Enemies of the WTO
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a two-page
spread in the New York Times , featuring more than a dozen pictures, can
speak volumes. And sure enough, the lavish Nov. 15 advertisement by the Turning
Point Project, a coalition of activists opposed to globalization in general and
the World Trade Organization in particular, said more than any merely verbal
exposition about what really motivates those activists could. Indeed, it
revealed quite a bit more than its sponsors intended.
The occasion for the ad
was the upcoming WTO "ministerial" taking place in Seattle in a few days. The
WTO has become to leftist mythology what the United Nations is to the militia
movement: the center of a global conspiracy against all that is good and
decent. According to the myth, the "ultra-secretive" WTO has become a sort of
super-governmental body that forces nations to bow to the wishes of
multinational corporations. It destroys local cultures, the headline on the ad
read "Global Monoculture"; it despoils the environment; and it rides roughshod
over democracy, forcing governments to remove laws that conflict with its
sinister purposes.
Like most successful urban legends, this one is based on a
sliver of truth. The gradual global progress toward free trade that began in
the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt introduced the Trade Agreements Program, has
always depended on international negotiations: I'll reduce my tariffs if you
reduce yours. But there has always been the problem of governments that give
with one hand and take away with the other, that dutifully remove tariffs and
then use other excuses to keep imports out. ( Certainement , there is free
trade within the European Union, but those British cows, they are not safe.) To
make agreements work there has to be some kind of quasi-judicial process that
determines when ostensibly domestic measures are de facto a reimposition of
trade barriers and hence a violation of treaty. Under the pre-WTO system, the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, this process was slow and cumbersome.
It has now become swifter and more decisive. Inevitably, some of its decisions
can be challenged: Was the U.S. ban on dolphin-unsafe tuna really a trade
barrier in disguise? But the much-feared power of the WTO to overrule local
laws is strictly limited to enforcement of the spirit of existing agreements.
It cannot in any important way force countries that are skeptical about the
benefits of globalization to open themselves further to foreign trade and
investment. If most countries nonetheless are eager or at least willing to
participate in globalization, it is because they are convinced that it is in
their own interests.
And by and large they are
right. The raw fact is that every successful example of economic development
this past century--every case of a poor nation that worked its way up to a more
or less decent, or at least dramatically better, standard of living--has taken
place via globalization; that is, by producing for the world market rather than
trying for self-sufficiency. Many of the workers who do that production for the
global market are very badly paid by First World standards. But to claim that
they have been impoverished by globalization, you have to carefully ignore
comparisons across time and space--namely, you have to forget that those
workers were even poorer before the new exporting jobs became available and
ignore the fact that those who do not have access to the global market are far
worse off than those who do. (See my old
Slate
piece ".") The
financial crisis of 1997-99 temporarily gave those who claim that globalization
is bad for workers everywhere a bit of ammunition, but the crisis did not go on
forever, and anyway the solution to future crises surely involves some policing
of short-term capital movements rather than a retreat from globalization as a
whole. Even the Malaysians continue to welcome long-term foreign investors and
place their faith on manufactured exports.
What about the environment? Certainly some forests have
been cut down to feed global markets. But nations that are heedless of the
environment are quite capable of doing immense damage without the help of
multinational corporations--just ask the Eastern Europeans. For what it is
worth, the most conspicuous examples of environmental pillage in the Third
World today have nothing to do with the WTO. The forest fires that envelop
Southeast Asia in an annual smoke cloud are set by land-hungry locals; the
subsidized destruction of Amazonian rain forests began as part of a Brazilian
strategy of inward-looking development. On the whole, integration of the world
economy, which puts national actions under international scrutiny, is probably
on balance a force toward better, not worse, environmental policies.
But anyway, these are side issues, because what
that advertisement makes clear--clearer, I suspect, than its sponsors
intended--is that the opposition to globalization actually has very little to
do with wages or the environment. After all, leaving aside a photo of tree
stumps and another of an outfall pipe, here are the horrors of globalization
the Turning Point Project chose to illustrate:
A highway interchange, a parking lot filled with
cars, a traffic jam, suburban tract housing, an apartment building with
numerous satellite dishes, an office with many computer screens, office workers
on a busy street, high-rise office buildings, a "factory farm" with many
chickens, a supermarket aisle, a McDonald's arch.
Each picture was
accompanied by a caption asking, "Is this Los Angeles or Cairo?" "Is this India
or London?" etc.
What is so horrible about these scenes? Here's what the ad
says, "A few decades ago, it was still possible to leave home and go somewhere
else: The architecture was different, the landscape was different, the
language, dress, and values were different. That was a time when we could speak
of cultural diversity. But with economic globalization, diversity is fast
disappearing."
You can't argue with that; lives there the tourist
with soul so dead that he does not wish that he could visit rural France, or
Mexico City, or for that matter Kansas City the way they were, rather than the
way they are? But the world is not run for the edification of tourists. It is
or should be run for the benefit of ordinary people in their daily lives. And
that is where the indignation of the Turning Point people starts to seem rather
strange.
For surely the most
striking thing about the horrors of globalization illustrated in those photos
is that for most of the world's people they represent aspirations, things they
wish they had, rather than ominous threats. Traffic jams and ugly interchanges
are annoying, but most people would gladly accept that annoyance in exchange
for the freedom that comes with owning a car (and more to the point, being
wealthy enough to afford one). Tract housing and apartment buildings may be
ugly, but they are paradise compared with village huts or urban shanties.
Wearing a suit and working at a computer in an office tower are, believe it or
not, preferable to backbreaking work in a rice paddy.
Now, of course what is good for the individual is not
always good if everyone else does it too. Having a big house with a garden is
nice, but seeing the countryside covered by suburban sprawl is not, and we
might all be better off if we could all agree (or be convinced by tax
incentives) to take up a bit less space. The same goes for cultural choices:
Boston residents who indulge their taste for Canadian divas do undermine the
prospects of local singer-songwriters and might be collectively better off if
local radio stations had some kind of cultural content rule. But there is a
very fine line between such arguments for collective action and supercilious
paternalism, especially when cultural matters are concerned; are we warning
societies about unintended consequences or are we simply disagreeing with
individual tastes?
And it is very clear from the advertisement in the
Times that the Turning Point Project--and the whole movement it
represents--are on the supercilious side of that line. Although they talk of
freedom and democracy, their key demand is that individuals be prevented from
getting what they want--that governments be free, nay encouraged, to deny
individuals the right to drive cars, work in offices, eat cheeseburgers, and
watch satellite TV. Why? Presumably because people will really be happier if
they retain their traditional "language, dress, and values." Thus, Spaniards
would be happier if they still dressed in black and let narrow-minded priests
run their lives, and residents of the American South would be happier if
planters still sipped mint juleps, wore white suits, and accepted traditional
deference from sharecroppers ... instead of living in this "dreary" modern
world in which Madrid is just like Paris and Atlanta is just like New York.
Well, somehow I suspect that the residents of
Madrid and Atlanta, while they may regret some loss of tradition, prefer
modernity. And you know what? I think the rest of the world has the right to
make the same choice.
