Fences and Windows (10 page)

In September 2001, the European Union President and Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt wrote an open letter to the “anti-globalization” movement. “Your concerns as anti-globalists are extremely valid,” he said in the letter, “but to find the right solutions to these valid questions we need more globalization, not less. That is the paradox of anti-globalization. Globalization can, after all, serve the cause of good just as much as it can serve the cause of evil. What we need is a global ethical approach to the environment, labour relations and monetary policy. In other words, the challenge that we are faced with today is not how to thwart globalization but instead how to give it an ethical foundation.” (To read the prime minister’s letter in full, see
www.premier.fgov.be/topics/press/e_press23.html
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After the letter sparked considerable controversy, Verhofstadt convened the “International Conference on Globalization” in Ghent, Belgium, and invited a series of speakers, including Naomi Klein, to respond to his letter. This is the speech (slightly expanded) delivered at the event
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Prime Minister Verhofstadt,

Thank you for your letter to “the anti-globalization protesters.” It is extremely significant that you have initiated such a public debate. I must admit that I have, over the past few years, gotten used to something else from world leaders: either being dismissed as part of a marginal travelling circus, or invited into closed-door negotiations that lack any accountability.

I had begun to think that marginalization and co-optation were the only two choices available to globalization critics. Oh, and criminalization. Make that three choices. Genuine debates on these issues—the open airing of different world views—are extremely rare amid the tear gas and posturing.

But perhaps there aren’t as many anti-globalization protesters here today as you would have liked, Mr. Prime Minister. I think that’s partly because many in the movement don’t see us here as their representatives. Many are tired of being spoken for and about. They are demanding a more direct form of political participation.

There is also much debate about what this movement stands for. For instance, I strongly object to your term “anti-globalization.” The way I see it, I am part of a network of movements that is fighting not against globalization but for deeper and more responsive democracies, locally, nationally and internationally. This network is as global as capitalism itself. And no, that’s not a “paradox,” as you claim.

It’s time to stop conflating basic principles of internationalism and interconnectedness—principles only Luddites and narrow nationalists oppose—with a specific economic
model that is very much in dispute. At issue is not the merits of internationalism. All the activists I know are fierce internationalists. Rather, we are challenging the internationalization of a single economic model: neo-liberalism.

If we are to have genuine debates like this one, what we are calling “globalization” must be recast not just as an inevitable stage in human evolution but as a profoundly political process: a set of deliberate, debatable and reversible choices about how to globalize.

Part of the confusion about what we mean when we use the term “globalization” stems from the fact that this particular economic model has a tendency to treat trade not as one part of internationalism but the overarching infrastructure of it. It gradually swallows everything else—culture, human rights, the environment, democracy itself—inside the perimeters of trade.

When we debate this model, we are not discussing the merits of trading goods and services across borders but the effects of profound corporatization around the world; the ways in which “the commons” is being transformed and rearranged—cut back, privatized, deregulated—all in the name of participating and competing in the global trading system. What is being designed at the WTO is not rules for trade but a template for one-size-fits-all government, a kind of “McRule.” And it’s this template that is under dispute.

Post September 11, Americans are getting an up-close look at these trade-offs as their hospitals, post offices, airports and water systems struggle to deal with a terrorist threat that preys on holes in the public sector. And as millions lose their jobs, many more are learning that the social safety net is no
longer there to catch them—another trade-off made in the name of trade. In Canada, we are currently making the ultimate trade-off: control over our borders in exchange for continued free trade with the U.S.

Hundreds of thousands are taking to the streets outside trade meetings not because they are against trade itself but because the real need for trade and investment is systematically being used to erode the very principles of self-government. “Govern our way or be left out completely” seems to be what passes for multilateralism in the neo-liberal age.

As we discover the vulnerabilities of this economic model, are we able to learn from our mistakes, to measure this model against its own stated objectives and ask if the tradeoffs have been worth it? It seems not. The response from politicians since September 11 has been more of the same: tax breaks for businesses and further privatized services, in the U.S. and around the world.

One of the top items on the agenda at next month’s [November 2001] World Trade Organization meeting is the General Agreement of Trade in Services, the side agreement that steadily pushes for more market access to public services, including health care, education and water. It also restricts the ability of governments to set and enforce health and environmental standards.

But countries need trade, you say, particularly poor countries, and to have trade there must be rules. Of course. But why not build an international architecture founded on principles of transparency, accountability and self-determination, one that frees people instead of liberating capital?

That would mean enforcing those basic human rights that make self-determination possible, like the right to form independent trade unions, through the International Labour Organization (ILO). It would mean eliminating the policies that systematically keep democracies in shackles: debt, structural adjustment programs, enforced privatization. It would also mean making good on long-delayed promises of land reform and reparations for slavery. International rules could be designed to make genuine democracy and empowerment more than empty phrases.

No doubt you agree with this sentiment, Mr. Prime Minister. In fact, reading your letter, I was struck by the similarity of our stated goals. You call for “a global ethical approach to the environment, labour relations and monetary policy.” I want those things too. So the real question is why are we here, then—what’s to debate?

Sadly, what’s to debate and what must be debated, or there will never be peace outside the summits, is the track record. Not words but deeds. Not good intentions—there’s never any shortage of these—but the grim and worsening facts: wage stagnation, dramatic increases in the disparity between rich and poor and the erosion of basic services around the world.

Despite the rhetoric of openness and freedom, we see new and higher fences constantly going up: around refugee centres in the Australian desert, around two million U.S. citizens in prisons, fences turning entire continents like North America and Europe into fortresses, while Africa is locked out. And, of course, the fences that are erected every time world leaders get together to have a meeting.

Globalization was supposed to be about global openness and integration, and yet our societies are steadily becoming more closed, more guarded, requiring ever more security and military might just to maintain the inequitable status quo.

Globalization was also supposed to be about a new system of equality among nations. We were coming together and agreeing to live by the same rules, or so it was said. But it is more evident than ever that the big players are still making the rules and enforcing them, often enforcing them on everyone but themselves—whether it’s agricultural and steel subsidies or import tariffs.

These inequalities and asymmetries, always bubbling under the surface, are now impossible to avoid. Many countries that have been through, or are going through, economic crisis— Russia, Thailand, Indonesia and Argentina, to name just a few—would have appreciated the extreme government intervention just launched to save the U.S. economy, instead of the austerity prescribed by the IMF. The governor of Virginia explained the U.S.’s tax cuts and subsidy measures by saying that America’s recession “is not a routine economic downturn.” But what makes an economic downturn extraordinary, in need of lavish economic stimulus, versus “routine,” in need of austerity and bitter medicine?

The most striking of these recent defiant displays of double standards relates to drug patents. According to World Trade Organization rules, countries are free to break drug patents on life-saving drugs when there is a national emergency. And yet when South Africa tried to do it for AIDS drugs, it faced a lawsuit from the major drug companies. When Brazil tried to do likewise, it was hauled in front
of WTO tribunals. Millions living with AIDS have essentially been told that their lives count less than drug patents, less than debt repayment, that there is simply no money to save them. The World Bank says it’s time to focus on prevention, not cures, which is tantamount to a death sentence for millions.

And yet earlier this month, Canada decided to override Bayer’s patent for Cipro, the favoured antibiotic to treat anthrax. We ordered a million tablets of a generic version. “These are extraordinary and unusual times,” a spokeswoman for Health Canada said. “Canadians expect and demand that their government will take all steps necessary to protect their health and safety.” It should be noted that Canada still hasn’t had a single diagnosed case of anthrax.

Although the decision was later reversed after Bayer lowered its prices, the same logic was at work: when it comes to rich countries, rules are for other people. Vulnerability to abstract economic theory has become the great class divider. The rich and powerful countries seem to be able to pick and choose when to follow the rules, but poor nations are told that economic orthodoxies must govern their every move, that they must throw themselves at the mercy of a free market ideology that even its architects disregard when it’s not convenient. Poor countries that put the needs of their citizens before the demands of foreign investors are vilifed as protectionists, even communists. And yet the protectionist policies that fuelled Britain’s industrial revolution were so rampant, that it was illegal to bury a corpse without first proving that the funeral shroud had been woven in a British mill.

What does this have to do with our debate? Too often, we pretend inequalities persist and deepen only because of national idiosyncrasies, or because we haven’t happened on the right set of rules, the perfect formula, as if these inequalities were little more than some cosmic oversight, or an irregularity in an otherwise functioning system. Always missing from this discussion is the issue of power. So many of the debates that we have about globalization theory are actually about power: who holds it, who is exercising it and who is disguising it, pretending it no longer matters.

But it’s no longer enough to say that justice and equality are around the corner and not offer anything but good intentions for collateral. We have just been through a period of tremendous economic prosperity, a time of expansiveness and plenty when core contradictions in this economic model should have been addressed. Now we are entering into a period of contraction, and greater sacrifices are being asked of those who have already sacrificed far too much.

Are we really supposed to be placated by the promise that our problems will be solved with more trade? Tougher protections on drug patents and more privatization? Today’s globalizers are like doctors with access to a single drug: whatever the ailment—poverty, migration, climate change, dictatorships, terrorism—the remedy is always more trade.

Mr. Prime Minister, we are not anti-globalization. In fact, we have been going through our own globalization process. And it is precisely because of globalization that the system is in crisis. We know too much. There is too much communication and mobility at the grassroots for the gap to hold. Not just the gap between rich and poor but also
between rhetoric and reality. Between what is said and what is done. Between the promise of globalization and its real effects. It’s time to close the gap.

In which access to safe food, clean water and affordable housing is fenced off— and anti-capitalism becomes the hot, new marketing pitch