social and ecological context. We Canadians are not strangers to such a market ethic, and the way that that ethic, enshrined in trade agreements, can frustrate the democratic will of a people. We have NAFTA, which Ronald Reagan called an economic constitution for North America.
At the People’s Rally and March for Fair Trade, that took place on Tuesday, November 30th, 50,000 people joined together to say that they wanted their so-called economic constitution to reflect and enforce certain values. I was there in the stands with the hundreds of Canadians, who came to Seattle from B.C. and elsewhere to participate, and what we were saying at the rally, and what was said by speaker after speaker, is that trade must be made clean, green, and fair, and that nations who act to make trade clean, green and fair, should not have their laws or policies struck down. This was a peaceful demonstration, run without Darth Vader police cordons in attendance, and it was wonderful to see, trade unionists, environmentalists, farmers, aboriginal people, food safety activists, and many others, united by their common perception of the WTO as a threat to democracy and the common good. Democracy and the common good. In the context of the WTO the two are linked. It is usually when democracies act in the interests of the common good that they come into conflict with the WTO, to the extent that thinking about the common good tends to elevate labour and human rights, environmental and health concerns, and cultural diversity over corporate power and commercial interests.
It is ironic, however, that the same WTO which has the power to act so forcefully in some cases, pleads powerlessness in other respects. As Canadian Elaine Bernard, head of the Harvard University Trade Union Program, noted in an article in the Washington Post, after Seattle: "For example, the WTO says its purview does not include social issues, only trade. So it claims to be powerless to do anything about a repressive regime selling the products of several shops that use child labour. Yet let this same regime, use the same children in sweatshops to produce "pirated" CD’s or fake designer T-shirts, and the WTO can spring into action with a series of powerful levers to protect corporate "intellectual property rights". So it’s really not a question of free trade versus protectionism, but of who and what is free, and who and what is protected." Amen.
On the issue of core labour standards, Canada was an embarrassment, and has been all along. The Americans, and President Clinton, may only be paying lip service to the need for action on labour standards, but even in doing that they are helping to highlight the issue. Prime Minister Chretien and Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew take the weakest possible position, that labour standards are a matter for the ILO, when everyone knows that the ILO has no power to enforce core labour standards. Without enforceable core labour standards, globalization will only continue to encourage exploitation and injustice in the workplace, particularly in the developing world, but not only there. And while it will be important to address the concern among some developing country elites that such rules could be used as disguised trade barriers, there is no justification whatsoever for seeking comparative advantage in trade by denying fundamental worker freedoms.
So just what kind of democratic decisions am I talking about, or are others talking about, that the WTO has struck down, or that are being challenged through the WTO, and why, as I see it, should all parliamentarians, and those who elect them, be concerned?
The fact is that an increasing number of what would once have been clearly domestic policy issues are being decided by the WTO, or are on the agenda for being put within the reach and power of the WTO. In Canada, we have some experience with this, both in the context of the WTO, and the NAFTA. In NAFTA we have seen it in the context of the Chapter Eleven investor-state dispute settlement mechanism, whereby Canada was challenged by Ethyl Corporation for an environmental policy on the fuel additive MMT that impaired the profits of that corporation. And we have seen, more ominously, the reluctance of the Canadian government to ban bulk water exports for fear of triggering a NAFTA challenge.
In the context of the WTO, we have seen our split-run magazine policies struck down, the auto pact ruled against, and our generic drug laws gutted in order to conform to WTO rules. Other countries have had different problems. And no country is above reproach. Country A may be fighting a WTO ruling against a national policy, of its own, while trying to use the WTO to strike down a national policy of some other government which is harmful to the interests of its exporters. Canada is a good example, and was used as such at one of the events I attended in Seattle: the Peoples Tribunal on the WTO. Canada is using the WTO to challenge France’s national ban on asbestos, and Canada’s actions at the WTO, trying to impose asbestos on France by having its asbestos ban struck down, are an embarrassing example of how laws which have to do with public health are being attacked as trade barriers at the WTO.
The European ban on the import of beef with hormones in it has been successfully challenged at the WTO, raising concerns among food safety activists. The European policy of giving preference to Caribbean banana producers has been successfully challenged at the WTO, showing how development priorities are given no value at the WTO. The People’s Tribunal heard testimony as to how some islands will now have to turn to growing dope as an alternative. Way to go, WTO! And as a last example, but one which was very high on the list of many in Seattle, there is the way in which the WTO ruled against the U.S Endangered Species Act, and the rules against import of shrimp that are harvested in ways that destroy sea turtles.
Emerging issues, if the WTO gets its way, will be WTO rules on GMO’s, on services, on investment, and a host of other issues that will further impinge on the ability of nation states to determine their own policies. The current bio-safety conference in Montreal, a follow-up to Rio, is a case in point. Will there be an international bio-safety protocol worthy of the name, and which isn’t subject to being trumped by WTO rules and WTO ideology, or will the American position win out, backed by Canada, that it would be better to have no protocol, if its going to be too strong, and let the WTO deal with it. [As it turned out, the protocol arrived at in Montreal did represent some progress. The environmental philosophy and rules established by the protocol, and the recognition of the precautionary principle, in ways that cannot be challenged at or by the WTO is a hopeful, and hopefully precedent-setting, achievement.]
On the issue of services, it is certainly a Canadian concern that any agreement on services at the WTO could set the stage for opening up the Canadian public health care and public education systems to American private interests. Unfortunately, this was not a big issue in Seattle, as very few countries have as much to lose in these areas as Canada does. There is much work to be done to help others see what it is that Canadians are worried about, and why they should share our concerns. Again, unfortunately, the Canadian government has not been doing a good job for Canadians.
On the issue of investment, it is certainly true that there will be an attempt to resurrect a form of the MAI at the WTO, and this is cause for continuing concern as well. However, I think it reasonable to predict that whatever investment agreement emerges at the WTO, should the WTO’s critics and opponents not win the day, will be significantly different than the defeated MAI. This will be true in terms of taking more into account the needs of developing countries, but also, perhaps, in terms of the investor-state dispute settlement provisions that we see in Chapter 11 of NAFTA, and which were replicated in the draft MAI that was abandoned by the OECD. In Seattle, I was shown a draft final statement that the EU, Japan, and several other countries had signed onto, which explicitly excluded investor-state dispute settlement provisions. This is good news. The pilot project called NAFTA has been a failure. Now what we need is for the guinea pig, Canada, to wake up and smell the coffee, and seek the elimination of Chapter 11 from NAFTA, or better yet, the elimination of NAFTA itself.
Having mentioned the MAI, I think it fair to say that the defeat of the MAI, followed by the humbling of the WTO in Seattle, both by its own internal disagreements and by the protests, is occasion for great hopefulness. The neo-liberal, neo-conservative agenda of free trade, deregulation, and privatization, followed by national governments in the 80’s and later enshrined in trade agreements, is now openly on the defensive, for the way in which it is polarizing societies, polarizing the world, threatening the environment and ignoring social justice.
For a long-time the Federal NDP, as a political party, was a voice in the wilderness on these issues, along with other voices in Canadian civil society and in the social movements. After Seattle, I dare to hope that things may someday be different, and that this will be so, no matter how long it takes, because of all the young people I saw in Seattle.
One of the highlights of my week in Seattle, apart from getting my first taste of tear gas, and then only at a distance, was doing a press conference with Tom Hayden, a California state senator who in 1968 was one of the infamous Chicago Seven who organized the protests at the Democratic National Convention over the Vietnam War.
Like me, he was inclined to think for a number of years that Generation X, and those who came after them, depending on what you define as Generation X, was too apathetic or too accepting of the new world order being drawn up in the board rooms of the corporations, and obediently mouthed by captive governments at international forums. As Hayden himself observed, in an article after Seattle, campuses "are still more silent than they were in the 60’s. But the Seattle protestors represent the break through of the vast hip-hop generation into a public effort to challenge the system".
Hayden went on to say: "Seattle will have greater consequences. In Chicago, we were dealing with a single issue: the Vietnam War. The Seattle activists were confronting the very nature of the way economics, environmentalism and human rights are going to be shaped for the rest of our lives. The so-called New World order has to do with everything: exports, prevailing wages, sweatshops, sea turtles, the price and quality of food. The Vietnam War was going to end eventually, but the new world order will not. You’ll either be part of it or you’ll be frozen out."
On behalf of all the people who are already frozen out, I believe we all have an obligation to resist and transform the new world order, making it a form of globalization that creates a true global community, and not just a global marketplace is which everything is for sale, including our values.
