Inside, Outside Forces Change WTO Forever

It was meant to be a dignified, focused affair. But in an unscripted howl of protest, this week’s summit of the World Trade Organization turned into something revolutionary.

On the tear-gas shrouded streets of Seattle, the unruly forces of democracy collided with the elite world of trade policy. And when the meeting ended in failure late Friday, the elitists had lost and debate was changed forever.

Hum-drum trade issues were reborn as supercharged social concerns. Political alliances were made across the sea. And chastened government officials vowed that from here on out their insular trade establishment will be more open to the public.

“You can say the old phrase, ‘Things will never be the same,”’ noted Commerce Secretary Bill Daley in an interview. “I don’t think they will.”

The official goal of the Seattle summit was to agree to launch a new round of trade liberalization talks. The WTO, the international organization charged with writing the rules of global commerce, was to be the vehicle for change.

Clinton administration officials had staked their prestige on the get-together, which they viewed as a chance to shape the course of a global trading system that numbers 135 nations and is growing steadily.

But the WTO’s aims in Seattle fell victim to political whirlwinds that savaged the summit from within and without, bringing fierce pressure for reforms of the WTO and the clubby manner in which nations have made deals about trade.

Internally, Third World nations rebelled against what they saw as their exclusion from key talks dominated by the United States and Europe.

Externally, tens of thousands of protestors shouted their demands that trade officials consider the effects of their decisions on the environment, working people, public safety and health.

By the end of the wild week, the effects--and lessons--were starting to become apparent, according to interviews with delegates, U.S. officials, and some of the WTO antagonists.

The WTO pledged to explore new ways to include all its members in key deliberations, a reform that was loudly demanded by delegates from Africa, Asia and Latin America. While leading nations rejected the demand of protestors to eliminate the WTO altogether, U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky conceded it “has outgrown the processes appropriate to an earlier time.”

For its part, the sprawling army of critics and interest groups claimed nothing less than the arrival of a historic moment in global democracy.

It was “a stunning breakthrough in the public debate over globalization,” maintained John J. Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO. “Americans crossed a threshold to begin a truly national conversation...and they were joined by citizens across the globe.”

Anti-WTO alliances were legion, in some cases uniting outside detractors with delegationes inside the besieged institution.

Champions of the poor, for example, found allies in the delegations from have-not countries, supplying them with information and even serving as mouthpieces for their concerns.

“In the end, powerful countries were unable to railroad weaker ones into agreeing to something that they had never been part of in the first place,” said Tetteh Hormeku of the African Trade Network, a non-governmental group that spoke on behalf of delegates from sub-Saharan Africa.

The anti-WTO movement barely existed a decade ago.

When trade officials gathered in Punta del Este, Uruguay in 1986 to embark on the last major round of negotiations, only a handful of interest groups bothered to show up. But in Seattle there was a stampede: More than 2,000 non-governmental organizations--mostly anti-WTO interests with strong social agendas and international ties--registered for the summit, according to trade officials.

A decade ago, Americans mostly yawned when U.S. and Canadian officials negotiated a pact that set the stage for the North American Free Trade Agreement. Efforts to arouse environmentalists were largely unsuccessful.

“International trade. What would an environmental group know about international trade? The answer was nothing,” recalled Steven Shrybman, a lawyer in Toronto at the time who tried to spark the interest of U.S. environmentalists in the treaty.

But in Seattle, environmental groups were everywhere, pushing press releases on reporters, giving televisin interviews, taunting delegates on the street. The loose network of activists conducted live Internet broadcasts of events, and maintained constant communication via cell phone and e-mail.

More than any other event to date, Seattle was an example of globalized political organizing, abetted by global communication and global transportation. At an organized- labor rally, Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng joined the heads of the AFL-CIO, Teamsters and Auto Workers, where he later warned American politicans not to “ignore the voice of the people.”

“I heard accents from France, Germany and Italy out there,” said Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper of the nearly 40,000 people who had descended on his city. “This was an international incident. It just happened to take place in the city of Seattle.”

There is little question that the solidarity on the streets of Seattle has already begun to make itself felt in domestic politics, according to Brenda Jacobs, a Washington, D.C., trade attorney whose clients include domestic apparel importers.

Take clothing imports, a deep concern to the beleaguered U.S. industry and its labor allies. Jacobs recalled asking a U.S. trade official last week whether Cambodia, which has low labor costs, was going to receive permission to increase its apparel exports to the United States. At the time, organized labor was marching in the streets.

“Look at what’s happening outside,” came the response. In other words, no change was in store for Cambodia.

Certainly, government officials throughout the world have taken note of the rising backlash and are struggling to address some of the complaints about the WTO and the global economy.

Pascal Lamy, the European Union’s top negotiator, told reporters Saturday that the WTO’s membership has grown so large, and the range of issues it dealt with so broad, that it will have to be “reassessed and maybe rebuilt.”

“The WTO does not have the institutional strength or the culture or the procedures to do this right,” Lamy said.

While the WTO scrutinizes its internal processes and struggles to become a more open, inclusive institution, there are other steps underway to make trade more humane and its procedures more democratic.

A growing number of governments, ranging from the United States and the European Union to small nations such as Zimbabwe, have begun consulting more regularly with their nongovernmental critics--a process that preceded Seattle but will surely be pushed forward.

And the heads of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund came to Seattle to highlight their pledge to assist have-not countries whose economies are disrupted by the shift to open markets and the global economy.

Beyond that, a group of national legislators from the United States, Europe and other nations created in Seattle an unprecedented “standing group” of parliamentarians who promised to serve as a new set of eyes and ears when the WTO holds summits, prodding it toward greater participation and openness.

While hardly as sensational as violence in the street, this emergence of an international group of legislators was a signal development toward global democracy, some observers said.

“This was a very important meeting,” Steve Charnovitz, a trade expert in Washington, D.C., said of the international legislators’ session.

But there will be demands for much stronger steps. The emergence of this international network of protest, emboldened by its success here, is certain to spark future protest.

Mark Ritchie, an advocate of family farmers in Minnesota, is already looking beyond Seattle--to the WTO’s headquarters in Geneva and trade summits that have not even been scheduled.

“People will start lobbying Geneva next week,” said Ritchie, soft-spoken president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis. He promised: “People will be back at the next ministerial in much bigger forces.”

“We started a global movement--perhaps the biggest global movement in history. It’s quite a change. It’s a planetary response.”