Score One for Little Guys in Expanding Global Arena

For decades, world leaders in business and government have been constructing a new global economy behind closed doors and with little accountability to the public. However, a series of events--the defeat of fast-track trade negotiating authority, the efforts to cancel Third World debt and the current controversy over environmental and labor rights at the World Trade Organization--demonstrate the power to oppose the globalization juggernaut. Global elites must now listen to someone other than themselves.

No doubt that’s why President Clinton has called for global trade leaders assembling in Seattle next week to spend a day listening to their critics--tens of thousands of whom will be swarming in Seattle’s streets, meeting halls and church basements. As former Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade Jeffrey Garten recently warned, there is a very real possibility that the trade talks will be derailed by the “NGOs’ [nongovernmental organizations’] growing clout.” What is it that critics of globalization are actually saying?

Many workers and communities around the world are asking what happened to the promises of globalization. The global economy was supposed to improve living standards by lifting all the boats. Instead, it has been marked by a growing gap between rich and poor. Indeed, globalization has translated into a race to the bottom for many communities. As corporations move their operations around the world, workers, communities and entire countries are pitted against each other to see who will provide the lowest wages and the cheapest environmental and social costs.

Yet the critics are saying much more than just “no” to corporate-led globalization. Many are envisioning an alternative form of globalization. They have united disparate voices and concerns around one broad proposition: Global corporations, markets and capital must be sufficiently controlled to protect the well-being of the world’s people and environment.

Instead of presenting expanded trade as an end in itself, this alternative agenda starts from actual needs. Its goals include human rights for all people, environmental sustainability worldwide, democracy from the local to the global level, economic advancement for the most oppressed and exploited groups and protection against global cycles of boom and bust.

Instead of a few elites creating a “new global architecture,” they seek a democratic dialogue of people around the world, fostered by local forums, national governments and a series of U.N. conferences.

Many NGOs are calling for a global financial strategy that encourages domestic economic growth and development, not domestic austerity in the interest of export-led growth. The major industrial countries would coordinate their policies to promote environmentally sustainable global growth. It would establish a tax on foreign currency transactions to reduce the flow of destabilizing currency speculation--”hot money”--that contributed to the Asian crisis.

During the Asian crisis, many mainstream economists became convinced that the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other international financial institutions were as much part of the problem as part of the solution. Yet their operations remain largely unchanged. Critics argue that they should be required to reorient their programs from the imposition of austerity to support for labor rights, environmental protection, rising living standards and encouragement of small and medium-sized local enterprises.

A principal NGO demand has been that wealthy countries write off the debts of the most impoverished countries by the end of 2000. Some have also proposed a permanent insolvency mechanism for adjusting the debts of highly indebted nations.

Finally, NGOs have revived the idea of a binding code of conduct for transnational corporations to regulate the labor, environmental, investment and social behavior of global corporations. In sum, this alternative vision demands that the global economy must provide rules that redistribute wealth and power downward, allowing people in local communities more power to provide for their own economic and environmental security. And it must provide democratic accountability for current global institutions such as the WTO and any new ones that may be developed.

Such a program is not likely to be popular among the corporate and business leaders gathering in Seattle. However, if they are unwilling to reshape the global economy in a radically different direction, they may end up with a backlash against globalization that is far worse for their own interests.