CITIZEN ACTION
The beginning of the twenty-first century may be remembered by historians as an era of popular unrest: terrible acts of repression by local police trained by private companies with direct ties to various national security forces, massive demonstrations by a newly conceived “global civil society,” and the repeal of civil rights. In addition to this spectacular phase of resistance and containment, marked by national legal reforms and the strengthening of supranational institutional authority, historians may also record truly revolutionary developments in international diplomatic procedures that beckon toward democratic possibilities at the global level.
“We are writing the Constitution of a single global economy,” announced Renato Ruggiero, then head of the WTO, in an October 1996 speech to the UN Conference on Trade and Development. Afterward he denied saying so. In Seattle three years later, it became obvious why he’d tried to repress the comment: the WTO would be the last place in the world you’d want to plant your flag claiming global governance—that is, if you wanted your plan to work.
The so-called antiglobalization campaign certainly preceded the 1999 Battle of Seattle, growing steadily stronger over the past two or three decades in opposition to the social injustices and environmental policies of international economic institutions. The removal of dictators by popular forces in a dozen or more countries, human-rights campaigns against debt, and World Bank projects such as the Narmada River Dams characterized the early period of today’s movement. So, too, resistance to U.S. military invasions in Asia and Latin America during the 1980s contributed to the development of transnational citizen action. When activists plunged through the Berlin Wall, relations opened not just between Eastern and Western Europe but also among civil societies worldwide.
During the NAFTA campaign in the early nineties, tri-national gatherings of autoworkers, clothing workers, communications workers, dairy farmers, and corn producers were similarly galvanized, brainstorming sectoral as well as continental strategies to defend wages, the right to organize, rural communities, and fair trade. Along with environmentalists and other civil society groups, they focused on NAFTA’s likely impacts on employment, housing, pollution, and health in the U.S.-Mexican border region.
Regional trade negotiations between the United States and Asia-Pacific countries and between Europe and its former colonies in the African, Caribbean, and Pacific regions geared up simultaneously, and by the mid-1990s, all these networks began to focus on the WTO.
Farmer, labor, environmental, and consumer groups actively fought the Uruguay round of trade negotiations with the image of “GATT-zilla” overwhelming the towers of national democracy. Labor and environmental issues are probably the hottest debates, uniting the “Turtles-to-Teamsters” coalition at the Third WTO Ministerial meeting in Seattle and embracing the challenge of investors’ rights—the corporate attack on public sector services as well as the environment.
Enraged by the use of tear–gas—ostensibly in response to a small group of vandals—and the otherwise exceptionally brutal treatment by the Seattle police of all fifty thousand demonstrators assembled there, the new generation of youthful antiglobalization protesters next gathered in Washington, D.C. in April 2000, where the World Bank and IMF were meeting. From there they went to Prague for a meeting of the G-8. Also that year, the nominating conventions of both the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States were plagued with protests, as were the conventions of several industry groups, particularly the biotechnology industry.
Then on to Quebec City in April 2001, where thirty-four out of thirty-five governments in the Western hemisphere (all except Cuba) began negotiating the FTAA. Again, some fifty thousand activists, led by trade unions with lots of support from all the other sectors of civil society, protested the United States’ neocolonial corporate agenda for the hemisphere, and, again, the police reacted with extreme measures including tear gas, fire hoses, arrests, and beatings. In June 2001, protesters at a G-8 meeting in Genoa were attacked by the Italian police with rubber bullets and one was killed.
Later in 2001, the Fourth WTO Ministerial was held in Doha, Qatar, in the United Arab Emirates, a place so remote and controlled that officials would not have to deal with huge angry crowds. While smaller in numbers, representatives of the major public interest groups—labor, environmental, farmer, consumer, and so on—were joined by AIDS activists to demand the WTO affirm the intellectual property rules permitting countries to manufacture or import generic drugs instead of paying extra for the patented name brands. Also in Doha, farm organizations brought a proposal that could lead to waivers of some of the worst WTO rules hurting small-scale farms and rural communities, and it was adopted by developing country governments.
While these global campaigns languish in WTO negotiations on implementation, they are backed by national campaigns to reinforce or attack each government’s position in the international negotiations. With strong national capacity, regional and international strategies become more feasible. Increasingly, these well-organized national efforts are seen as the key to global achievements. A few recent accomplishments at the national level promise much wider implications internationally:
Advocates for affordable AIDS drugs in South Africa defeated a patent-infringement lawsuit filed by nineteen pharmaceutical companies. Buoyed by this victory, Brazilians then beat back a U.S. threat to use the WTO’s dispute system to challenge their national health policy providing free and low-cost AIDS drugs to people in need, regardless of the patents.
Farmers in India organized a “Seed Satyagraha”—a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience modeled on Ghandi’s “Salt Satyagraha” of 1930 that led to India’s independence from the British—declaring their noncooperation with proposed new patent laws covering seeds and other genetic resources.
In Ethiopia, model legislation was drafted that is now being promoted throughout the continent by the African Union (formerly the Organization for African Unity) to protect the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities to their knowledge and natural resources under national laws.
Citizens in Cochabamba, Bolivia, successfully defeated the privatization of their water supply by the Bechtel Corporation. Similar campaigns to defend community access and public control of freshwater are under way in Ghana, Pakistan, Canada, and many other countries.
But this describes only the current generation of international campaigners. So, too, the anticolonialist era marked by new democracies emerging from Spanish, British, French, and Portuguese domination should be considered part of this history. And certainly the anti-slavery and women’s suffrage movements presaged those of today. In fact, anti-imperialism dates back at least to the Greek and Roman empires.
The 1999 Battle of Seattle marks an exceptional moment in history, however, for numerous reasons. For one thing, the protesters were victorious: the WTO meeting ended abruptly and in absolute official failure. For another, and probably most important, it was the Caribbean, African, Asian, and some Latin American governments that decisively pulled the plug, opening a new era of solidarity and collaboration between global civil society and these governments. Three, the Seattle police made a huge mistake in allowing the violence to escalate. As a result, virtually every U.S. citizen across the country was shocked by the revealing images on their television screens. And four, the protesters were diverse—trade unionists, environmental and consumer advocates, indigenous peoples, farmers, antiwar advocates, and ordinary concerned citizens were all in attendance—and included large numbers of informed and organized young people, whose commitment to building broader awareness of the problems of globalization persists.
The unity behind this diversity of interests is stunning. Despite their differing motivations, all of these constituencies feel the impact of decisions being made at the international level, decisions in which they, the public, have no say. Democracy is at stake. Now, the old slogan “No justice, no peace!” again throbs in the air as police, armed in full battle gear, attack protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets in attempt to quell the crowds.
Somehow, it is encouraging to realize that the brutal upping of the stakes by government security forces is in response to significant successes by civil society. The so-called antiglobalization movement—which despite the rubric is not antiglobalization at all, but determinedly pro-global justice—collectively negotiated the terrain of international diplomacy to win real victories:
In 1994, a small number of activists formed a coalition, convinced a few key governments, lobbied strategically, and just three years later a treaty banning land mines was born. The rapidity of this negotiation alone is astounding, but so is the unique way in which the nongovernmental International Campaign to Ban Landmines initiated the project and carried it through—without the support of the world’s most powerful governments.
The Jubilee 2000 network, building upon decades of work by others, convinced the IMF, World Bank, and a number of governments to cancel nearly $100 billion of the debt owed by heavily indebted poor countries. The network continues to demand greater cancellation, challenging the very legitimacy of the loans’ terms in the first place.
In 2001, nongovernmental groups formed an alliance with a team of legal experts to create the Model Convention on Arms Brokering, a document aimed at regulating the illicit global trade in small weapons.
It was the proposals of nongovernmental organizations that in July 2002, despite U.S. opposition, broke through the intransigence of governments to at last establish the International Criminal Court—a proposal that had languished in diplomatic limbo since the Holocaust.
Each of these success stories is rooted in the shared commitment of citizens from many countries to work together to build a coalition strong enough to persuade their governments to take official action. Each victory has depended upon an international group of well-connected activists who are also expert in their fields and sophisticated enough to weld the popular thirst for justice with several governments’ strategic interests. But this sophistication is not cynical or self-promoting; it is instead derived from experience, commitment, and a sharp sense of the global public interest.
A decade ago, when the UN celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its first environmental negotiations in Stockholm, the Earth Summit of 1992 became its largest gathering of civil society groups ever. Some fifty thousand activists representing organizations from all over the world came together in Rio de Janeiro to show their support for new international environmental laws. Thousands of these groups spent the week on Rio’s Flamingo Beach drafting forty-two “treaties” of their own—a series of documents precisely defining their commitment to work with their own communities and national governments, as well as globally, to reorganize values, priorities, and institutions toward achieving sustainable development. The prescriptions were distinct for each of the forty-two sectors—ranging from water to land; from agriculture to labor; from business, to trade, to finance; and so on. And they were quite different from the official treaties that guide international environmental policy to this day, those simultaneously produced across town by governments cloistered behind security gates guarded by Brazilian soldiers and Rio de Janeiro’s well-armed police. But among all these civil society treaties, virtually all shared a commitment to participatory democracy and the engagement of local communities.
Then, ten years later, twice as many—some hundred thousand activists—gathered in Porto Alegre, Brazil, for the annual pro-global justice celebration at the World Social Forum. It is always remarkable to discover at such gatherings the degree to which common values and visions of the future are shared by ordinary people from everywhere, no matter their country or culture, whether or not they have ever participated in an international political event before.
Nonetheless, reorganizing the way in which the world works so as to achieve global health and justice is a massive project that will require more than big demonstrations or new international treaties. To seriously address global warming, for example, will require not only restructuring of the powerful transnational energy sector. It will also require changes in the behavior of every one of us on a day-to-day basis. It is not enough for us to recycle in our homes while driving gas-guzzlers, nor would it be enough if every citizen bought the most fuel-efficient automobile in the marketplace. If and when a future U.S. government signs and ratifies the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, it will still take the combined efforts of citizen action groups across the country—and in other countries—to monitor local industries and report noncompliance; to demand the procurement of alternative-fuel vehicles for their local and state and national governments’ automobile fleets; to build new housing projects powered by wind and geothermal heat exchangers; to work with farm groups and support ethanol and other biofuels; to buy food from nearby farming communities; and to coordinate other forms of rural-urban exchange.
Global policies can be a stimulus for reform, but any global solution requires widespread local support and most require local implementation. The role of individuals in defining a local vision, organizing committees to generate public support, building the political capacity to engage local governments, and ensuring equitable tax and financing mechanisms to pay for implementation is key. So, too, is restructuring the economy so that local consumers procure from local producers via local distributors, bypassing the corporate chains.
Linking such local initiatives—on both the policy level and the practical level—across the country and throughout the planet is how pro-global justice activists imagine achieving the dream of international economic and political democracy.
Here in the United States, we tend to associate the term “democracy” with elections. To be sure, the right to participate in the selection of our political leaders is fundamental, but so are freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and freedom of association. These freedoms are what makes for a healthy civil society—a culture bubbling with neighborhood associations and parent-teacher associations, labor unions and trade associations, cultural groups, recreation clubs, consumer and environmentalist lobbies, teen clubs and ethnic dancing clubs, chapters of the NAACP and the Urban League, Latinos Unidos, Asian business associations, and every other voluntary grouping you might imagine. The flourishing of such citizens’ organizations is probably the real hallmark of a democracy—even where elections can be rigged and stolen.
The peaceful resolution of disputes between free and independent individuals or between different associations of people is also fundamental. And, as is true of the formation of civil society groups, this process, too, is easier within a close-knit community than across international borders. It’s hard enough for neighbors arguing over a backyard fence to settle their gripes, let alone 5 billion people speaking thousands of different languages on seven continents. So the bigger the universe of stakeholders, the greater the dependence upon representative leadership instead of direct participation—and the greater the likelihood of exclusion from decision-making processes.
At the most local level, say, a town meeting to decide whether to build a new school, democracy can work pretty well. Word gets around, people discuss it for weeks at the coffee shop and grocery store, meetings get organized, and people speak up. Passions can grow strong on multiple sides of an issue, but eventually it seems clear that a majority favors one decision or another.
At a more regional level, perhaps the county or state or province will have to decide whether to help finance new schools. Maybe a couple people from the first town car-pool to the big city to visit with their elected officials, bring along a petition signed by hundreds of community members in favor of schools, and even testify in front of some microphones. Probably the decision won’t get made that same day; more likely, a vote will be held much later forcing choices within a bigger budget package—schools or sewers? Or maybe it’s a matter of a new highway versus subsidies for a shopping center. Either way, the townspeople will read about it in the newspapers.
At the national level, a newly elected president (or prime minister) might try to keep a campaign promise to build new schools and in turn get a lot of positive media coverage about it—at first. Over many months, other issues, maybe taxes or a war, take over. The national Congress(or Parliament), more accessible to their constituents than the president, remind the president and each other from time to time that most voters back home want their kids to get a good education, yet they know others care more about lower taxes. Most of their constituency never visits their offices nor even writes a letter, but they get plenty of visits from lobbyists promoting highways and subsidies for business. In fact, the lobbyists even give them money (legally!) to promote their interests. At the end of the year, the congressional representatives go home to campaign for their reelection and explain that they tried to support schools but they were outvoted. The president, meanwhile, collects millions of dollars in campaign contributions from every conceivable lobbyist and promises to build new schools next year.
At the global level—wow! Typically, the president (or some other head of state) appoints prominent, experienced international experts—say, a former military officer, an executive from industry, a retired lobbyist, or maybe a former banker—to serve the nation in various offices handling foreign affairs. The citizens probably have never heard of these people until (and if) their appointments are announced in the newspapers. And all too often, the public is unaware of the international policies they will be negotiating on their behalf. No hearings are held, no ballot initiatives are offered, no plebiscite is undertaken, and there is virtually no way to engage in the national decision-making process that directs foreign policy.
But there could be. It could become law that every international negotiation becomes the subject of a national policy debate; the form of this debate could well be structured to ensure participation at the local level. Here in the United States, we could require the broadcasting networks to air the full range of opinions in exchange for their access to the nation’s airwaves. We could establish a role for local, state, and even regional organizations in formulating a national mandate. For example, the National Association of Mayors, the fifty states’ legislative assemblies, the states’ attorneys general, and the National Governors Association might all be asked their views and perhaps even be entitled to some percentage in the ultimate decision-making formula, alongside Congress and the White House.
But does greater democracy necessarily bring about a more just society? Certainly there are many cases in which popular views are not just—racism comes to mind. And by definition, a minority group can be excluded from a democratic majority. On the other hand, many civil wars are being fought today to overcome political domination by a powerful minority. In the parliamentary system practiced in Europe and many other countries around the world, politicians wishing to govern must develop working coalitions amongst minor political parties, each with diverse priorities, sufficient to attain a democratic majority; and then leaders must sustain the coalition to stay in power. In the United States’ electoral system, however, the two dominant parties have a monopoly on power—a monopoly so unpopular that less than 40 percent of eligible voters even bothered to vote in the presidential election taken by George W. Bush amid charges of electoral fraud. And together, the two parties have established procedures making it extremely difficult for any third party to gain the foothold necessary to challenge their control.
Ralph Nader, the anticorporate, pro-global justice consumer advocate who scraped together 5 percent of the national vote in the presidential election of 2000, thus attaining official third-party status for the U.S. Green Party, likens the Democrats and Republicans to “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” Of course, there are many votes in our Congress reflecting fierce bipartisan differences, but most reform proposals merely skim the surface of an issue, leaving corporate power unscathed. And ironically, the fiercest of differences result in watered-down compromise or even stalemates! The debate over how to provide affordable drugs in the 2002 congressional session resulted in no new legislation at all, because the two parties would not find a compromise between their proposals, both of which would have subsidized the pharmaceutical companies with taxpayer dollars, albeit to varying degrees.
A more democratic approach to international policy making in the United States necessitates the creation of political space for new and alternative views to be aired as broadly as those of the major parties and their candidates, and a balance between corporate influence and the public interest. We could require that industry executives retire for a period of time before they can represent the public in governmental matters. Likewise, there could be a time lapse required before high-level politicians and civil servants may accept executive jobs within those industries they may have supported or regulated. And it could be made absolutely illegal to accept campaign contributions, gifts, or other veiled bribery from corporations.
We might want to democratize how decisions get made in the pursuit of scientific knowledge too. Indeed, the privatization of science, like the privatization of other resources, represents a critical threat to human and ecological health, public welfare, and justice.
As research and development has become increasingly expensive, our government and the public universities have found it easier to raise money from the private sector than from taxpayers. On many campuses, new labs with the best equipment and bright new architecture can only be built with the support of major companies—and the knowledge gleaned benefits their bottom lines, particularly when they can control the commercial application of the new knowledge with a patent. Even publicly funded research and the associated patent rights held by a public university are often licensed to private developers for commercial application. Most ironic, the private sector gives back, in the form of grants to universities, just a fraction of what it is exempted in taxes.
As a result, more and more research is skewed away from the public interest, with gigantic investments, for example, going into genetically engineered seeds that cannot reproduce (the infamous “Terminator” technology) or crops resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup Ready herbicide, instead of the treatment of malaria or other tropical diseases that kill hundreds of millions of the world’s poor every year. Furthermore, in the drive to be first in line at the patent office, researchers now tend to horde their findings, often as a condition of their employment, slowing down the ultimate discovery of a new vaccine or some other knowledge valuable to all humanity.
While research is increasingly biased toward generating returns for commercial interests, a great deal of valuable traditional knowledge is also being lost to humanity. The expertise of farmers managing the interactions of specific varieties of seed with specific soil conditions amid specific insect and bacteriological populations and specific climatalogical circumstances cannot be exchanged for a laboratory-tested commercial generally distributed variety. Nor can the knowledge of traditional healers and shamans be replicated by a doctor with a pill, despite the fact that most of the active ingredients in pharmaceutical drugs derive from a plant or other biological resource.
“Technology transfer” has been deemed one of the goals of international cooperation for development, yet it is mostly perceived as a matter of transferring high-tech types of knowledge from the industrialized world to the less developed countries. On the one hand, this is a shortsighted approach that could be greatly enhanced by pursuing a two-way exchange of traditional know-how and innovative practices. On the other hand, there’s a need to examine just how the encroachment of high-tech science may erode alternative knowledge systems. When technology transfer is achieved by force, rather than as a result of mutual understanding and a shared research agenda, the results can be not merely antidemocratic but socially and ecologically destructive.
Just such a forceful imposition of technology is promoted by the WTO agreement through obligatory patent protection measures in its TRIPS agreement. When indigenous peoples and traditional communities objected, citing the Convention on Biological Diversity’s mandate to “respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities in biodiversity conservation,” a major diplomatic debate ensued to reconcile these two international treaties. At the center of the debate is a UN agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), whose charge has shifted as a result of the conflict. Formerly, it served as an archive or clearinghouse for all the intellectual property agreements worldwide; since the TRIPS agreement was enacted, WIPO has moved into providing “technical assistance” to assist governments in their implementation of the TRIPS rules. Indigenous peoples and farming groups have criticized WIPO for this shift, while they simultaneously seek to limit and roll back the TRIPS agreement itself, or at least achieve acknowledgment within the WTO that the Convention on Biological Diversity must also be implemented.
Within the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, too, diplomats are meeting with farm groups to settle the “apparent conflicts” identified by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights between TRIPS and farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange, and sell farm-saved seed. A new international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture has defined farmers’ rights as a matter of national responsibility, while creating a multilateral system to ensure that the exchange of seeds and other reproductive material still in the public domain will not be limited by patents and other intellectual property rights.
In many communities, especially where the erosion of knowledge and the environment is problematic, participatory projects to engage neighbors in the protection of seeds, plants, and ecosystems as well as agricultural and medicinal know-how have been launched. Less common, but equally needed, are projects to define, finance, and pursue an agenda for research and development based upon the community’s needs and resources. There is a grave need for public support and public control of our government’s research-and-development agenda. Indeed, private control of any public resource is inherently antidemocratic and unjust. Yet the presence of injustice is not only a moral issue. It is of serious consequence for the orderly running of a nation: injustice breeds insecurity, insecurity breeds violence.