Next Trade Meeting Can Make Amends

Is the Clinton administration still sulking over Seattle? Many in Asia will decide that for themselves in February, when 188 nations converge on Bangkok for the first major international economic conference since the World Trade Organization fiasco. Ordinarily, any meeting of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development wouldn’t merit much more than a yawn or a laugh from the West. Instead, UNCTAD X (the 10th annual), is looming as something like Global Bowl II.

Unlike the WTO, which is run by the world’s economic heavyweights, the U.N. trade organization is dominated largely by developing nations. Its organizers are anxious that the U.S. show up with an A-team, not a token presence. “By taking UNCTAD seriously,” says a Thai official, “the West and the developed parts of the world might just begin the process of healing the wounds that have been inflicted in Seattle. Reconciliation might just start in Bangkok.”

Leading the reconciliation effort there will be U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The West ought to listen to this thoughtful man: As far back as January, at the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, he explicitly warned an obviously overconfident West that globalization might not raise all boats--only the yachts--and in the process wind up overturning a lot of canoes. The West didn’t listen, of course; neither did its hand-picked World Trade Organization Director General Mike Moore, who Washington hoped would “knock heads together” and slap Asian delegates around if they tried to resist the Western globalization agenda. That backfired big time. Moore will get a chance in the UNCTAD limelight to make amends and show he’s no toady of Washington, or some Don Rickles in a diplomat’s suit.

It’s fitting that International Monetary Fund managing director Michel Camdessus, who last month surprisingly announced he’d be resigning early next year, will be there; the Asian financial crisis began in Thailand in 1997 and with it a series of IMF mistakes that Camdessus has more or less owned up to. It is mean to say it, but the unpopular IMF head may get a standing ovation just for leaving. For the host Thai government, the U.N. trade meeting offers an opportunity not only to serve as a neutral go-between, bringing East and West closer together, but also to ease Thailand’s international image as an IMF basket case.

Anyone else coming to the Thai dinner? Top UNCTAD and Thai officials are praying that the Clinton administration will show up with a high-level delegation and erase the impression that it doesn’t care about Third World concerns. Key issues include externally enforced national labor standards that raise export prices for developing economies to uncompetitive levels, and environmental standards that are unaffordable for such economies without further development.

And there are other globalization issues that just won’t go away, like the double-edged sword of free-flowing Western capital. “Tensions and imbalances of a systemic nature have arisen,” says one U.N. official. “Given the high degree of interdependence in the world economy, the risk of financial upheavals spreading across other countries and nations has greatly increased.”

So whoever shows up from America will get an earful. Indeed, the U.N. trade body is more open to the input of nongovernmental organizations and academic critics than was the WTO. It’s not set up as a rich man’s show, but it’s far better for the West to show up in the lion cub’s den and take its licks than to dodge the moment.

UNCTAD X is the perfect platform, not only because it’s not so Western a show, but also because Thailand offers a suitable host environment for what is at issue right now--certainly more than Seattle, where Third World delegates were absolutely flabbergasted and in some cases revolted to see Western protesters in the streets of a city that the fruits of globalization had virtually paved with gold.

Bangkok, which is nowhere near Seattle wealth-wise, is, of course, an important international city that’s hoping for U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to show in February. Many Asians would read her presence as proof of U.S. determination to put all the rancor behind. “I hope Western governments and leaders will not try to derail it or ‘bonsai’ it by refusing to send meaningful delegations or not sending them to Bangkok at all,” said a source close to the UNCTAD planning group.

Indeed, if a smashingly successful Bangkok confab, led by the Third World, were to dilute the sour taste of the smashingly unsuccessful Seattle disaster, led by the U.S., the result might turn out to be the best of all possible global worlds.