Skewered in Seattle

As the home of both the world’s most successful software company and its biggest aircraft maker, Seattle has as good a claim as any city to be the heart of the new, global economy. Now, as the host of last week’s disastrous meeting of the World Trade Organization, it can claim, rather less cheerfully, that it is the place where the new politics is being forged, too.

The Seattle riots were a bizarre mixture of the comical and the terrifying. Protesters dressed as turtles; self-described “vegan dykes” went topless; banners declared “The WTO is a hazardous waste”; and, for a while at least, everyone seemed to enjoy the street theater. But other banners suggested a more sinister agenda--”Clinton, Blair, they’re no good, hit them on the head with a piece of wood,” said one, and “F--- the civil, let’s get disobedient,” screamed another--and some of the protests soon degenerated into violence.

Many Americans seem perplexed by this display. Previous urban protests touched most people in a visceral way. Everybody knew somebody in Vietnam. The Los Angeles riots arose from feelings of injustice that anyone who saw the Rodney G. King video could understand. But why riot over the level of tariffs on textiles, rice from India or the need to reconsider Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights? For many, the issues seem quaint and arcane, even if the National Guard had to be called out.

Or so it seems now. In truth, last week’s revolt against globalization--for that is what it was--may come back to haunt us all. Seattle may be an early insight into what might become the official politics of the next century: a continuing battle between a technocratic commercial elite with a minimal grasp of politics and a disenfranchised, angry minority with a minimal grasp of economics. The full import of this event can only be understood if you look beyond America to the rest of the world and beyond the present back into history.

Begin with an assumption that most economists (though not, sadly, the vegan dykes) would accept wholeheartedly: Globalization has basically been good for us. The lifting of barriers--political, cultural, economic--among countries has certainly been messy, creating losers as well as winners. But the overall gains in prosperity, not to mention liberal freedoms, have been overwhelming. The WTO’s agenda in Seattle fits this picture. It might seem a bit banal. But the gains are real: Tariffs on textiles and agricultural products represent a systematic act of sustained cruelty by the developed world against the developing world. Intellectual-property rules help open minds as well as markets.

The problem is that the technocrats at the WTO have never bothered to explain this. They would rather relegate momentous political decisions to the level of mere administration. This is partly a matter of temperament--trade negotiators have a taste for arcana and obfuscation that makes even lawyers look good--but it also reflects a deep-seated intellectual conviction that the case for globalization is too obvious to need defending. How can anyone complain about giving consumers better goods at better prices?

In fact, for many people, the case against globalization is far easier to understand. The losers tend to be concentrated and visible while the winners are widely dispersed, with the biggest gains going to consumers in general. Seeing an aging steel town devastated by cheap imports is heart-wrenching. Seeing everybody else’s lives improved by cheaper and better cars, washing machines and other things with foreign steel in them is commonplace.

The prospect of a backlash becomes more frightening once you examine the popularity of globalization around the world. Even in the United States, it is easy to rally support to protect particular industries. The United States now has roughly 300 antidumping duties to protect its economy against outsiders daring to sell cheap goods. Politicians are all for globalization--until it happens to a factory in their constituency. The myth that only one sort of trade--exports--is good for a country is common currency even in Washington. One sign of how poorly globalization has been explained to ordinary Americans is that one group of workers who went on strike in sympathy with the protesters were West Coast dock workers, the very people who rely on globalization for their jobs.

Look further afield and there are far more worrying signs. Outside the United States, globalization touches on ancient grievances and festering inferiority complexes. In continental Europe, the process is synonymous with Americanization--with Hollywood pap, with Frankenstein Foods (genetically modified crops) and with a superpower that treats it as a doormat. Such views tended to be put forward in Seattle by people in turtle costumes; but they pass for conventional wisdom not just among ordinary French citizens (who have made a folk hero out of Jose Bove, the farmer who rammed a McDonald’s with his tractor) but also in the French establishment.

Britain may be the most pro-American country on the continent, but London was the site of this June’s “carnival against capitalism” (a practice for many of the protest groups in Seattle), and there was another antiglobal riot there last week. Many conservative Britons, including Prince Charles, deeply distrust genetically modified U.S. food.

Asia, too, has long shared this desire to resist Americanization--what else was “Asian values” about?--but it also has a more immediate motive. “The Asian contagion” is now something of a distant memory in the United States--that moment when your Amazon.com shares briefly wobbled before heading skyward again. Yet, in most parts of Asia, it is still frighteningly real. Even though most economies have now recovered, few locals like the fact that their governments appeared to hold a fire sale of their nations’ foremost banks and companies--with U.S. firms buying them cheaply.

In many countries that resent globalization, locals are being a little economical with the truth. The deluge of U.S. shows on European television has turned out to be a temporary phenomenon, caused by the opening up of the market; now all the leading local programs are locally made. Similarly, in countries like South Korea and Indonesia, the Asian contagion helped spur useful political change. But America will receive few thanks for it. Pride is at work.

Many supporters of globalization are aware of these dangers. But they tend to dismiss them. The integration of the world economy has gone too far for it to be reversed, they argue, and the invention of the Internet is breaking down barriers faster than ever. There is an assumption among business people, in general, and technologists, in particular, that globalization is both new and inevitable. Neither is true.

In many ways, the world economy before 1914 was just as globalized as the one today. It was a time when you did not need a passport, and when labor and capital moved across borders with comparative impunity. In one year, 1907, some 1.3 million immigrants arrived in America, the equivalent of 1.5% of the population. There was the same focus on new technology, the same pell-mell creation of new wealth, the same confidence in the Anglo-American world that nothing would go wrong.

In fact, just as now, there was only muted support for free trade in continental Europe. Even in Britain, which played the same role in the world trading system that the United States plays today, there were plenty of politicians who supported free trade in general but always found exceptions for their own constituents. Even though most people were getting richer, there was mounting suspicion that most of the wealth was going to a few ultrarich ogres.

After World War I, populist politicians around the world began a bizarre competition to raise barriers and restrain their business people. The onset of the Great Depression divided the world into hostile blocs, as fences sprung up to protect domestic industries from evil imports, capital flows and immigration--not to mention a world economy that was visibly in trouble. The result was not increased safety for national economies but a worldwide slump. It was not until after World War II that the world got back on the right track.

It would certainly be odd if Seattle--an export-oriented port city--proved another turning point. But the events of the last week show there are deeper undercurrents at work, including envy and nationalism, and those currents swirl all over the globe. *