[smygo] For Now, A Global Movement Is Stymied
Clore Daniel C
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
For now, a global movement is stymied
By Boston Globe Staff, 9/30/2001
This article was based on reporting in Los Angeles, Washington,
New York, and Boston, by Sue Kirchhoff, Elizabeth Neuffer, Robert
Schlesinger, and David M. Shribman of the Globe Staff.
WASHINGTON - The plans, on both sides of the barricades, were in
place. Protesters were organizing demonstrations, preparing mobile
kitchens, and dreaming up ways to disrupt the meetings of world
leaders and financiers. Thousands of police officers, with
reinforcements from up and down the East Coast, were being mobilized.
A nine-mile fence to keep demonstrators away from diplomats had
been ordered.
This was going to be the weekend that the nascent antiglobalization
movement rocked Washington and the world.
Several hundred diehard protesters clashed with police near the
White House yesterday, but their numbers were drastically lower -
and their actions much less disruptive - than had been expected a
month ago.
Since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the political climate in the
United States and around the world has changed dramatically.
Washington has gone on war footing. The World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund canceled their annual meeting. And a
movement that before the terror struck seemed as if it might give
shape to a new kind of global politics has been dealt a severe
blow.
Now the antiglobalization movement, always a loose, awkward, and
deeply uneasy alliance of idealists, ideologues, and idiosyncratic
groups, is in tatters.
Some members have veered off to form a base of the post-Sept. 11
peace movement. Some, horrified at the congruence between their
critique of American power and that of terrorists, have withdrawn
from public activities. [What congruence is that? -- DC] Many have
simply returned to their individual efforts. And the largest,
richest partner in the movement - organized labor - has diverted
its focus to rising unemployment and assisting the victims of the
attacks.
''A growing frame in people's consciousness was global inequality,
the global economy, corporate globalization. And within that frame,
we were gaining on them,'' said Russ Davis, director of the
Massachusetts chapter of Jobs With Justice, a group supported by
labor. ''September 11th just wrenched that frame, pulled the rug
out from under the movement, and now the dominant frame is war,
foreign policy.''
Deep fissures have been exposed in a coalition that had included
both veteran peace activists and old-line, blue-collar defense-industry
workers.
''You can fairly say that the globalization movement is divided on
the issue of war,'' Davis said.
After the attacks, Mobilization for Global Justice, the Washington
umbrella group that had been organizing protests for this weekend,
met to debate whether to continue the protests, to transform them
into antiwar protests, or to cancel them altogether.
In the end, the group called off the street protests. It was a
decision ''that was very controversial internally, but was a decision
that was concensed,'' said Adam Eidinger, an activist based in
Washington, D.C., using the consensus argot of the movement.
''The influence of unions and environmental groups in the Mobilization
for Global Justice made it difficult for that coalition to shift
gears very quickly to become an antiwar organization,'' Eidinger
said.
Union members and environmentalists had been drawn into the coalition
because of their specific issues, Eidinger said, and did not
necessarily share their emphasis on social justice.
Those activists who favored an antiwar mobilization decided to go
ahead and hold smaller-scale protests in Washington this weekend,
trying to shift the focus from war to what they call the ''root
causes'' of terrorism - causes they believe lie in the injustice
that had been driving the anti-corporate globalization movement.
''The message has been shifted a little bit, but the links are
clear between issues of justice - economic justice being an integral
part of justice in general - and the search for peace and security
in the world,'' said Nadine Bloch, a D.C.-based activist, who added,
''You know the old saying, `No justice, no peace?' I think that's
what we're seeing in action now.''
Strange bedfellows:
a raucous coalition
This was, from the start, an unlikely coalition.
There was the Ruckus Society, a group based in Oakland, which trains
demonstrators in civil disobedience. There was United for a Fair
Economy, a Boston organization that conducts seminars on taxation.
There was Tute Bianche, from the Venice region of Italy whose
members wear white chemical suits as a way of emphasizing the
''invisibility of citizens with no rights or power.'' There were
the black bloc anarchists, the masked, black-clad activists whose
tactics include destruction of property.
There were left-leaning think tanks like the Center for Economic
Policy Research, which is funded by foundations, and libertarian
research and lobby groups like the Cato Institute, which has
substantial corporate funding but which also criticizes the
multinational institutions. And there was labor: the AFL-CIO.
Their critique of American life hasn't changed; they still argue
that the globalization of the economy has put high-paid American
workers in competition with foreign workers who make a fraction of
their wages. ''Masses of people are being subjugated, are being
trodden upon by the few who are accumulating inordinate wealth at
the expense of our livelihood, at the expense of our quality of
life,'' Bloch said.
Many of the protesters argue, moreover, that American consumer
culture has become empty, and that American life is dominated by
corporate special interests that have no respect for the environment,
individual rights, or personal freedoms.
''We see ourselves for the globalization of social justice, of
human rights, of environmental protection,'' said Stephen Kretzmann,
an analyst with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.
''We're against the idea that the profit motive has to be the way
that the global development choices are made and the path of
societies internationally are taken.''
Members of the antiglobalization movement want international
institutions like the World Bank and the IMF to represent the
interests of poor nations rather than big corporations and to be
more open in their operations - or they want the abolition of the
World Bank and the IMF. They want to re-energize public participation
in American democracy - or they want an entirely new political
system. They want the news media to relay their concerns free of
corporate bias - or they want their own, independent publications
and broadcasts.
Though many of these activists believe these causes live on, most
have come to the reluctant conclusion that the Sept. 11 terror
attacks have prompted many Americans to move on.
''This is a dramatic event,'' said Neil Watkins of the Center for
Economic Justice. ''It changes the political climate and raises
the issue of how do we keep getting [out a] message ... that was
really starting to resonate in a dramatic way.''
Still, optimists in the movement believe their cause will seem even
more appealing once the furor over terrorism subsides.
''The institutions themselves are continuing on an everyday basis
as they always have to approve the same bad projects and policies
that they have been all along,'' said Carol Welch, a policy analyst
with Friends of the Earth. ''So our work continues unabated.''
A disparate group
hits the brakes
With their progressively more disruptive demonstrations - in Seattle
in 1999, Prague in 2000, Quebec City last spring, and Genoa in July
- the antiglobalization movement seemed, for a time, to be remaking
global politics, forcing powerful figures and institutions to hunker
behind chain-link fences and prompting corporations and foundations
to reexamine their policies and priorities.
Individuals and groups within the movement were always, however,
as complex and contradictory as the global economy itself. They
decried high technology, for instance, and yet their activities
were in large measure organized and promoted through the Internet.
They luxuriated in their status as outsiders, and yet one of their
principal warnings - that debt is strangling both developing nations
and the world's economy - has been expressed by both the pope and
a former Republican Treasury secretary. They were skeptical of
global institutions, and yet they were quietly building a global
force of their own.
Now they are facing a world in which security concerns put mass
street protests in an entirely new light.
''What's primarily different is street protests and the tactics
that have been employed,'' Kretzmann said. ''It's very clear that
it's going to be hard to try to pull together the same kind of mass
demonstrations that we have in the past in the future, for a wide
variety of reasons, not the least of which would be our concern
for the civil liberties of the protesters.''
He added: ''In a time of tension and conflict as we're in,
confrontational tactics can easily backfire.''
That is a realization that organizers of this weekend's antiwar
events are wrestling with. Even protesters who favor tactics of
anonymity and direct confrontation said in one of the meetings in
recent days that they are encouraging people, as Eidinger put it,
''not to wear masks, not to dress up, not to use militant tactics,
even not to burn American flags.''
For many of these activists, street protests are a showy tool but
not the only one. Many of the groups will now focus on other tactics
they have traditionally employed:
letter-writing campaigns, lobbying Congress, pressuring multinational
institutions, even door-to-door canvassing.
Many activists say that while their issues may have been obscured
by the terrorist attacks, they have not been erased.
''In a way, nothing's changed: All the problems that created the
globalization movement still are there,'' said Mike Prokosch,
globalization coordinator of United for a Fair Economy in Boston.
What won't be there for a long time, he and others say admit, are
the raucous street protests that accompanied their movement. Or
the international spotlight they enjoyed.
Those died Sept. 11.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 9/30/2001.
-- Dan Clore mailto:cl...@columbia-center.org
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