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The Next American Century?

Extracted from Another American Century? by Nicholas Guyatt (Pluto Press)

How will the United States maintain its global power in an era when the very notion of the nation-state is under challenge?

In the first months of 1999, commentators in the US began to turn their eyes towards another American century, grounding their vision in an upbeat assessment of the present and recent past. In the years since Henry Luce's 1941 essay, the United States had faced down the forces of totalitarianism and communism, winning the Cold War and still leaving time for a decade of neoliberal 'globalisation' - a process which consolidated the US victory across the globe. Bill Clinton's 1999 State of the Union address suggested that the US had made great progress towards preparing the ground for 'the next American century'; other Americans shared his optimism, seeing few obstacles to US domination of another hundred years of world history.

As some of the more influential US commentators prepared their millennial musings at year's end, however, they were rudely interrupted by an unexpected source of protest. Earlier in the year, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the umbrella organizations for international trade negotiations, had decided to begin a new round of talks in Seattle. The city happily accepted the challenge of hosting the conference, but various dissenting groups announced throughout the year that they would make Seattle the focus of protests against the WTO. These groups represented a wide variety of interests. Environmentalists saw the WTO as a leading force behind global climate change and the circumvention of environmental standards, especially in the developing world. Labour advocates charged the WTO with exploiting low-wage workers in other countries. US unions carried their personal grievance that the low-wage economies encouraged by the WTO in developing countries had taken manufacturing jobs from American workers. Development groups protested over the issues of Third World debt and system global poverty, accusing WTO of encouraging free trade even as the gap between poorer and richer countries widened further.

These groups had many things in common. They were mostly based at the grassroots level, and depended on local organisers, often brought together by innovative technologies like the Internet. They were well-organised, and understood both the issues before them and the need to build coalitions (and public support) to effect change. Most profoundly, however, they represented ideas and values which were largely excluded from the political mainstream in the US, Europe and much of the rest of the world. Amidst the talk of the free-market revolution, or its 'centrist' variant, the so-called 'third way', there was virtually no room in political debate for these emphases on the protection of the global environment, the need for good working conditions and a liveable wage, and the problem of global economic inequality. Although the WTO was merely the forum in which; politicians and business leaders would discuss a new round of trade liberalisation, these protesting groups correctly realised that the Seattle meeting would gather together many of those primarily responsible for the plant's most pressing inequities. Even before the WTO delegates began to arrive, the press billed the meeting as 'the battle in Seattle', a rare moment in which the leaders of the global economy would come face to face with organised and intelligent opposition.

To the apparent surprise of the Seattle officials and the Clinton administration, which had organised the WTO convention, the protesters disrupted proceedings from eh first day of the meeting. On Tuesday 30 November, tens of thousands turned out to march in the streets, to form human chains around buildings at which WTO events were scheduled to take place, and to register their complaints about the WTO and the injustices of the international economy. WTO delegates were marooned in their hotel rooms, unable to move freely around streets filled with protesters. The police, realising that the opening day of the conference was descending into chaos, began to employ more draconian tactics against the vast crowds. Unarmed protesters were dispersed with tear gas, concussion grenades and even rubber bullets. The police fought running battles through the streets, struggling to overturn the vast numbers of marchers, who simply regrouped after each gas attack and began to march once more. The scenes of protest and repression were beamed throughout the US and around the world, presenting a striking contrast to the generally upbeat tone of the Clinton administration on economic issues. In the midst of a spectacular American economic boom, an estimated 35,000 protesters gathered in Seattle to reject the president's line on global economy.

The president himself made a typically contradictory contribution to the meeting. Arriving late on Tuesday night, the president prepared for his address the next day by instructing the Seattle authorities to impose martial law, and to seal off an enormous area of downtown Seattle from anyone without WTO credentials. With the National Guard instructed to take up positions on Seattle's streets, the president travelled to a lunch meeting with the major international delegates and spoke of his sympathy for the protesters he had just excluded. Condemning the small minority (estimated in the dozens by virtually all observers) who had committed acts of violence, Clinton went on, inexplicably, to praise the thousands of others who had choked on the tear gas of the police the previous day:

But I'm glad the others showed up, because they represent millions of people who are now asking questions about whether this enterprise in fact will take us all where we want to go. And we ought to welcome their questions, and be prepared to give an answer, because if we cannot create an interconnected global economy that is increasing prosperity and genuine opportunity for people everywhere, then all of our political initiatives are going to be less successful.

Clinton, the master politician, may well have taken this line in the hope of advancing his vice-president's cause with the US labour unions, especially with a view toward 2000 presidential election. Moreover, his tolerance of the protesters was obviously made easier by the careful exclusion of those same protesters from the city on the day of his speech. However, the angry response of some delegates and business leaders to his comments suggest that his modest remarks had worried his audience of governmental officials and corporate representative. Given the complete breakdown of relations between the angry crowd and the angry WTO delegates, was there any hope for a reconciliation of the two? And if this preliminary meeting had aroused such passionate opposition and such large crowds, did Seattle represent a precedent for the expression of popular opinion through direct action, rather than via a political system largely funded and controlled by elites?

The story of what happened in Seattle is worthy of closer examination, not least because many of the commentators we met in the last chapter have tried to take over this story for themselves, or to frame the issues as best they can to alienate the protesters from the millions of Americans who saw the demonstrations on television or in the newspapers. Jeffrey Garten, writing in Business Week, actually warned his readers in advance of the conference that Seattle 'is likely to be the scene of a big test for global capitalism'. With impressive inventive skills, Garten depicted the forces of global capitalism as weak and threatened, and portrayed the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and protest groups as the oppressive force in the battle for public opinion:

While governments and chief executives bore the public and the media with sterile abstractions about free markets, NGOs are sending more nuanced messages sensitive to the anxieties of local communities around the world. At the same time, they are preparing sophisticated strategies to influence television networks, newspapers, and magazines. There is plenty of evidence of NGOs growing clout. In recent years, they have changed the policies of global corporations such as Nike (over treatment of workers abroad), Monsanto (over genetically engineered products), and Royal Dutch Shell (over environmental issues) ... If Washington and Corporate America don't move decisively, NGOs could dominate public opinion on global trade and finance.

To many readers, these examples of NGO pressure might seem positive contributions, a proper public scrutiny of corporate interests. Fro Garten, however, these modest achievements portended the broader submission of business to public pressure, an outcome which led to the hysterical suggestion that NGOs might find was to influence an international media which is securely in the hands of some of the world's largest corporations. Even the readers of Business Week found Garten's warning hard to handle, complaining in subsequent correspondence that his 'surreal' vision merely proved that, rather than 'open world economy', the 'one thing the world needs is open political processes.' Garten's article was useful, however, in showing the anxiety of financial elites about the kinds of questions raised by protests in Seattle, and their effects on a broader base of public opinion.

Fareed Zakaria, ministering tot eh readers of Newsweek, acknowledged after the protests that Seattle had been a 'fiasco', and 'unmitigated disaster'. However, his editorial defended the international economy and the current mechanism of global trade in equal measure. Conveniently ignoring the fact that inequalities between rich and poor nations have increased massively in recent decades, Zakaria suggested that the 'downtrodden' people of the Third World were clamouring for the WTO and its many instruments of trade liberalisation. Moreover, Zakaria tried to indemnify the WTO from any responsibility for implementing minimum standards on labour conditions, wages and environmental concerns. 'There are other methods, treaties and organizations aimed at pursuing these worthwhile goals', he announced sophistically, as if trade and social conditions were mutually exclusive. The final weapon in his arsenal was to accuse the protesters of hypocrisy in their complaints against the WTO:

The demonstrators claimed to be acting in the name of democracy .... But, of course, not one of these organizations is in any way accountable to anyone. Most of them represent small and narrow interests that have been unable to build mainstream support for their demands. The truth is that labour unions, environmental activists and other activists are trying to impose regulations through the WTO that they were unable to persuade the United States Congress to accept.

Apart from the obvious hollowness of this charge, given the participatory and extremely democratic structure of many of the protesting organizations, there is something rather absurd about Zakaria's pique. Hailing the WTO's commitment to democracy just weeks after it voted to admit China as a full member seems rather hollow; as does the shrill boast that protesters cannot obtain the backing of a united States Congress which was, at the end of the twentieth century, more dependent on lobbyists, campaign finance and corporate influence than at any other time in American history. Instead of questioning the efficacy and reliability of these putatively democratic processes in American life, Zakaria simply smeared the protesters who'd chosen to deliver their message in Seattle rather than in Washington, DC.

Predictably, the most irate commentator on Seattle was Thomas L Friedman, whose own bible of globalisation, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, had hardly predicted this kind of popular uprising in the US. Friedman actually needed two editorial columns in the New York Times fully to expectorate his bile at the protesters - 'Senseless in Seattle', and the sequel, 'Senseless in Seattle II'. Friedman could hardly contain his anger: 'Is there anything more ridiculous in the news today than the protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle? I doubt it.' Friedman's tactics were rather different from those of Garten and Zakaria, however: his telling of the Seattle story cast the protesters as late-twentieth-century Luddites, opposing neither global inequality nor labour exploitation, but the idea of trade between nations itself. This enabled Friedman to reach some odd conclusion about the protesters' motives and methods:

What's crazy is that the protesters want the WTO to become precisely what they accuse if of already being - a global government. They want it to set more rules - their rules, which would impose our labor and environmental standards on everyone else. I'm for such higher standards, and over time the WTO may be a vehicle to enforce them, but it's not the main vehicle to achieve them.

Since Friedman refused to imagine a 'globalised' world in which standards of pay, labour conditions and environmental impact are regulated and improved, he couldn't recognise the protesters as truly international in their vision; nor could he understand why they would target the WTO, the body which supposedly regulates global trade, if the notion of regulation in and of itself has been demonised. His editorial pieces were notable for their complete inability to accept the protesters' terms, or to consider their mere presence in Seattle as valid. For Friedman (as for Garten and Zakaria), the job of the WTO is to destroy environmental or social standards which bar free movement of goods and money, even if the consequence is a rush to the basement by governments and employers, eager to produce the cheapest products regardless of their effects on workers and on the environment.

Friedman's initial editorial, written in the heat of his anger, seemed unusually intemperate and rude. In his follow-up, he acknowledged that his 'environmentalist allies' (translation: former environmentalists who now work for corporations) had suggested that 'my criticism of the protesters in Seattle was too broad-brush'. Rather like Bill Clinton, Friedman offered the vague idea that the WTO could be 'opened up', although he undercut any radical implication here by simply noting that it had 'no need' to be secretive in its deliberations. Friedman's willingness to open the WTO to scrutiny was tied to a crucial companion tactic, concerning the agenda of the protesters in Seattle. The protesters had argued that standards on labour, wages and the environment should be guaranteed internationally. Friedman, on the other hand, contended that the customer should determine such things - if customers were sufficiently vexed by low wages abroad, or by the environmental impact of a corporation's activities, they should organise ad hoc protests and change policy by their actions at the cash register. In the meantime, free trade would continue to define the global economy and environment, with only intermittent interruption from the occasional cause celebre of consumer groups.

Many objections to Friedman's solution come to mind. In the first place, corporations hardly publicise many of their abuses or cost-cutting exercises, and the notion that 'consumers' will learn of these abuses from a corporate-controlled media seems optimistic at best. The television and newspaper coverage of the Seattle events frequently suggested that the protesters were enemies of any kind of trade, and that a high proportion were engaged in violent activities during the protests. Conversely, journalists were often uncritical of the Seattle police department, even after pictures of tear-gassing and the firing of rubber bullets had reached the newsrooms. In the midst of the street protests and the 'riot-control' measures, Lou Waters of CNN concluded an interview with a Seattle police spokesperson with a cheerful sign-off: 'Good luck to you out there today.' Given this kind of soft-pedalling, it seems fanciful to suggest that corporations or governments are overly worried that the media will amplify the message of Seattle's protests to a wider public.

Moreover, 'consumers' in the richest countries posses far more disposal income than citizens of poorer countries, and this wealth entitles them to a much greater influence in any market-based regulatory system. Regulation by consumer would amount not to democratic control, but to the foundation of a one-dollar, one-vote principle at the heart of the world's political system. Should the fate of the majority of the world's people depend entirely on the consumer preferences of a small minority in Western countries? According to Friedman, undoubtedly. Finally, the impact of industry and energy consumption on the global environment is measured in climatic changes over decades, even centuries. Although most scientific experts agree that the planet is headed towards disastrous climate change, the effects of this change will be overlooked by government and individuals unless they are compelled to take a long view. Many consumer decisions are extremely short-term and fickle, and the notion of basing environmental policy on such immediate concerns as cheap fuel prices seems extraordinarily short-sighted as one views the environmental problem from a broader perspective.

The idea of regulation, then, seems absolutely necessary to combat the environmental and human disasters which loom in the coming century. Friedman, however, anticipated this thinking in his editorial, and reanimated an old demon to forestall these ideas:

Too many unions and activists want the quick fix for globalisation: just throw up some walls and tell everyone else how to live. There was a country that tried that. It guaranteed everyone's job, maintained a protected market and told everyone else how to live. It was called the Soviet Union. Didn't work out so well. In the end it probably did more damage to its environment and workers than any country in history.

Behind the protests in Seattle, then, lay a simple choice: rampant globalisation on Friedman's model, or a submission to regulation which could only lead back towards communism and Soviet tyranny. In Garten's warnings about the power of NGOs and popular protest, Zakaria's arguments that protesters were undemocratic because they couldn't afford to lobby the US Congress, and Friedman's explicit incarnation of the Red menace, the same message was apparent: at the end of the twentieth century, the only alternative to unfettered capitalism, with all its admitted faults and inequities, was a communist terror; and so there was really no alternative at all.

Although we should refrain from passing definitive judgement on the six decades since Luce's 'American Century', we can hardly avoid observing that the battle against communism has been a constant theme in American politics throughout this period; and that political debate even today, more than a decade after the Soviet Union's collapse, is conditioned by the supposed threat of socialism or communism. Although the US government has intervened heavily in its economy throughout this period, particularly in the support of military industries and through corporate tax relief more generally, the suggestion that the US should regulate the economy more closely to guarantee minimum standards of health, education and income has been anathema to generations of politicians and ideologues. Moreover, the spread of neoliberal ideology in the pat two decades has imposed this thinking on countries around the world, to the point where the American political and economic philosophy has itself become highly dogmatic, even fundamentalist. The automatic equation of unregulated capitalism with freedom, and of government intervention with communist oppression, has persuaded an entire generation that the inequities and problems of our world are irresolvable, even as those inequities and problems worsen across the globe.

An arrogant 'globalism', which upholds this single model of world development, has achieved near-total consensus in Washington; the sheer weight of evidence contradicting its claims, however, has forced the occasional insider to dissent from the general view. A few days before the events in Seattle, the chief economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, resigned from his post. Stiglitz, an academic economist who had served in the Clinton administration and the World Bank throughout the period of Clinton-led neoliberalism, was hardly a socialist; however, his departure was linked to his sense that the American commitment to neoliberalism, faithfully implemented by the World Bank, had become politically and morally untenable. In his 1999 report on Russia, which criticised the US and the IMF for their advocacy of 'shock therapy' (and which was seen by many as responsible for his exit from the World Bank), Stiglitz had addressed this point directly:

One deeper origin of what became known as the 'shock therapy' approach to the [Russian economic] transition was moral fervour and triumphalism left over from the Cold War. Some economic cold-warriors seem to have seen themselves on a mission to level the 'evil' institutions of communism and to socially engineer in their place (using the right textbooks this time) the new, clean and pure 'textbook institutions' of a private property market economy. From this cold-war perspective, those who showed any sympathy to transitional forms that had evolved out of the communist past and still bore traces of that evolution must be guilty of 'communist sympathies'. Only a blitzkrieg approach during the 'window of opportunity' provided by the 'fog of transition' would get the changes made before the population had a chance to organise to protect its previous vested interests. This mentality is a reincarnation of the spirit and mindset of Bolshevism and Jacobinism.

Not surprisingly, this kind of talk made Stiglitz very unpopular in Washington. Although Stiglitz was, according the Financial Times, 'personally friendly' with the new US Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, 'Mr Summers had to look after his constituency on Wall Street'. The financial media speculated that Stiglitz had actually resigned under pressure from his boss, James Wolfensohn; and, indirectly, at the behest of Summers, who controlled Wolfensohn's pending reappointment as World Bank president. Regardless of the extent of American involvement in Stiglitz's resignation, his departure from the World Bank removed another opponent of the Washington Consensus, and cleared the way for a resumption of the Clinton administration's global mission, to 'level the 'evil' institutions' which stand in the way of the final triumph of market 'freedom'.

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  Issue 88 contents

»	Directors Face Criminal Charges Over Super Scam
»	Call Centre Code Picks Up Speed
»	Staff Demand Action as Jobless Number Grows
»	Lifeguards to Down Togs Over Sweaty Speedo Scam
»	Hotel Workers Refuse to Raise Sweat
»	Blood on the Beds at Sleep City
»	Paint Lock-Out Claims First Victim
»	Casino Workers Seek Full Metal Jacket
»	Leichhardt Council Endangers the Public
»	Casual Teachers Break Through
»	Tide Turns on Award-Stripping
»	Workers Demand Seat on Racing Board
»	Shangri-La Faces D-Day
»	Fiji PM Appointment Illegal
»	Activists Notebook

»	The Soapbox
»	The Locker Room
»	Trades Hall
»	Tool Shed

»	Blokey Culture
»	Carr's Indulgence
»	Postcard from Delhi

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