The Guardian (London) | By Madeleine Bunting | April 26, 2004
May Day had become a fixture on the anti- globalisation movement's calendar - and on the Met's. The bashing up of a McDonald's and large amounts of police overtime seemed to have become spring rituals of the new millennium. No longer. The May Day Collective announced on its website that this year it was calling the protests off. It cited heavy police harassment and lack of interest.
It was interpreted as the final nail in the coffin of the anti-globalisation movement by some who had always looked on the big protests of Seattle, Prague and Genoa with contempt. We have more important things to worry about now than Starbucks and Nike, the critics concluded, dismissing the protests against lifestyle brands as the politics of a generation of rebels with more pocket money than causes. Their view was that the threat of dirty bombs in western cities had wiped such self-indulgence off the media map.
There were always many who looked forward to dancing on the grave of the anti-globalisation movement. It was too chaotic. It defined itself by what it was against but had no clear idea of what it was for. It got entangled with unsavoury anarchist elements out for a punch-up. It had a habit of alienating potential allies by accusing them of compromise. In short, it had all the characteristics of any radical movement, but while baby boomers fondly remembered 1968, they had nothing but scorn for the challenge the anti-globalisation movement presented. Leftish commentators whom one might have expected to be sympathetic such as John Lloyd and Charles Leadbeater went out of their way to dump from a very great height on the ferment of ideas that were lumped together under the anti- globalisation banner.
What is true is that 9/11 and the war on terror wrought major change on the anti-globalisation movement, but we're a long way off death notices. First, the spotlight of media attention was abruptly switched off after 9/11. Today, sub-Saharan Africa attracts little attention while Iraq explodes. The fact that Ethiopia is spending $ 35m a year on debt repayment rather than on HIV/Aids and clean water programmes struggles to get newspaper coverage. The demonstrations around the IMF/ World Bank meetings at the weekend attracted a fraction of the publicity they did a few years ago.
Without that media space, the anti-globalisation movement has changed. It has lost some of the more violent fellow- travellers for whom the publicity was always the point. It has continued to develop its own media and public forums where - and this is the most important of all - it has grown up. It has given itself a proper name, the Global Justice Movement, and its thinking on a wide range of issues from the reform of the IMF to trade has become more sophisticated. The "50 years is enough" slogan of its campaign to abolish the Bretton Woods institutions has given way to understanding that the imperative is reform rather than abolition. Similarly, trade and the WTO are not inherently evil, but can be reshaped to serve the interests of developing countries. At the last World Social Forum in Mumbai earlier this year, 170,000 activists (the biggest attendance yet) gathered to debate and deliberate in what is by far the most powerful expression of global civil society.
But the crucial point is that time is on their side. The arguments of the Global Justice Movement can only gather strength, even though the media may only intermittently pay attention. The instinct for justice is too deeply embedded in human nature and global inequality is too grotesque for the agenda to be overwhelmed even by the consuming fears of the war on terror - however imperfectly and falteringly that agenda is achieved.
Those who have campaigned on development for decades see how the issue captures mainstream attention periodically. In the late 90s, it was an unusual alliance of, among others, churchgoers and western anarchists that succeeded in pressing an ethical argument about personal responsibility. They established the link between patterns of personal consumption, corporate power and global chains of exploitation. It became a mainstream commonplace that you had a responsibility, however extenuated, for the working conditions of those who had stitched your trainers or grown your coffee. Corporations have tiptoed round the issue ever since. The campaigning led to major improvements in debt relief and the politics of the World Trade Organisation were transformed - the developing countries' bloc in Cancun last autumn would have been unimaginable in the mid-90s.
Next year could be one of those points where, once again, the media's attention is grabbed and forced to focus on the global justice agenda - on Africa. Britain is in the hot seat, holding the EU presidency, and hosting both the G8 and the European Social Forum in 2005. NGOs are lobbying for Blair's Commission on Africa, which holds its first meeting next week, to be the lever for a Marshall plan for Africa. The continent continues to pay billions of dollars in debt repayments even though poverty is increasing and life expectancy is declining.
Help for this 2005 breakthrough could come from an unexpected quarter. A slim volume by Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Choice, published in America last month,has been eclipsed by the sensa tional revelations of Bush's warmaking, but in the longer term Brzezinski's blueprint for a Democratic American foreign policy may prove a turning point.
As Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, this former cold warrior had a reputation as a hawkish conservative, but now he is arguing that America's security is best ensured by establishing the legitimacy of its global hegemony. It must work with multilateral institutions and play by their rules. Its power must be seen to be exercised in the interests of a global common good, not just narrow self-interest if it is to win the allies it needs to fight terrorism: "The more callous America appears towards global suffering, the more recalcitrant the world becomes towards American leadership," he writes, adding that America will have to make "sacrifices for the global good". Brzezinski has considered carefully the arguments of the anti-globalisers, and while he may differ fundamentally from them on the desirability of American power, he acknowledges that a shrinking, ageing western population with a lion's share of the world's wealth fuels the bitterness and resentment of developing countries. America has a choice: domination through force, which can ultimately never ensure its security; or leadership of a global interdependent community.
Brzezinski inserts back into the war on terror its linkage with global inequality. Not the crude "poverty breeds terror" arguments that were floated after 9/11 - and just as quickly crushed by stories of Osama bin Laden's family wealth. But rather a pragmatic "security requires global justice" agenda that might just galvanise electorates on both sides of the Atlantic, and kick the ongoing debates of the Global Justice Movement on global governance, trade, aid and debt, back on to the mainstream agenda.The Guardian (London):
