By E. J. Dionne Jr. c 2001 The Washington Post Company May 8, 2001; Page A23
Protesters demonstrating against economic globalization at summits and international bank meetings have become punditry's easiest targets.
Some of the assaults just rip off talking points left over from the 1960s: These are said to be spoiled sandals-and-beads rich kids who bellow about the environment and Third World poverty with no sense of responsibility.
The more substantive argument holds that the global economic system is here to stay. Efforts by outsiders to improve labor and environmental conditions in poor countries will be counterproductive because they'll stall or foil needed investment to create jobs. These jobs, while low-paying, are better than any that citizens in those countries can get now.
Finally, there's the inevitable effort to cast workers in the Third World and in the wealthier countries as intractable foes. It's argued that the real agenda of the anti-globalizers, especially in the labor movement, is to preserve high-paying jobs in the well-off countries.
Some of these arguments should be taken seriously. What's bothersome is the arrogant dismissal of globalization's critics by those who cast free trade as a holy cause rather than simply an economic arrangement.
In fact, we owe two if not three cheers to the demonstrators and their allies, because they are asking the most basic political questions. Who benefits from the global economy, who doesn't, and what can be done to make the arrangement fairer? How will power be distributed in this new system, and what values will it promote?
Supporters of free trade are broadly right when they say a global economy is inevitable in some form and that simply blocking the flow of investment and trade would increase rather than decrease poverty. It's also true that an auto parts worker in the United States making $50,000 a year does not want his or her job to disappear to a country where an employer can pay $5,000 a year for the same work.
The globalizers say the system works because it raises living standards even in the country exporting jobs. There is some evidence for this. But it's not inevitable that all those displaced $50,000 workers get a decent break once their jobs are gone.
The more sensitive globalizers say fairness requires affording such workers better opportunities to make the transition to new jobs and insurance against the risks they're being asked to bear on behalf of the whole economy. Progressive globalizers suggest universal health coverage, wage insurance and other measures to ease the burdens of change.
The problem: Those programs are never put in place. In the current budget debate in the United States, there's talk of only baby steps toward universal health coverage, and no talk about wage insurance. The current battles over trade are, as Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, puts it, simply a form of "collective bargaining" between those who benefit from the free movement of investment and those who don't. Those who are hurt are holding out for -- well, let's call it a New Deal.
Critics of globalization also make the essential point that the global market is not as free as it looks. Politically powerful groups -- think, just for starters, of farmers, sugar producers and, more generally, investors -- build all sorts of government protections into the system for themselves. But the politically powerless -- for example, sweat-shop workers in countries that lack full democracy and freedom of association -- barely receive even the most basic guarantees against abuse or unsafe conditions. The anti-globalization campaigners are calling attention to this disparity of power.
Their efforts to achieve at least some harmony in rules across borders on labor and environmental protections are desirable -- and, as the free trade agreement negotiated by the Clinton administration with Jordan shows, possible. Yet Frank notes that many among the most ardent free traders resist approving the accord with Jordan. "We're accused of putting concern over the environment and labor ahead of trade, but in the Jordan treaty, we've achieved both," he says. "Now, critics of the Jordan treaty are saying it's more important to resist environmental and labor protections than to have free trade. So who is really anti-trade?"
Of course many of the street demonstrators lack a plausible, fully worked-out alternative to the current global system. That misunderstands their task, which is to raise doubts and press for alternatives. If those who govern the global system don't come up with better ones, the movement against it will grow.:
