Development, 2007, 50(S1), (148–152) r 2007 Society for International Development 1011-6370/07 www.sidint.org/development

Dialogue

Looking Back, Looking Forward

NICOLA BULLARD

ABSTRACT Ten years ago, the Asian financial crisis shook the foundations of neo-liberal doctrine, sowing the seeds for a decade of social struggles and protests that have challenged the elite institutions and governments. Nicola Bullard argues that in a rapidly changing world, where the sources of power are less and less accountable, the global justice movement faces three new challenges: exposing and controlling corporate power, popularizing alternative visions and creating a new emancipatory paradigm for the 21st century. KEYWORDS Asian financial crisis; neo-liberalism; global justice movement

Introduction Ten years ago, in July 1997, Asia was shaken by a devastating financial crisis. The economies of Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia were assaulted by collapsing currencies, capital flight, mass unemployment and impoverishment. In the aftermath, there were harsh criticisms, even from mainstream economists and editorialists, about the ‘irrational exuberance’ of the financial markets and the failed policies of the international financial institutions. The Asian financial crisis marked a turning point in the debates on globalization: until then, the boosters of globalization were predicting a new Golden Age of prosperity in which the benefits of free markets would ‘lift all boats’and the benign multilateralism of the UN would create a‘global neighbourhood’ founded on good governance, sustainability and democracy. Of course, there were many critics who pointed out the fundamental contradictions between the model of globalization promoted by corporations and implemented by the elite institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO), and that of the United Nations, which found voice in forums such as Rio, Beijing, Copenhagen and Istanbul. The Asian financial crisis showed that these two world views were on a direct collision course, setting the stage for the events that rocked Seattle just two years later, when the confrontation between the‘globalizers’ ^ represented by the WTO ^ and the‘anti-globalizers’ was broadcast into homes across the world. Since Seattle, and especially since the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the world has become a far more dangerous, complicated and contradictory place: the gap between people and politics is widening and non-accountable forms of power ^ especially Development (2007) 50(S1), 148–152. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100396

Bullard: Looking Back, Looking Forward military and financial power ^ are shaping global events. Although the boosters of corporate globalization no longer stride the planet with the same certainty, other anti-democratic and reductionist projects ^ imperialism, nationalism and all sorts of fundamentalisms ^ are stepping up to take their place as mobilizing ideologies.

Where are the globalizers today? The institutional symbols of neo-liberal globalization ^ the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank ^ are in an intellectual morass and their political and financial capacity to dictate economic policies is shrinking. The WTO is the crowning glory of economic globalization, yet since the collapse of the ministerial in Seattle in November 1999, it has been in a permanent crisis, such that most analysts agree that the organization is effectively, if not officially, dead. The Doha Development Round was launched in the wake of 11 September 2001 when most governments, despite their reservations, felt obliged to reaffirm their faith in trade liberalization and their commitment to multilateralism (even though the ‘victim’ of the attacks has no commitment to multilateralism). Since then negotiations have stumbled from crisis to crisis; two years later in Cancun talks collapsed completely, and at the Hong Kong ministerial in December 2005 the main objective was simply to avoid a meltdown. Despite this, negotiations reached another impasse six months later and talks were suspended only to be resuscitated in early 2007 thanks to the frenzied international diplomacy and scaremongering of the director general Pascal Lamy. And so it will continue. The other icons of neo-liberal globalization ^ the World Bank and the IMF ^ are also experiencing a decline in influence and prestige. Many countries, including China, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Indonesia and Thailand, are either changing their status from borrower to lender or choosing to cut the financial umbilical cord rather than accept the policy advice emanating from these overstuffed bureaucracies whose own research departments are now questioning some of the basic tenets of neo-liberal doctrine. For

example, just before the 2005 WTO ministerial, World Bank researchers dramatically downgraded the projected benefits of trade liberalization under the Doha Round. The following year World Bank experts advised the Thai government to issue compulsory licenses on second-generation HIV/AIDS drugs to ensure affordable access (Anderson and Martin, 2005; Keen et al., 2006; Revenga et al., 2006). Little by little, the institutions are having to acknowledge, by results of their own research, that the theory of liberalization is a long way from the reality. In the era of Bill Clinton, the US was the main flag bearer for globalization and a new post-Cold War world order of US dominance and happy multilateralism. But since the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the United States has become a unilateralist bully: US foreign policy has lost much of its legitimacy and influence, relying less on diplomacy and moral persuasion, and more on threats, coercion and force. Obviously the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent war has dealt the most damaging blow; however, the US’ failure to address a string of domestic and international crises, including global warming, racism, religious and cultural violence engendered by the war on terror, Hurricane Katrina, corporate scandals such as Enron and WorldCom, growing domestic poverty and economic and social polarization, has left the United States with little capacity to exert a positive influence on international politics or to provide leadership on global problems. Although the US still exercises formidable military and economic strength, it does so from a position of moral weakness, economic vulnerability, a deeply divided citizenry and ambivalent support from its former friends. It remains to be seen whether the new Democrat majority can turn this around. The result of the United States’ hollowing hegemony is that international relations are in a state of flux. New power lines are being drawn across the globe, many of which deliberately exclude the United States or at least balance relations with the United States in more complex, conditional and issue-specific ways. These days, the US has no permanent friends. 149

Development 50(S1): Dialogue Reconfiguring the South Back in 1997, countries across Latin America were following the Washington line, slavishly adopting neo-liberal policies of trade and financial liberalization, and regurgitating the globalization cant. Brazil, although on the other side of the world, was battered by the Asian financial crisis, proving that risks of financial liberalization can spread very far indeed. Ten years later, Latin America is almost unrecognizable: individual countries and the region as a whole are adopting a more autonomous position vis-aØ-vis the dominant powers and, in some cases, defying dominant economic thinking. The political landscape is a mix of overtly anti-imperialist governments, such as Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Ecuador, and centre-left governments with a nationalist orientation such as Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. Pro-US and pro neo-liberal governments are now a minority, not least because of the extraordinary rise of radical social movements demanding a change from the devastating neo-liberal policies of the past two decades. The elections of Lula in Brazil, Chavez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia and Correa in Ecuador (and possibly even Ortega in Nicaragua) reflect this mood for social change. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is the most outspoken critic of the US and has used his vast and recently nationalized oil reserves to provide subsidized fuel to poor communities in the US: a brilliant public relations tactic to counter the anti-Chavez campaign in the US and to highlight poverty in the North. In Ecuador and Bolivia, popular leftist presidents have been elected with the strong support of social movements ^ especially indigenous movements ^ and moved quickly to nationalize gas and oil, or at least renegotiate contracts with energy companies operating in the countries, to signal their break with the past and assert their sovereignty. Even beyond these three countries, which are in the vanguard of attempting to reverse policies of trade and financial liberalization and privatization that have impoverished the majority of their peoples, other nations are distancing themselves from the US and challenging the hegemony of the ‘Washington Consensus’. Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia 150 have all re-paid their outstanding debts to the IMF

(indeed, Venezuela is now so flush with cash that many Latin American leaders call Caracas instead of Washington). In the WTO, Latin American countries are important actors in several groups opposing the negotiating positions of the US and the EU. In 1997 President Jiang Zemin, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, announced that China would take a more active role in the world by ‘opening up in all directions y developing an open economy, enhancing our international competitiveness, optimizing our economic structure and improving the quality of our national economy.’ This was the official signal that China was open for business. The transition to a market economy, which had started in the late1970s, culminated in 2001when China joined the WTO after almost 15 years of lengthy negotiations. Since then China has become the saviour of capitalism: hundreds of European and US companies survive by relocating their production to China, US consumer demand remains buoyant thanks to cheap China-made products and across the world investors get fat returns on Chinese business. On the other hand, China is blamed for single-handedly driving down labour and environmental standards, as if China alone were responsible for the inevitable results of globalized capitalism. We have yet to see the full expression of China’s powers (and perhaps we never will) but in all arenas ^ trade, finance, politics, security ^ China is now a big part of the picture. In another sign of healthy autonomy, developing countries are making their own agreements outside of the WTO: Brazil, China and India, as well as Venezuela and South Africa and many others, are pushing ahead with South^South trade and investment agreements which circumvent or exclude the big economies. These new trading arrangements are not without their problems as they are driven largely by the interests of northern transnationals based in the South and emerging Chinese, Indian and Brazilian TNCs rather than the spirit of South^South solidarity. What’s more, they do little to challenge or reverse the resource-intensive, finance-driven, export-oriented model of economic development that is the bedrock of neo-liberal thinking. There are, however, some efforts to create alternative models: such as the Bolivarian Alternative for the

Bullard: Looking Back, Looking Forward Americas (ALBA), an attempt by Venezuela to build an alternative regional cooperation arrangement that explicitly challenges trade liberalization and imperialism (Azzi and Harris, 2006). While the ALBA is the antithesis of a free trade agreement there are still problems with its orientation, not least that it is being driven top-down by the personal vision of Chavez and the oil wealth of Venezuela. In so far as the ALBA is an antiimperialist project, it is a great success but to the extent that it is anti-capitalist (or, to put it another was, an experiment in socialism for the twentyfirst century), it is still largely oriented towards large-scale projects, industrialization and resource extraction ^ such as the controversial proposal for an 8,000 km pipeline to carry gas from Venezuela, across the Amazon, to the South ^ albeit in an anti-imperialist frame. These shifts are seismic: although the US remains the dominant global power, its meteoric but relatively short-lived political, economic and military ascendancy is fading. New players in the global economy, especially in Asia, are challenging the economic dominance of both Europe and the US, while new counter-hegemonic groupings, especially in Latin America, and widespread anti-imperialist sentiment in West Asia and beyond, are a direct challenge to the US’s moral and political powers.

Challenges for the global justice movement Beyond governments and the international institutions, are the thousands of social movements, NGOs, trade unions, associations and collectives that make up the global justice movement or the ‘movement of movements’ (Aguiton, 2005; Bullard, 2005). More than any government, these social forces ^ which encompass the full ‘progressive’ spectrum from autonomists to social democrats ^ are challenging domination by big power and big money and, in so far as national governments are showing a willingness to challenge the policies dictated by the G8, the WTO, the IMF and the financial markets, it is due largely to pressures from below. In the past ten years, the global justice movement has exposed how power works in the inter-

national system and resisted the drive to corporate globalization. The strategy has not been to accumulate power in the traditional sense of political parties or trade unions (although this does still happen but, it seems, with less and less impact) but to build broad-based and plural networks of women, trade unions, social movements, farmers, consumer, environmental and community organizations, researchers, independent media and so on, working in alliances on issues that effect us all such as water, trade, privatization, debt, global warming and corporates. This new ‘methodology’ has enabled the global justice movement to act locally and globally, to share analyses and strategies, and to shift public opinion and discourse. Although it is worlds away from the past strategy of building vanguard parties or centralized power structures, this way of working is not without its problems: there are tensions between different organizational ‘traditions’, networks can be very opaque, ‘power’ relations are rarely acknowledged although they certainly exist, and consensus is not always democratic. However, the experiences of these networks and campaigns shows that perhaps it is possible to change the world, not by taking the power but by re-defining the power, and sometimes that means re-defining the power even within our own movements. In future, as the ‘symbols’of domination lose their legitimacy (as is already happening), it will be important for the movements to think strategically how to work for social and ecological justice in a far more complex and fast-changing world where the levers of power are often in the hands of completely unaccountable governments and corporations. Until now, our strategy has been to focus on the elite institutions and the powerful countries, especially the US and the EU. This was correct but until now we have not paid enough attention to who is behind these institutions, what are their interests, and how they are changing the societies in which we live. Thus, I see three challenges ahead. The first is to develop an analysis and critique of the financial and corporate world in the same way that we have been able to build a comprehensive and grounded critique of the international institutions and the key global powers. Financial markets and 151

Development 50(S1): Dialogue transnational corporations are defining the world in which we live: national and international law, economic policies, production and distribution chains, consumption patterns, and even the democratic institutions of our countries, are influenced, if not shaped, by the decisions made in boardrooms and stock markets. This is no longer the exclusive privilege of the North: with every edition of the Fortune 500 we have proof that there are also extremely rich individuals and mega corporations in the South: China, India and Russia. This challenges the global justice movement to develop a more sophisticated critique that does not depend on old North^South divides, but understands that capitalism is now truly globalized. The second challenge is to popularize, without simplifying, our analyses and critiques in ways that empower the so-called ‘ordinary’ people to understand the deep transformations that are taking place in their societies and, most important, to act. The right-wing racist, nationalist and fundamentalist movements and political parties have been much better at this than the left because they are willing to play on people’s insecurities and emotions, offering simple solutions to complex problems. We have shouted ‘Derail the WTO’ and ‘No blood for oil’ but we have not developed the logic of those slogans to the point where people will not only see the link between the two issues but also question the very notion of society as a borderless and limitless market driven by efficiency, profit, competition, individualism, consumerism and growth. Nor have we been able to convey a convincing and attractive alternative. Yet the global justice movement does has an alternative vision of how society could be, a society

of solidarity and cooperation based on tolerance and diversity and there are many small but significant signs that this world could be constructed. The World Social Forums are a sign of our resistance and optimism. The dozens of international coalitions working on issues such as trade, drugs, water, privatization and debt, shows the movement’s capacity to create new ways of organizing. The successes of these campaigns show that it is also possible to change public opinion and policy. The overwhelming response to the 2004 Tsunami shows that solidarity is not a forgotten ideal. The anti-war movement shows that ‘ordinary’ citizens have far more integrity and common sense than their political leaders and the United Nations. Wikipedia and the free software movement show that real things can be produced outside the logic of profit, with the ancient ideas of gift and countergift as the basis for economic cooperation. All these are expressions of the potential of a global movement, which is able to act both locally and globally, surpassing the limitations of national identity and politics, ideologies and hierarchical structures, surpassing even the logic of profit and ownership. The third challenge is to find a new emancipatory paradigm for the twenty-first century. It will not be written in a single political manifesto or in an academic journal (the days of truth being handed down from above are over) but it will evolve from praxis, reflecting the diversity and pluralism of the multiple real and virtual worlds in which we live. Without over-estimating the benefits or difficulties of horizontality or consensus, it will break with the ‘old politics’ of hierarchy and centralization, building on the ‘new’ politics of inclusiveness, consensus and diversity. These values and practices are the seeds of a radical new democracy.

References Aguiton, Christophe (2005) ‘Mapping the Movement’, Development 48(2):10^14. Anderson, Kym and Will Martin (2005) ‘Agricultural Trade Reform and the Doha Development Agenda’,World Bank. Azzi, Diego and David Harris (2006) ‘ALBA ^ Venezuela’s Answer to Free Trade: The Bolivarian alternative for the Americas’, Focus on the Global South. Bullard, Nicola (2005) ‘Where is the Movement Moving?’, Development 48(2): 4^8. Keen, Michael,Yitae Kim and RicardoVarsano (2006) ‘The‘Flat Tax(es)’: Principles and Evidence’,Working Paper, IMF. Revenga, Ana, Mead Over, Emiko Masaki,Wiwat Peerapatanapokin, Julian Gold,Viroj Tangcharoensathien and Sombat Thanprasertsuk (2006) ‘Economics of Effective AIDS Treatment Evaluating Policy Options for Thailand’, World Bank.

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