Anti-globalisation warriors shift their ground: The appetite for mass confrontations at international conferences has diminished. Alan Beattie reports
By ALAN BEATTIE
Since September 11 the appetite for anti-capitalist demonstrations seems to have shrunk: neither the World Trade Organisation meeting in Doha, Qatar, starting today nor the G20 meeting in Ottawa next week are expected to produce protests on the scale originally planned.
But for those willing to recast and direct their criticism in a different way, the potential for change may be at its strongest for a decade.
Tom Spencer, director of the European Centre for Public Affairs think-tank, sums up the challenge for those continuing to seek radical reform: "Are we talking about anti-capitalism, anti- globalisation or anti-Americanism? It didn't matter before September 11; now it does."
He was speaking at a recent conference in Budapest on globalisation, hosted by George Soros, the billionaire financier, and attended by academics, campaigners and policymakers. What emerged from the conference was that continuing to conflate Mr Spencer's three critiques was to risk strong opposition. Both pro-and anti-liberalisation speakers attracted general opprobrium for appearing to do so.
Walden Bello, Bangkok-based director of the campaign group Focus on the Global South - which opposes wholesale trade and economic liberalisation - attracted strong criticism when arguing that a similar critique was applicable both to the Washington economic model of liberalisation and to capricious US foreign policy.
He insisted that the public in poor countries routinely conflated anti-globalisation and anti-Americanism. "In the third world you saw a real ambivalence about the September 11 acts," he said. "Across Asia one of the biggest-selling items has been Osama bin Laden T-shirts. He is now emerging as a rebel figure running circles round a bully."
David Hartridge, special adviser to Mike Moore, the WTO's director-general, played the September 11 card from the other side of the table: "We should be aware of elevating an atrocity into the status of an argument," he said. "Anger validates nothing."
Such comments drew strong reaction from several participants, who said being anti-liberalisation did not equal being anti-American.
One such was Susan George, born in the US but naturalised French, vice- president of the Paris-based campaign organisation Attac. Ms George said Attac's relatively specific agenda of controls and taxes on the free movement of capital were now even more relevant.
"One of Attac's demands has been a clampdown on tax havens," she said. "Up to September 11, everyone said this was impossible. Then George Bush suddenly said that tax havens were harbouring terrorists, and it became perfectly possible."
Ms George does not believe the US government has been converted to her analysis of the underlying causes of terrorism. Though distancing herself from Mr Bello's understanding of sympathy for the terrorist acts, she still regarded the US response with horror.
"As the saying has it: do not do what you want to do; do what your enemy would least like you to do," she said.
"That would be to start a genuine plan against the poverty and environmental crises which beset the planet. What they most want us to do is more or less what we are doing; bombing civilians and creating a reaction in the Muslim world."
She said she doubted governments had been shocked out of their complacency to the same extent as by the second world war, after which the United Nations was created and the US rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan. But there was, she said, at least a chance.
Indeed, the possibility of a genuine shift in the willingness to contemplate new ideas has been evident.
Blue-sky ideas including global carbon taxes to raise billions for development - floated recently by a blue-ribbon commission chaired by another Budapest conference participant, former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo - seem a little less like fantasy and more like a basis for serious debate.
But it is not clear that the loose alliance of radical anti-capitalist organisations, which first leapt to global prominence at the 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle, is well suited to put the case for change.
The irony of the situation is that much of what its members call for is more regulation - of capital movements, of corporations, and of labour markets. So the interventionist instincts that generally accompany large-scale military conflict, as well as activist responses to the global economic slowdown, may serve them well.
But some supporters recognise their tactics may not be appropriate. Changes in state policy require a more systematic engagement with the state. More likely agents of change may be established non-governmental organisations such as the aid agencies which have acquired strong advocacy and lobbying wings.
G.M Tamas, a Hungarian philosophy academic, told the conference: "The Seattle movement is a revolutionary theatre with reformist aims. It does not want to turn into a set of elected politicians. But we are having a war in which voluntarism is not in vogue.":
