Thousands of protesters converged on Quebec City, Canada, during the Apr. 20-22 Summit of the Americas. They oppose the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a NAFTA-style trade agreement that heads of state touted at the summit. Though dismissed by free trade politicians and pundits as misguided, the young people in the streets are not against globalization. Rather they are opposed to the particular type of globalization advanced by agreements like the FTAA. And they have allies in the Catholic community. The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops greeted the Summit with a paper highly skeptical about FTAA, since NAFTA has generated economic growth without sharing it with the poor. From the developing world, Fr. Tissa Balasuriya of Sri Lanka has published his own social analysis, entitled “The Myth of the Free Market: Internal Contradictions of Free Market Capitalism.”
At all three CTA conferences this year, our analyst of globalization will be Kevin Danaher, a co-founder of the human rights organization, Global Exchange, and the author of “Democratizing the Global Economy: The Battle Against the World Bank and the IMF.” Here is an extended excerpt of his recent essay on globalization and the Quebec City protests.
Policy makers and opinion shapers have spent much of the last decade peddling the notion that globalization is inevitable. We’re told that new communication technologies and the end of the Cold War’s ideological tensions have ushered in an unstoppable era of so-called “free trade.” This oddly determinist attitude — once upon a time only Marxists believed in an inevitable end to history — obscures the fact that globalization as it is currently practiced is the design of only a small number of people. Until recently, globalization has been driven by a business elite interested in creating new global relations as a way to increase profits. But another kind of globalization — grassroots globalization — is now winning supporters around the world. The question confronting us, the question the protesters in the streets are trying to raise, is which kind of globalization we want: elite globalization or grassroots globalization?
In late January, representatives of non-governmental organizations from around the globe gathered in Porto Alegre, Brazil for the first annual World Social Forum, designed as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum, a meeting for corporate executives and politicians held every year in Davos, Switzerland. In Porto Alegre thousands of human rights activists, trade unionists, farmers, indigenous leaders, and environmentalists outlined their vision of a globalization based not on business concerns and commercial interests — as globalization has been conceived of until now — but based on principles of social justice and environmental sustainability.
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| Kevin Dahner makes the case for grassroots globalization. |
Porto Alegre was not the beginning of the grassroots globalization. Rather it represented only the formal convergence of a movement that has been gathering steam informally for a decade. While attention to globalization in recent years has focused almost exclusively on trade and finance, the grassroots variety of globalization has been growing apace. In the last decade the world’s trade union movement has become increasingly globalized as unions from different countries work together in cross-border organizing drives. The AFL-CIO’s “solidarity centers” in nations such as Cambodia, Indonesia and Mexico show that the U.S. union movement, once so insular, has recognized that its own struggle must be linked to workers’ struggles in other countries. At the same time, environmental groups are linking directly with indigenous groups in the Global South threatened by logging, oil exploration, and dam construction. Social justice and human rights groups are promoting fair trade crafts and commodities that support small, locally owned enterprises and family farmers in the developing world.
The recent protests besieging the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have raised two central questions. Who is sitting at the table when trade, investment and development decisions are made? And what are the values guiding the decision-making process? The demonstrators argue that if the decision-makers look like a monocrop — mostly wealthy, mostly male, mostly from the world’s rich countries — then the policies they craft will not meet the needs of the vast majority of the world’s population. Grassroots globalization, on the other hand, offers a decision-making process that is firmly grounded in transparency, participation, democracy, and diversity. Only a commitment to those values will ensure a globalized economy that is not a predatory economy.