ENVIRONMENTALISM & THE
TRAJECTORY OF
THE ANTI-CORPORATE
GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT[1]
Department of Rural Sociology
and Institute for Environmental Studies
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Department of Sociology
St. Lawrence University
A revised version is in C. Chase-Dunn and
Salvatore Babones, Global Social Change,
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
INTRODUCTION:
A GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT
A distinctive aspect of 21st century globalization is that
many of its key features are challenged directly by a global-scale social
movement, the anti-corporate globalization movement (ACGM). Many social
scientists believe that in the current era of globalization social movements
must necessarily be global in their vision and scope if they are to be
successful (O’Brien et al., 2000). The
power of transnational actors, particularly transnational corporations and
trade liberalization institutions such as the World Trade Organization,
regional trade institutions, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund,
and the G8, implies that the only possibility of effective challenge to these
actors must involve organizations and movements that can counter these
globalizing institutions at the scale at which they operate. Indeed, many argue that the ACGM is the most
significant left movement of the new Millennium (Brecher et al., 2000).
In this chapter we begin by discussing the major structural
characteristics of the ACGM, which we define in a broad manner to include not
only the participants in protests and in the confederations that have
coordinated these protests, but also other non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) and groupings that consider themselves to be part of the movement. We then comment on the recent history of the
ACGM. We focus on two particular aspects of this movement; the relationships
between the ACGM and another important global social movement, the
international environmental movement, and the effects that the ACGM might have
on various actors and institutions of globalization, and on particular
nation-states. In this regard we suggest
that despite the potential of this movement to produce important social
changes, the movement also faces a number of major crossroads in terms of
ideology, discursive approach, and strategy.
One implication of our analysis is the hypothesis that while the current
vitality of the ACGM can be gauged by its having adopted an increasingly
coherent and radical ideological stance in which international—especially
North-South—economic inequality are targeted, to be successful the movement
will need to more fully integrate social-justice goals with environmental
protection and sustainability agendas.
THE
STRUCTURE OF THE MOVEMENT
The ACGM draws many of its adherents from the groups and
networks associated with other social movements. The ACGM is a broad coalition
of smaller (anti-sweatshop, debt relief, fair trade, etc.) and larger (human
rights, organized labor, international hunger, etc.) movements and draws
participants and participating organizations from a diversity of ideologies
(autonomists, socialists, liberal reformists, etc.). What gives cohesion to
this “movement of movements” is a common critique of neo-liberal economic policies,
the anti-democratic nature of international financial institutions (the World
Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank in particular)
and the increasing power of transnational corporations. Participants and
coalition member organizations coordinate activities primarily through
electronic media, allowing for intercontinental simultaneous discussion and
mobilization. The movement is therefore able to organize globally and maintain
communication between very different groups in very different locations. The
ACGM organizational structure is based on a commitment to non-hierarchical and
consensus based decision-making. Such an organizational structure ensures that
all groups are able to participate in decision-making, thus preventing schisms
from developing into obstacles to coordinated action.
There are a number of structural bases for the rise of the
ACGM other than the premise that the growing power of transnational actors
“requires” global-scale movements to successfully contest new power
relations. First, while there is a
general consensus among economists and state officials in most countries of the
North that there are mutual gains to be realized through “freer” world trade,
many citizens in the North and South argue that such gains accrue only to
domestic and transnational elites.
Increased dependence on trade can create social benefits, but it also
creates social losses such as an increased risk of unemployment, and the loss
of worker protections. Second, trade liberalization institutions such as the
World Trade Organization (WTO) and the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) have essentially been established to permit offshore veto of
“protectionist” environmental regulations and the traditional measures for
enhancing social security such as the welfare state “safety net.”
Anti-corporate globalization discourses stress the role of the WTO, World Bank,
the International Monetary Fund (IMF), NAFTA, the emerging Free Trade Area of
the Americas (FTAA) and the G8 as enforcers of the rules of globalization which
privilege transnational corporations.
Movement discourses refer to the prerogative of offshore corporate veto
as creating a powerful “race to the bottom” as nation-states face competitive
pressures to “water down” regulations in order to remain attractive for capital
investment. Third, there is also a
sizable share of cultural revulsion against the homogenization,
“McDonaldization” (Ritzer, 1993), and Americanization, which are associated
with globalization. The rise of the ACGM
is also related to the advent of a unipolar, U.S.-dominated world order
following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the general demise of state
socialism, increased U.S. military dominance, and the relative absence of a
countervailing world power.
While there is much debate about the
socioeconomic and cultural impacts of globalization, there is a surprising
consensus on the growing role of global anti-systemic social movements such as
the ACGM. ACGM proponents and many social scientists see much promise in the
development of “global civil society.”
In addition to seeing that global social movements are intrinsically better
positioned than national movements to advance causes such as environmental
protection and protective labor legislation, movement proponents and a number
of social-scientific analysts agree that global social movements (GSMs) have
been adept at creating coalitional movement structures across (and within)
national borders and new discourses. Generally, these observers of GSMs view
these movements as a logical response to global processes such as the
establishment of new regional and international “free trade” agreements, the
expansion of markets, the establishment of international governmental
organizations and regimes, and the growing role of transnational
corporations. GSM theorists (e.g.,
O’Brien et al., 2001; Cohen and Rai, 2000) believe these movements can be quite
influential because dominant global actors can be vulnerable to negative public
opinion and to the scrutiny by governments that is generated by public
sentiments. Some observers of GSMs have tended to see the global environmental
movement as the key umbrella movement, while the more recent tendency has been
to assign that role to the ACGM.
Despite its coalitional character, the ACGM has an identity
and organizational structure that serves to distinguish it from other GSMs,
such as the hierarchically organized environmental GSM which has its own
distinct identity rooted primarily in the international conservation wing of
environmentalism. We focus on the interrelations of these two GSMs by noting
that over the past decade there have been trends toward both the
“environmentalization” and “de-environmentalization” of the ACGM. We suggest
that the role that environmental claims and strategies play in the ACGM’s
“repertoire of contention,” (Tilly, 1978; 1986) will be critical to the
movement’s future.
There are several focal structural
properties of the ACGM. First, while
those in the North often presume that the essence of the movement is that of
periodic protests against institutions and corporations in the North, the
majority of protests have actually occurred in the global South. Protests
against the Bretton Woods institutions, and IMF structural adjustment policies
in particular, have been a regular feature of political conflict in the global
South for well over 25 years (Walton and Seddon, 1994).[2]
While we acknowledge this central point (see Podobnik, 2001, for an impressive
elaboration), anti-corporate globalization protests in the South are most often
confined (by intention or practicalities) to getting the attention of heads of
state and finance ministers in the South.
The ACGM in the North is in some respects the more strategically
significant segment of the movement, in that it has the geographical capacity
to attack transnational institutions more directly as well as to gain the
attention of the heads of state of the countries which have the dominant voices
within these institutions.
The vitality of the ACGM is largely due to the actions of
the protesters who now contest the annual meetings of essentially all
globalization institutions. But another
critically important component of the movement is its active NGO supporters and
affiliates. The ACGMs’ cast of NGO
supporters and affiliates encompasses the “Seattle coalition,” the
unprecedentedly broad coalition that formed during the lead-up to and in wake
of the protest at the 1999 Third WTO Ministerial meeting in Seattle. The ACGM
is now endorsed by a vast array of NGOs and related movements, and these groups
are integral components of the ACGM. Much of the ACGM’s education, publication
and public outreach work is undertaken by these NGOs. Such NGOs also generate much of the
movement’s policy analyses and proposals.[3]
Third, the
movement is intentionally acephalous. Delegates
from various “affinity groups” representing the NGOs, movements, and less
formally organized groups of participants form “spokes councils” where
strategic and tactical decisions are made, allowing the movement to operate
without formal leaders or a clear organizational hierarchy. Much of the protest organizing
occurs through the Internet without the need for a central source of command,
greatly reducing resource and bureaucratic needs. Months prior to a protest,
groups form to organize teach-ins throughout the host country. The “spokes
council” structure and Internet modality of protest organization has facilitated
the accommodation of considerable diversity within the movement. Such models minimize infighting, but also
require acceptance of an inability to generate strong ideological and tactical
consensus.
Finally, the ACGM finds itself being defined both
advantageously and destructively by the mainstream press, which is itself often
the focus of negative movement attention as a corporate vehicle for the
dissemination of neoliberal ideology. But since the Seattle protest, which
received some positive press coverage for having raised issues of concern to
many citizens, the mainstream media’s treatment of the ACGM has tended to cast
the movement in a distinctly unfavorable light—of angry, antagonistic,
protesters; of youthful participants who would rather demonstrate than
negotiate; of the presence of violent anarchist groups; portrayal of the
movement’s message as incoherent, and so on. Negative and poorly informed mainstream press
coverage has led the movement to facilitate the expansion of more sophisticated
independent media, primarily through “Indymedia “ web sites.
THE
EMERGENCE OF THE “SEATTLE COALITION”
In the years following the unsuccessful mobilization against
NAFTA, there were a number of critical events and phenomena that produced a
U.S. expansion of the ACGM coalition, leading up to the “Battle in
Seattle”. First, in the early 1990s
Mexico filed a complaint against the U.S. to the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (GATT). This resulted in a
bilateral negotiation that led to removing the component of the Marine Mammal
Protection Act that prohibited import of tuna produced under conditions that
result in widespread death of dolphins.
Then, in one of the first rulings of the WTO, it acted in support of a
complaint by Venezuela and Brazil alleging that the U.S.’ ban on imported
gasoline that exacerbates air quality problems was an impermissible trade
barrier. A similar ruling, against a
1998 U.S. law banning shrimp imports from countries whose shrimp harvesting
methods kill sea turtles was handed down by the WTO in 1999. Also in late 1999, the Canadian Methanex
Corporation filed suit under NAFTA against the State of California for its
proposed ban on the gasoline additive MTBE.
The impact of these anti-environmental rulings cannot be
overestimated. Until these trade
liberalization rulings and suits, groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, the
National Wildlife Federation, Audubon, the Natural Resources Defense Council,
and the Environmental Defense Fund had supported NAFTA and WTO, while the
Defenders of Wildlife and the Nature Conservancy had been at least nominally
neutral toward trade liberalization. The WTO rulings shook most mainstream
environmental groups to their foundations. It became apparent to the large
mainstream environmental organizations that a domestic environmental regulation
may not be very effective unless its scope can be extended to pertain to the
conditions of production of imported goods.
Further, it became apparent that the WTO might give foreign governments
and corporations leverage to overturn domestic environmental legislation. As the end of the 1990s approached, it was
becoming apparent to U.S. environmental organizations that the environmental
side-agreements to NAFTA were largely ineffective. As a result of these
revelations there was a fundamental shift in mainstream environmental NGO
opinion about globalization in general and trade liberalization in
particular. By early 1999 these moderate
environmental groups had joined Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, and
Greenpeace in taking a generally negative stance toward corporate
globalization.[4]
The willingness to initiate participation in ACGM actions, most notably the
Seattle protests of November 1999, is a clear indicator of the political shift.
Second, the Kathie Lee Gifford
revelation on live television in 1996 that her clothing line was manufactured
by child labor in Honduran sweatshops brought the labor abuses of globalized
production to U.S. public attention. That same year, the AFL-CIO, under the
leadership of John Sweeney, initiated the Union Summer campaign to bring
student activists into the labor movement (Clawson, 2003). Union Summer,
combined with the efforts of Jobs With Justice (a labor rights NGO) and UNITE!
(the garment workers union) generated important revelations about the social
and environmental conditions of production of Nike, and other apparel
manufacturers. These organizing and consciousness-raising efforts were
manifested in an aggressive and highly visible student/labor anti-sweatshop
movement. The press attention brought to
Nike in particular dramatized the social impacts, in both North and South, of
footloose corporate capital shifting its production facilities to low-wage
countries in the South.
Finally, the explosion of public sentiments against
genetically modified (GM) foods in Europe and East Asia created a crisis of
legitimacy for the WTO. WTO rules
suggested that the European Union (EU) would have little legal basis for
excluding GM agricultural input products and GM foods, while European public
sentiments against these technologies were so strong that the EU was forced to
act in conflict with WTO rules and with U.S. corporate and federal government
views. The GM controversy galvanized the
anti-WTO sentiments of many farm groups, such as the U.S.’ National Farmers
Union and sustainable agriculture organizations. These precipitating events and processes
combined to help forge the 1999 Seattle coalition.
The Seattle coalition was impressive in its breadth. The coalition included anti-corporate globalization groups, organized labor, environmental organizations, religious organizations, farm, sustainable agriculture, anti-GM, consumer, development /world hunger, and animal rights groups, and the governments (as well as NGOs and activists) of many countries of the South. Perhaps the most telling symbol of the Seattle coalition was the poster that read, “Teamsters and Turtles—Together At Last.”[5] What made the Seattle WTO protest so path breaking was the apparent environmentalization of the ACGM, and the prominent role played by mainstream environmental groups in a coalition involving anti-WTO and labor activists. The strong environmental overtone of the Seattle protest was among the major factors that conferred on it a certain legitimacy among the U.S. public and contributed to the partially favorable press coverage of the protest. Since Seattle, there has been a continuous stream of anti-corporate globalization protests across the world disrupting the meetings of globalizing institutions. These protests, ranging is size from tens to hundreds of thousands of participants, have been met with escalating levels of state security and police repression.[6]
Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center
and Pentagon on September 11, 2001 protests in the U.S. were smaller and more
subdued. A decision was made on the part
of U.S. anti-corporate globalization activists to take a less aggressive
approach in order to distance themselves from the violent attacks on the World
Trade Center (which at least one Congressman had initially blamed on the
movement). The movement also decreased its protest activity due to an increase
in state repression stemming from the curtailment of civil liberties through
mechanisms such as the USA PATRIOT Act. The detention of anti-corporate
globalization activists at the U.S.-Canadian border, and the denial of flying
rights to some activists further disrupted movement organizing. However, with
organized labor taking the lead in demonstrations at the November 2003 FTAA
summit in Miami, the U.S. movement began to recover some lost momentum. But,
the unprecedented militarization of a U.S. city and widespread civil rights
violations by state and federal “law enforcement” agents in Miami clearly
illustrated a shift in the U.S. political environment post-9/11.
The emergence of an enormous global anti-war movement in the
lead up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq drew heavily on the mobilization infrastructure
of the ACGM (Njehu, 2004). This anti-imperialist oriented movement has
simultaneously drained resources and attention from the ACGMs primary focus,
and brought new activists and organizations into the ACGM coalition.
Ideologically, the global movement against U.S. (and British) military
aggression has served to deepen the ACGMs analysis of the central role of
militarism and coercive force in forging and defending the neoliberal world
order. However, there remains a notable schism between core elements of the
anti-war movement, which have a rather narrow focus, and the ACGM which views
the war on Iraq as deeply embedded in other global political-economic forces
and agendas.
MOVEMENT
DILEMMAS
In a relatively brief period, the
ACGM has produced some major successes.
It has led to concessions from various quarters of the “big three,”
particularly the World Bank (Stiglitz, 2003).
Anti-corporate globalization protests and related movement activity have
largely disabled the machinery for negotiating the Millennial Round of the WTO.
It has also forced a shift in the rhetoric of international financial
institutions (IFIs), which are now on the defensive, especially in regard to
poverty alleviation, ecological sustainability, and structural adjustment.[7]
The World Bank and IMF have expanded their policies on debt relief and
increased their focus on the mitigation of poverty (Väryrnen, 2000). The Bank
devoted its World Development Report for 2000/2001 to poverty
alleviation, giving substantial attention to health, environmental, and
educational mechanisms for reducing poverty and increasing quality of life in
the South. But despite the movement’s successes, it faces some significant
dilemmas.
Many of the dilemmas faced by the
ACGM are issues of discourse and strategy typical of mass movements. Should the movement seek to transform or
terminate the main institutions of globalization?[8] On
one hand, the dominant institutions of globalization are deeply
entrenched. Thus, a possible shift
toward a more conventional “advocacy network” approach, involving formal
organization, a decision-making hierarchy, and greater ability to mobilize
resources, could exact more concessions from the dominant institutions and
generate more favorable media coverage.
On the other hand, these institutions are firmly committed to a
neoliberal agenda that cannot respond meaningfully to the demands of a diverse
array of NGOs, social movements, and national-states. Some propose that the
United Nations offers an institutional alternative to the IFIs through which
transnational economic relations may be mediated (Bello, 2001; Korten 2001).
Second, the nature of social
movements is substantially shaped by their ability to extract resources of time
and money from major social institutions as well as from adherents and
sympathizers (McCarthy and Zald, 1977).
Political process theorists (McAdam, 1982) have suggested that
successful social movements are those that are best able to extract funds from
philanthropic foundations or government agencies, and that what radical social
movements can accomplish is limited by what foundations are willing to fund.
Thus, from a political process perspective, we can recognize that capital has
latent veto with respect to anti-capital oriented movements.
The protest components of the ACGM have required relatively
few resources, and the most active protest groupings appear to have received
essentially no direct funding from major foundations. However, there is a vast NGO network of movement
supporters that are critical to the movement’s legitimacy. And it is in the NGO affiliate wing of the
movement where foundation support has been critical. Foundations[9]
have funded numerous NGOs, particularly environmental NGOs, to weigh in on
trade/globalization/environment issues.
Foundation support of the NGO affiliates[10]
has been sufficient to attract the attention of the right-wing foundation
watchdog NGO, Capital Research Center.
The Capital Research Center is a well-funded right-wing NGO that aims to
pressure the families and firms whose names are affixed to foundations into
withholding funding from left-leaning social movement organizations. The ACGM is now one of the Center’s main
targets. The Capital Research Center may not succeed in de-funding the NGO
affiliate wing of the ACGM, but the foundations may not need to be pressured to
do so. Foundations see themselves as
agents of innovative thinking and tend not to give long-term funding to a group
to undertake the same project. The cult
of newness among foundations may lead to foundation de-funding of the NGO
affiliate branch of the movement. The
de-funding of this component of the movement will not deter protests, but it
will detract from the legitimacy of protests due to a reduction in more
mainstream NGO support.
A third dilemma common to global
movements concerns the matter of whether international strategies can succeed
in a unipolar, U.S.-dominated global political economy. This concern is even more immediate now that
the Bush Administration has proved willing to resist any international agreements
that institutionalize agendas that conflict with the prerogatives of
international capital. Dismissal of the United Nations as “irrelevant” by key
Bush administration members and advisors serves to highlight the extent of an
increasingly self-confident U.S. unilateralism. Global activist attention to
the war on Iraq (and anti-U.S. sentiment in general) has shifted focus from
systemic analyses to “peace” agendas, indicating that U.S. unilateralism poses
ideological as well as strategic challenges for the ACGM.
While some of the dilemmas the movement faces are
characteristic of related social movements, the ACGM faces some dilemmas that
are specific to its sphere. One dilemma
concerns the nature of the movement’s coalition and ideology. Since the Seattle protest, the movement has
exhibited a significant shift in its discourses. While the defection of many mainstream
environmental groups from the “Washington consensus” and the resulting
environmentalization of the trade and globalization issue were critical to the
Seattle mobilization, there has been a decline in the movement’s embrace of
environmental claims and discourses, and an increase in its use of social
justice/inequality discourses. The lead
role played by organized labor in the Seattle protests helped to skew movement
discourse toward issues of sweatshops, child labor, and international labor
standards, ironically rhetorically deprioritizing environmental claims just at
the moment when many previously reluctant mainstream environmental
organizations were joining the ACGM coalition.
There are some rationales for the movement having undergone
a progressive “de-environmentalization” and having undertaken a shift toward
North-South inequality claims. One
involves increased communication between northern and southern wings of the
ACGM following the 1999 Seattle protest. The first World Social Forum (WSF),
organized to facilitate dialogue among the globally diverse movements
comprising the ACGM coalition, was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001. That
and subsequent WSFs have served to better integrate northern ACGM activists
into the global movement, and to expose northern groups to southern movement
goals and ideologies (Fisher and Ponniah. 2003). Increased contact with
southern movements and southern NGOs revealed a schism between northern ACGM
prioritization of labor and environmental protections, and southern focus on
equitable and sustainable development (Mertes, 2004). Increased ideological
synthesis between northern and southern wings of the ACGM required some
movement of northern ACGM claims away from the formal environmental regulatory
approaches championed by most of the large northern environmental NGOs.
Southern ACGM coalition partner movements (such as MST[11]
and the Zapatistas) have had conflicts of interest with northern conservation
NGOs over the efficacy of preservation vs. working landscape/sustainable
development approaches to ecological integrity (Weinberg, 2003; Stedile, 2004).[12]
Such conflicts between the development aspirations of southern movements and
the agendas of northern environmental NGOs have not been uncommon (Gould,
2003). As the northern and southern wings of the ACGM became more fully
integrated, both ideologically and strategically, many mainstream environmental
organizations’ approaches became more marginalized.
Another cause of ACGM “de-environmentalization” is that
while there are good reasons to predict that trade liberalization agreements
will lead to pressures toward an environmental “race to the bottom”, there is
limited evidence of such an impact. Williams
(2001:47) has suggested that WTO dispute resolution system officials now appear
to be bending over backwards to avoid making more controversial
anti-environmental rulings. This may
stem, in part, from the dominance of “Third Wave”[13]
environmental ideology among mainstream environmental movement organizations,
whose Boards of Directors often include a number of executives of transnational
corporations (Dowie, 1995), and which often rely on financial support from
corporations that rank among the worst environmental offenders (Foster, 1999).
With a foot in both neoliberal and anti-corporate globalization camps (Brulle,
2000; Gonzalez, 2001), some large mainstream environmental groups are well
positioned to leverage traditional northern environmental concerns against the
social justice issues that are gaining increased prominence in ACGM discourse.
In contrast to the limited evidence
that “free trade” regimes lead to the demise of national and transnational
environmental regulations, there is ample evidence of the ecological damage
wrought by IMF-imposed structural adjustment policies (SAPs). SAPs structurally coerce heavily indebted
southern nations to greatly increase agricultural and natural resource exports
in order to meet transnational interest payment obligations (Athanasiou, 1996;
Roberts and Thanos, 2003). IFI-supported increases in the export orientation of
southern nations result in widespread land degradation, habitat loss, and the
liquidation of the natural capital of southern nations (Gedicks, 2001; Korten,
2001). SAPs, by reducing public revenues and staffing of public regulatory
agencies, also reduce the capacity of states to monitor and enforce compliance
with environmental regulations (Kim et al, 2000). Therefore, an increased
movement focus on the ecological impacts of structural adjustment
policies—rather than on the formal rollback of domestic and international
environmental regulations—would help to recover the ecological dimensions of
ACGM ideology, while also illustrating the integration of environmental and
social justice concerns, since SAPs also increase domestic inequality and reduce
access of the poor to health care and education (Kim et al, 2000). Such a focus
is consistent with southern environmental movement approaches (Taylor, 1995).
While WTO actions that overrule
existing national environmental regulations may be slowed for strategic
reasons, transnational trade liberalization does reduce the likelihood that
southern (and northern) nations will establish stricter environmental
regulations as competitive pressures to attract and retain corporate investment
have a dampening effect on state willingness to constrain private capital
(Gould, Schnaiberg and Weinberg, 1996). The political problems that these
processes generate for the ACGM are two-fold. First, it is more difficult to
make claims about the failure of environmental regulation to emerge (Crenson,
1971) than it is to call attention to the elimination of existing
regulations. Second, the environmental
GSMs’ focus on formal regulatory mechanisms rather than on structural processes
in identifying the causes of and solutions to environmental problems (Gould, et
al, 1996; Gould 2003) makes it more difficult to recruit these movements’
support in opposition to the IFIs and trade liberalization organizations (such
as the FTAA).
In contrast to limited evidence of negative impacts on
formal environmental policy, there is ample evidence that since the
establishment of WTO there has been an exacerbation of global economic
inequality, with roughly three to four dozen countries in the South having
exhibited persistent declines in per capita incomes since the mid-1990s while
most industrial nations exhibited considerable growth. Even the prominent neo-liberal proponent
Jeffrey Sachs noted in The Economist that the IMF essentially functions
as the debt collection enforcer of private banks, and that the IMF has
sacrificed the economic recovery of most of South and Southeast Asia, and
elsewhere in the South. Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz
(2003) concurs. The establishment journal Foreign Affairs published a
paper documenting the exacerbation of North-South inequality in the 1990s
(Scott, 2001). The deepening economic marginalization of sub-Saharan Africa is
a glaring example of the unevenness of globalization processes and the
expansion of international inequalities that result. Thus, there is an
empirical underpinning to the shift of movement discourses away from threats to
formal environmental regulation and toward issues of socio-economic inequality
and structurally generated environmental disorganization.
The de-environmentalization of movement discourses and the
predominance of claims-making about international inequality involve a major
dilemma, however. In most of the North,
which is ultimately the most critical audience for the ACGM, the North-South inequality
issue is not likely to attract wide support.
Environmental claims-making, and discourses stressing environmental and
domestic social-policy “races to the bottom” in the North, are more likely to
generate public support. It seems apparent that the U.S. ACGM will need to be a
broad coalition—involving, at a minimum, organized labor, environmental, and
minority groups—to achieve its goals (Epstein, 2001). Such a coalition requires
a focus on neoliberal policy impacts on domestic inequality and environmental
concerns, in addition to a focus on North-South equity issues (depending on the
extent to which such issues can be directly linked to northern job losses and
high profile environmental concerns such as rainforest destruction). The focus
on neoliberalism provides the ideological glue that fuses the concerns of
diverse coalition participants in a common systemic critique. The ACGM needs to
articulate the connectedness of transnational processes and structures to
domestic concerns to broaden the domestic support bases of the movement in
order to increase its political leverage at the national level, within the G8
countries that exert most influence over IFIs.
Further, the shift of the movement toward speaking primarily
on behalf of the poor in the global South poses some potential problems. One is that increased emphasis on the IMF and
World Bank may tend to threaten the coalition with organized labor, which has
tended to be more actively supportive of protests targeting the WTO and FTAA
than the IMF and World Bank (Gould, Lewis and Roberts, 2004).[14]
Perhaps most fundamentally, the northern wing of the ACGM has stressed agendas
such as adding labor and environmental standards to the WTO, which state
officials from most countries of the South (and some southern movements within
the ACGM) are ambivalent about at best.
A good indicator of this is that the WTO dispute resolution panel
rulings that overrode U.S. environmental laws were the result of complaints
filed by southern governments (Williams, 2001).[15] Forging and sustaining meaningful North-South
coalitions within the ACGM may require de-emphasizing formal environmental
policy and regulatory standards. The extent of the movement’s losses in terms
of its northern environmentalist constituency would then hinge on its ability
to effectively articulate the structural causes of transnational ecological
degradation to mainstream environmentalists who emphasize regulatory policy and
market-based environmental protection mechanisms over structural change.
Regardless of whether the ACGM maintains its emphasis on
North-South economic inequality or returns to the issues likely to sustain the
more diversified coalitional emphasis of the Seattle protest, the political
success of the movement will depend on whether it can continue to help induce
two potential blocs of nation-states to resist a “deepening” of the WTO during
its Millennial Round negotiations (which largely collapsed in Cancun in 2003).
In a sense, the most likely bloc to be enabled and induced by anti-corporate
globalization protests to support major reform (or elimination) of the WTO is
that of nation-states of the South. In the Uruguay Round, developing countries
essentially signed away their rights to use trade policy as a means of
industrialization and development (a strategy which was effectively employed by
the “Asian Tigers” during the 1970s through the early 1990s). Governments of the South also agreed in the
Uruguay Round to open up their markets for agricultural imports from the
agribusiness superpowers, while receiving few benefits of liberalized markets
in the North (Madley, 2000: Chapter 1).
In addition, liberalization of agricultural markets in the South has
unleashed a tide of depeasantization that will have lasting negative effects
(e.g., unemployment, mass migration, hyper-urbanization) decades hence (Araghi,
2000).
Most southern states welcome the movement’s efforts to press
for debt relief. But, southern governments tend to be more interested in
enforcing the Uruguay Round WTO agreement than they are in achieving a decisive
rollback of the WTO. Such southern state
orientations may be an indicator of the gap between the interests of states and
those of their domestic citizenries, and of an elite consensus on trade
liberalization in both North and South.
While these processes have recently led to grassroots backlash and major
political shifts away from overtly neoliberal regimes throughout Latin America,
poor countries have few options other than participating in the world trading
system on the most favorable terms possible.
Thus, while one reason the WTO is now paralyzed has to do with
North-South disagreements, the ultimate negotiating position of most southern
governments may not be in sharp conflict with the U.S. position of further
market liberalization, deregulation, and more effective enforcement of WTO
rules.
The other bloc of nation-states with
a potential interest in significant WTO reform is that of the EU. Hirst and Thompson (1999:228) have noted that
The role of the European Union is central because it is at
one and the same time the most developed and the most completely structured of
the major trade blocs. The evolution of
the EU’s capacities for coordinated common action by its member states will
determine to a considerable degree whether the governance of the world economy
is strong or minimalist.
The EU’s
sympathies could well lie toward the minimalist pole. Public support for the ACGM’s agenda is
significantly stronger in the EU than in the U.S. WTO rebukes of a number of European
environmental, trade, and social policies prompted by U.S. complaints have
created a growing Continent-wide view that the EU must stand up for the
preservation of its worker and environmental protections. This, combined with
increasingly aggressive U.S. unilateralism, has hardened and expanded anti-U.S.
sentiment throughout Europe. Thus, while the movement drifts toward North-South
inequality discourses, it may find that its most amiable constituencies with
significant power to promote policy changes are the EU and Japan, rather than
the governments of the global South. The positions ultimately taken by the more
anti-neoliberal governments of Latin America in regard to the FTAA may prove
crucial to the ACGM’s ideological and tactical trajectories.[16]
CONCLUSION:
THE GLOBAL ROAD AHEAD
The ACGM has already achieved some
significant successes. International
institutions now must meet in remote locations or behind immense
fortifications. These institutions,
which already have public relations problems because of their inaccessibility
and lack of transparency, are forced to insulate themselves from the public to
an even greater degree. There is
sufficient public support for the movement’s agendas that several of these
international regimes have been compelled to make changes in their discourses
and practices (Stiglitz 2003). The
Millennial Round of the WTO has been stalled for nearly four years, and the initial
U.S. plan for a strong FTAA has been largely abandoned.
Despite these gains, the movement
faces important dilemmas of organizational structure, ideological coherency,
multiple competing discourses, and strategic choices. But since the movement will continue to be
acephalous due to its deeply coalitional character and its organizational
structure, it will not “make decisions” in the same manner that most social
movements do. The choices that will be
made are not choices within a leadership and organization hierarchy, but
choices made by many different groups of actors who consider themselves to be
part of the movement. Some of the most difficult choices concern the discursive
emphasis of the movement. Among the
critical choices will be whether to emphasize to groups in the North the
employment and environmental benefits of restructuring or disabling the
institutions of globalization or to emphasize a global social justice agenda of
reducing North-South economic inequalities.
This is not to suggest that it is impossible to imagine ACGM agendas
that have benefits for both groups in the North as well as those in the global
South. But those agendas will have to be carefully crafted and clearly
articulated, albeit within a highly decentralized structure.
Perhaps greater integration of both
northern and southern environmental justice groups and frames offers a
potential alternative to attempts to sustain the coalition with the most
conservative mainstream environmental NGOs, which in terms of both ideology and
constituency will have a tendency to return to their initial alliance with the
neoliberal “free trade” agenda (Dowie, 1995; Athanasiou, 1996; Taylor, 1995;
Pellow, 2002). Such environmental justice/anti-corporate globalization
coalitions could facilitate a continued focus on North-South inequality, while
constructing a greater focus on intra-North (and intra-South) inequality.
Attention to domestic inequality could help sustain an alliance with organized
labor, while simultaneously reaching out to communities of color in the U.S.
whose participation in the ACGM has been minimal. Environmental justice
discourse might also allow the movement to retain an environmental agenda that
sidesteps the environmental vs. social justice trade-off that is deeply entrenched
in “Third Wave” environmental ideology and practice. In the post-September 11th
political climate, mainstream environmental organizations are likely to return
to their traditional resistance to confrontational discourse and direct action
tactics (Schnaiberg and Gould, 2000), seeking accommodation with the
institutions which the ACGM intends to disempower.
Finding an ideological and
discursive vehicle through which to link domestic socio-economic and
environmental inequality and unemployment in the North with structurally
generated ecological degradation in the South, while still maintaining some
emphasis on international inequality, may be necessary to sustain the major
components of the ACGM coalition. While a shift to an environmental justice frame
and focus on structurally generated environmental destruction may allow the
movement to retain and synthesize North-South inequality and environmental
concerns in its discourse, that does not remedy the loss of resources,
legitimacy, and constituency that comes with a retreat of (or from) the major
environmental NGOs. Environmental justice groups are small in membership,
decentralized, and have limited financial resources that they can bring to the
ACGM relative to those of the mainstream environmental GSM organizations. In
the end, perhaps the fate of both major GSMs lays not so much with the
ideological and discursive decisions of the ACGM, but rather with those of the
international environmental NGOs. The extent to which the environmental GSM is
willing and able to move itself and its broad constituency away from regulatory
and “Third Wave” approaches to environmental problems and toward a structural
critique of the ecological implications of neoliberalism may ultimately
determine the long-term effectiveness of both GSMs.
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[1] An earlier and extended version of this chapter was published as “Global Social Movement(s) at the Crossroads: Some Observations on the Trajectory of the Anti-Corporate Globalization Movement” In Journal of World Systems Research, X, I, 2004. This research was supported by the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Jonathan London and Patrick Jobes provided helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. The authors also wish to acknowledge the incisive comments and editorial assistance offered by Andrew D. Van Alstyne, which helped us produce a stronger argument and deeper analysis.
[2] Protests have been particularly common in Bolivia, Argentina, Thailand, Ecuador, India, Brazil, and Indonesia, and southern activists are generally more confrontational than their counterparts in the North (Smith, 2002).
[3] A wide variety of environmental, agricultural, labor, consumer, human rights, women’s rights, and related groups now have “trade” or “globalization analyst” staffers. The AFL-CIO has been an effective organizer and has a strong presence at North American anti-corporate globalization protests. Much of the ideological coherence of the movement is provided by a small group of prominent intellectual figures (e.g., Walden Bello, José Bové, Vandana Shiva, Robert Weissman, Naomi Klein, Kevin Danaher, and Lori Wallach), all of whom are associated with NGOs whose work is primarily geared toward publications and education.
[4] Both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have been actively opposing World Bank projects since the 1980s. Both groups were founding members of 50 Years is Enough in 1994, an ACGM group focused on debt relief and opposing structural adjustment policies. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club also have atypical records in supporting domestic environmental justice struggles.
[5]The reference to turtles was the 1999 shrimp-turtle ruling by the WTO.
[6] Major protests occurred at the April 2000 World Bank/IMF meeting in Washington, DC, the September 2000 World Bank/IMF meeting in Prague, the April 2001 Quebec City Summit of the Americas, the G8 Summit at Genoa in July 2001, the Tenth Assembly of the UN Conference on Trade and Development in Bangkok (February 2000), the World Economic Forum in Melbourne (September 2000), the EU summit in Gothenburg (June 2001), the EU summit in Barcelona (March 2002), the WTO Ministerial meeting in Cancun (September 2003), and the FTAA summit in Miami (November 2003).
[7] The economic collapse of the IMF’s structural adjustment poster child, Argentina, significantly reduced the legitimacy of their policy prescriptions.
[8] A dilemma often referred to within movement circles as the “fix it or nix it” question
[9] Pew, MacArthur, Ford, Rockefeller, Kellogg, Mott, McKnight, and other smaller foundations.
[10] Encompassing groups as disparate as the Hemispheric Social Alliance, Alliance for Responsible Trade, Institute for Policy Studies, Development Group for Alternative Policies, Center for International Environmental Law, Friends of the Earth, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Global Exchange, Oxfam, and the International Gender and Trade Network.
[11] The Sem Terra Movement of landless workers in Brazil.
[12] More “radical” environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace have been helpful to southern movements due to a deeper appreciation of the complexities of southern development issues.
[13] Responding to Ronald Reagan’s deregulatory agenda,
the Washington, D.C.-based mainstream environmental organizations moved toward
the adoption of “Third Wave” environmentalism in the 1980’s, emphasizing (a)
cooperation with transnational corporate environmental offenders rather than
confrontation, (b) compromise agreements that allowed them to claim victories
for their mail-in member constituencies, and (c) increasing acceptance of
corporate executives on their Boards of Directors (Dowie, 1995). Third Wave
doctrine exacerbated the mainstream environmental movement’s historical
resistance to incorporation of social justice concerns within their political
agendas, and reflected a growing alignment with neoliberal agendas emphasizing
market-based mechanism to control pollution and voluntary monitoring and
regulation of corporate environmental impacts.
Dowie (1995) contrasts “Third Wave” environmentalism with first wave environmentalism which emerged in the U.S. in the early 20th Century, and focused primarily on land and wildlife conservation, and with second wave environmentalism which emerged in the U.S. in the 1960s with a focus on state regulatory approaches to pollution control.
[14] This further indicates a need on the part of the ACGM to more clearly articulate linkages between the impacts of SAPs in the South and northern job losses. Labor has shown far greater interest in trade liberalization agreements ( U.S.-Canada FTA 1988, NAFTA 1994, FTAA) and the WTO than in the Bretton Woods institutions, due to the more direct threats to northern employment (Gould, et al, 2004).
[15] Including Mexico, Thailand, Venezuela, Pakistan, Malaysia, and India.
[16] The surprisingly neoliberal policies of President Lula in Brazil are not encouraging.