Movement Off the Streets
April 26, 2004
Author: Sebastian Mallaby
Source: Washington Post
Available: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42114-2004Apr25.html
Last year a cool young Parisienne called Sabine Herold led protests against the French culture of protest, and a long-haired Swedish anarchist called Johan Norberg wrote a bestseller defending capitalism. Since then, it's been tempting to trumpet the decline of the anti-globalization movement.
If the young and the hip now go to the barricades to protest against French strikers, perhaps they'll stop railing against "corporate-dominated globalization"? Last week's tame demonstrations against the World Bank/IMF spring meetings seemed to encourage that hope. On Wednesday an "unhappy birthday" party to mark the 60th anniversary of the two institutions attracted barely 50 people (not counting the bored reporters); and Saturday's demonstrations involved just 2,000 to 3,000 people, a fraction of the 20,000 who descended on Washington during the spring meetings of 2000.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Londoners are preparing for the annual May Day holiday, which has become an occasion for anarchists to smash windows. Next weekend, no window-smashing is expected. The Mayday Collective has canceled its annual demonstration, and its few remaining comrades plan a picnic instead.
Yet it would be wrong to write off the globophobes. For one thing, their movement goes in phases. It loomed large 10 years ago, when the 50th anniversary of the World Bank and IMF was marked by a carnival of street protest at the institutions' annual meetings in Madrid. It then went quiet for a few years, and by 1999 it seemed to have fizzled; but it roared back to life at the end of that year in Seattle. Now the movement has entered another quiet phase, because the Iraq war has made supposed "corporate oppression" seem secondary. Sooner or later, it will bubble up again.
But the other reason to keep worrying is that the critics of globalization
fight on two levels, street protests being only the most visible of them.
The critics also pursue their struggle through the various panels and committees
that have been set up to placate them. And lately the committee comrades
have been doing rather well.
The template for this form of struggle is a body called the World Commission
on Dams. Scarred by successive waves of protest, the World Bank created
this outfit to forge a consensus on dam-building: How you can do it while
minimizing environmental and social costs? In the hope of drawing its fiercest
critics into a new consensus, the bank gave them a seat at the table. But
the radicals understood that the bank's desire to include them gave them
an effective veto, and they used it to ensure a report so loaded with requirements
as to constitute a virtual ban. A dam in Laos would be expected to build
in as many safety measures as a dam in Sweden. This was like telling the
Laotians that they could not ride in motorized vehicles until they could
afford brand-new Volvos with passenger-side airbags.
The dams commission reported in 2000. That year, buffeted by anti-globalization
protests, the bank announced another similar initiative called the Extractive
Industries Review. Again, the aim was to forge a consensus on how mining
or oil projects could be done so as to promote development; again, radical
nongovernmental organizations were given a seat at the table. The head
of the review panel issued a final report three months ago. His verdict:
The bank should get out of oil and coal projects completely, because hydrocarbons
contribute to global warming.
There's a reasonable case to be made against oil projects in poor countries, which tend to stoke corruption. But a blanket withdrawal on environmental grounds is preposterous. The burden of coping with global warming should be shared globally, not lumped on the world's poorest countries. But, having commissioned the review panel, the bank is in a quandary. If it rejects the recommendations, it will put itself in a worse public-relations position than it would have been in if it had never dreamed up the review.
You get a sense of this quandary by checking out the panel's Web site.
International parliamentarians, half a dozen Nobel laureates, and NGOs
from all over the world have written to the bank's president, James Wolfensohn,
demanding that he implement the panel's recommendations in full. But if
Wolfensohn does that, he will be assailed in poor countries for hypocrisy.
Why should gas-guzzling northern protesters tell the bank's poor clients
not to produce oil or coal?
So don't be fooled by the relative calm in Washington over the weekend.
The real struggle between capitalism and its critics is going on elsewhere,
and the winner isn't clear yet. The World Bank promises to respond formally
to the Extractive Industries Review in six weeks or so.