Friday, 20 April 2001
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From 19 to 22 April, in French-speaking Quebec City, Canada, the Summit of the Americas, a production of the Organization of American States, will meet to discuss the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement, a multilateral composite of NAFTA and WTO, extended to cover all of North and South America.
Corporate media editorials about the Summit in Quebec City will cluster around two principal themes: (1) How the FTAA will make the world a better, more democratic, more prosperous place; and (2) How -- pick any three -- confused, ignorant, obscurantist, racist, Luddite, mean, evil, nasty, leftist, fascist, violent, naive, or manipulated the protesters are.
The Summit of the Americas is being met by a vigorous, diverse coalition of citizen's groups which oppose the FTAA and neoliberal, corporation-centric globalization generally. If you're just getting up to speed, the basic reality grounding the antiglobalization protest movement is understood easily enough.
Citizens of democratic states possess democratic rights. Whenever those rights are trampled, some of these citizens, putting aside jobs and families and projects, protest the institutions they hold responsible for the trampeling. And those institutions, as fierce defenders of the unjust, inequitable status quo, use the practically limitless state resources at their disposal to ensure that the redress of grievances not only fails but is seen clearly to fail. Thus radically incommensurable notions of democracy play out in a social field of radically asymmetrical relations of power, privilege, and access.
As Whitehead said, seek simplicity, then mistrust it; things are a bit more complex than can be put in one paragraph. At least two complicating factors are relevant here: NGOs and the institutions of globalization themselves.
First, NGO participation in institutions like the WTO and OAS complicate things. Many NGOs are otherwise perfectly good civil organizations devoted to securing and sustaining democratic rights; but most of them are reformist in their outlook, which means they want to work within the framework of the status quo to improve conditions. Most citizens and organizations in the protest movement are not reformists but radicals who work to fundamentally alter the the status quo and the framework. Both forces for change, reformist and radical, are likely helpful, since they're likely to be effective at different times: reformers in the short run, radicals in the long. Both are helpful, that is, as long as both remain forces for change, not just self-reproducing entities.
Second, the sometimes decent and good -- or, at the least, the mixed -- intentions of individuals that constitute the OAS, WTO, World Bank, and IMF are ideological complications. If everything they did and said were horrible, organizing a mass movement to oppose globalization would be much simpler. But the World Bank and IMF talk regularly now about poverty reduction, democracy, goodness, and light -- the point isn't whether they intend well, however, but how such talk muddies the waters and makes the creation of a mass antiglobalization movement more difficult. The OAS regularly passes fine resolutions about important, unobjectionable things like "Integrating a Gender perspective in the Summits of the Americas" and the like. Well, who could be against that? Certainly not the protest movement, which is highly gender integrated.
The pessmistic view is that NGOs are being co-opted, giving credibility to fundamentally corrupt institutions. Maybe so, maybe not. My view is that these fundamentally misguided institutions already have credibility to spare and that good faith NGO engagement must be predicated on the likelihood of short and medium term reformist gains. The point about credibility only matters when the result of NGO withdrawal from, say, the WTO or OAS would be the loss of all credibility; in the present situation, I don't see how that's the case.
So, one might say, the institutions of globalization are separated from the antiglobalization protest movement by radically incommensurable notions of democracy; by which I mean that one should take the OAS and WTO and all the rest of the neoliberal globalization advocates at their word: they are not all evil overlords.
What they are is dead wrong about what constitutes democracy and its flourishing; improperly oriented to Western, transnational corporation-centric models of international development; erroneously committed to capitalism as the only possible arrangement of social and economic forces; fiercely defensive of an ordering of values, reinforced by the status quoe, and out of which status quo proceeds, an ordering in which corporate profits for some people are more valuable than food, water, shelter, and meaningful work for everyone else, and the like. They are, in short, substantively wrong, both on the issues and on the framework of assumptions within which the issues find expression and meaning.
What reception plans are being made for citizens enacting democratic rights? An area of Quebec City has been made over into an armed encampment. The OAS and the state security forces it appears to command are obsessed with borders and border lines, inners and outers, drawing lines around pockets within which democratic rights have no force; but also drawing borders around borders and around the walls and lines that mark the inner border from the outer. It's all quite dizzying, of course, but we will already have met the strange, oddening permiabilities of some borders when we've met the radical critique of neoliberal globalization. Capital flows across borders; or, rather, capital flows now irrespective of borders, it flows in channels of pure electronic gibberish over which borders have no ply. But people, who have the right -- according to Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- to cross borders are being denied that right in order to protect the free flow of capital and those global elites who benefit from it.
Longtime Monkeyfister, Dru Jay, is also in Quebec City; stay tuned for his reports and photos from Quebec City.
For further information, consult the following sites.
See also Beyond Melbourne and Prague: An Exhortation to Local Action <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/643>
This is Protesting the FTAA in Quebec City <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/751>