“Antiglobalization” Protests and the Future of Democracy
Mark A. Laffey and Jutta Weldes
These are strange times
for global democracy. According to most commentators, the past decade has been
very good for democracy. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire in
The worldwide expansion of liberal democracy is integral to neoliberal narratives of economic globalization; free trade, free markets, and free elections, it is regularly asserted, go together to produce “market democracies.” The desirability and necessity of liberal democracy is promoted and enforced through global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as international and regional organizations such as the G-8, the World Economic Forum, the European Union (EU), and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The global expansion of liberal democratic polities is thus linked directly to the continuing extension of capitalism to new spaces and the growth of world markets and multinational or transnational corporations to service them. The dominant discourse of globalization is overwhelmingly corporate or neoliberal globalization and the celebration of liberal democracy is part of it.
In the past decade, massive protests against neoliberalism have occurred at many “ritual celebrations of economic globalization” (Ericson and Doyle 1999, 589), including the WTO meeting in Seattle (1999), the IMF–World Bank meetings in Washington and Prague (2000), and the EU summit in Gothenburg and the G-8 summit in Genoa (2001) (Giuffo 2001). Defense of democracy, and calls for its deepening and enrichment, lies at the heart of the struggle against neoliberalism. As Stephanie Ross points out, “A central element of the movement’s critique of contemporary capitalism is that corporate power organized on a global scale undermines the capacity of citizens and national communities to make independent decisions about social, economic and political priorities” (2002, 281). Neoliberal globalization, in other words, “eats democracy for breakfast” (Kingsnorth 2003, 122). Protests against corporate globalization are almost invariably protests in favor of democracy.
In this paper, we explore the relations between globalization and democracy as they emerge in the struggle against neoliberalism. Dispute over the meaning of globalization and democracy is a large part of what the struggle against neoliberalism is all about. The international institutions promoting neoliberalism are dominated by the world’s most powerful states, almost all of which have democratically elected governments. These governments have responded to what they term “antiglobalization” protests by trumpeting their democratic credentials and reasserting the necessity and desirability of globalization as a remedy for problems of poverty, underdevelopment, and democracy—in their view, globalization is good for democracy. In contrast, critics of neoliberalism have questioned the empirical evidence and the theoretical models underpinning neoliberal policies and practices. Opponents of neoliberal globalization stress the ways in which democracy is undermined both in how policy is generated and implemented and in the effects of neoliberalism. Evidently, globalization and democracy are contested terms.
What our collective future will look like, and the place of democracy in it, will “depend upon the outcomes of current social struggles, struggles in which the meanings assigned to ‘globalization’ [and democracy] are central“ (Rupert 2000, 42). Analysis of the struggle against neoliberalism also throws light on the future of democracy. State responses to protests against neoliberalism—typically articulated as “antiglobalization protests—have had significantly antidemocratic consequences and implications, through the “criminalization of dissent” (e.g., Klein 2002, part 3). An oft-overlooked feature of the political dynamics highlighted in the struggle against neoliberalism is the continuing centrality of the state’s coercive functions in the context of economic globalization. Reinforcing this dynamic, protests against neoliberal globalization are also increasingly seen as a threat to state security. In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, protests against corporate globalization are increasingly defined in legislation as forms of terrorism, opening the way to the securitization of protest.2 Because of such measures, the scope for democratic freedom of expression, even in those states most often held up to the rest of the world as the best models of a modern liberal democracy, is dramatically narrowed.
This paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we locate the so-called antiglobalization movement in the long-term and worldwide critique of neoliberal or corporate globalization. We note that this “movement” is not new, is not against globalization, and is not a single movement, and that central concepts at issue in the debate over neoliberalism—notably globalization and democracy—are highly contested. In the second section, we then compare and contrast the competing conceptions of globalization and democracy put forward by advocates and critics of neoliberal globalization. We highlight the political salience of these contradictory conceptions and their centrality to contemporary political struggles. In the third section, we examine the practical implications for the future of democracy and globalization as manifested in the coercive policing of “antiglobalization protest.” In particular, we examine the criminalization of dissent and the securitization of protests through brief analyses of the policing of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Vancouver in 1997 and post–September 11 antiterrorist legislation, respectively. In conclusion, we argue that the widening impact of neoliberalism, the coercive policing of political protest, and the growing limitations on civil rights and liberties cast severe doubts on the future of liberal democracy.
Neoliberalism and the “Antiglobalization Movement”
Much discussion of the protests in Seattle and since, particularly by state managers and in the media, has stressed the novelty and the violent character of the antiglobalization movement. The protests in Seattle in 1999, when protesters briefly succeeded in halting the meeting of the WTO and helped prevent the launching of a new round of trade negotiations, are represented as the defining moment of a new development in world politics. Policing agencies, shocked and embarrassed by the initial success of the Seattle protest, stressed the necessity of using more aggressive policing to counter the violent tactics of the “antiglobalization movement.” Following Seattle, similar protests took place in rapid succession at the IMF–World Bank meetings in Washington and Prague in 2000 and the EU summit in Gothenberg and the G-8 summit in Genoa in 2001, providing further evidence of the “movement’s” power and reach. Politicians and corporate media highlighted the violent character of the protests, and media images of violent “antiglobalization” protesters confronting rank upon rank of heavily armed riot police in mass demonstrations have become increasingly commonplace.
Representations of the protests and the people making them in these terms, however widespread and taken for granted, are unconvincing. For example, the protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful. As events in Gothenberg and Genoa suggested, in fact, the state, acting through the police, is responsible for most of the violence (e.g., Callinicos 2003). There are also good reasons for questioning whether the “antiglobalization” movement is new, antiglobalization, or a movement, despite repeated claims to the contrary (e.g., Crossley 2002). Making sense of the so-called antiglobalization movement and antiglobalization protests is hampered by the systematic misrepresentation—most often by state managers and the corporate media—of the protests, their character, and motivations. In this section, we locate the “antiglobalization movement” in its proper context, the long-term and worldwide critique of neoliberalism. This in turn will enable us to consider how its evolution has shaped its strategies and state responses.
What are conventionally labeled “antiglobalization protests” are directly linked to the long-standing effort to resist neoliberalism. Over the past two or three decades, criticism of neoliberalism has emerged from a wide variety of different locations. Increasingly, the views held by organizations and movements (such as Third World Network, Jubilee 2000, Direct Action Network, Global Exchange, the International Forum on Globalization, Peoples Global Action) and campaigns against particular corporations (such as Nike) or practices (such as sweatshops)—to name just a few—have converged on a common problem: the growth and expansion of corporate globalization. Naomi Klein nicely sums up both the central issue and the rapid evolution of the understanding of what is happening to the world that drives the struggle against corporate globalization: “We’ve gotten very good at naming the problem. It’s taken a while. In the three-year trajectory that I’m writing about, it went from a critique of a few bad apple corporations, to a critique of privatization, to a critique of neo-liberalism as it’s being enforced, to a deeper understanding that this is a stage of capitalism” (qtd. in Chihara 2002). Increasingly also, these and other organizations have combined in protests and events such as the “global street party” held on May 16, 1998, to protest a variety of issues linked to the global political and economic system, its operation and consequences.
Despite the tendency to perceive this as a novel development in world politics, a perception reinforced by the success of movement histories such as Klein’s No Logo (1999) and Fences and Windows (2002), global antineoliberal struggle is not new. Protests highlighted by the media in places like Seattle, London, and Davos between 1999 and 2001 are only the latest in a long series of events expressing the genuinely global extent of opposition to neoliberalism (e.g., Shah 2003). Contemporary “antiglobalization” struggles have their roots in the “food riots” and “IMF riots” of the 1980s that protested policies of structural adjustment allegedly “imposed” on debtor states in the global South by the IMF and the World Bank (e.g., Walton and Seddon 1994).3 International media inattention to the world outside the overdeveloped North, and the protests and struggles taking place there, has generated a systematic blindness to the immense impact of neoliberalism on the South. As a result, more recent struggles in places like Seattle appear novel and are attributed a significance that is misleading and overstated. Meanwhile, “antiglobalization” protests large and small, the bulk of them outside the tunnel vision of the media, have continued apace since 1999 (Bircham and Charlton 2001). According to data compiled by the World Development Movement, since the Seattle protests in 1999 there have been more than 120 separate episodes of civil unrest in twenty-two poor countries directed at IMF and World Bank policies (Woodroffe and Ellis-Jones 2001; Ellis-Jones 2002). Contrary to representations of these protests as a novel development in world politics, then, arguably all that is new is the scale of the protests, their increasingly international and networked character, and the—admittedly welcome—media attention.
Contemporary criticisms of neoliberalism have emerged out of a long-standing and increasingly sophisticated set of efforts both to understand policies such as structural adjustment and to articulate alternatives to them. The rhetoric of “there is no alternative” (TINA for short), made famous by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher but also adopted by the international financial institutions, forced individuals, groups, and organizations opposed to privatization and debt reduction, for example, to offer alternative solutions to the problems such policies purported to address. After almost two decades of work, elements of the “antiglobalization movement” are able, through organizations like the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), to put forward a sophisticated alternative set of proposals for how the world economy should be governed, organized around economic democracy and sustainability. As a result, claims made repeatedly by proponents of corporate globalization that there is no alternative to neoliberalism, that critics are merely protectionists in disguise, or that they offer no realistic and concrete proposals, ring increasingly hollow. Indeed, neoliberalism is increasingly argued to be itself a utopian project, implausible on theoretical, empirical, and normative grounds: “To keep arguing as they do—that a system that homogenises global economic activity and culture to benefit corporations, removes power from communities and puts it into global bureaucracies, marginalizes and makes homeless millions of farmers and workers, and devastates nature can survive for long—that is utopianism. It’s not going to work” (International Forum on Globalization 2002, 32).
Seen in this light, it is immediately apparent that for many of those who participate in the so-called antiglobalization movement, the issue isn’t globalization at all. Opposition to neoliberalism does not necessarily entail opposition to globalization. The term “antiglobalization” has been routinely rejected by prominent participants in the struggle as a media-imposed description of a more complex reality. Participants in “antiglobalization protests” at meetings of the WTO, IMF, and G-8 are typically not opposed to trade or globalization per se, only the neoliberal or corporate form these currently take. Far from being “antiglobalization,” through their actions the protesters are in fact turning globalization into a “lived reality,” and one “not restricted to a narrow series of trade and tourism transactions” (Klein 2002, xv). What they want is not globalization from above, by and for the rich and the powerful, but rather globalization from below, for the vast majority who are poor and weak. To label these struggles “antiglobalization,” then, is “at best a contradiction, at worst a slander,” a better description, argues Susan George, would be the “global citizens movement” (2001).
Terms like “global citizens movement” are an improvement over “antiglobalization movement” and help clarify just who is participating in global actions such as Seattle and Genoa, but they also obscure the dynamics of what is happening. Convergence on common issues and problems—neoliberalism or corporate globalization—has not translated into either a common organizational structure or a centralized leadership. For this reason it makes little sense to refer to an antiglobalization or a global citizens’ movement. In part, this reflects the diverse origins of the different groups and organizations opposed to neoliberalism and the diverse character of the struggles in which they are engaged. Myriad differences—of emphasis, constituency, and strategy—persist. In part, too, it is also an expression of the broad-based commitment to democracy amongst the various movements opposed to neoliberalism. For this reason Naomi Klein suggests the phrase “a movement of movements” (1999).
It has become commonplace to criticize the “antiglobalization movement” as unrepresentative and undemocratic, but such representations again misrepresent a more complex reality. Significant elements of the “antiglobalization movement” are opposed to centralized leadership or the notion that democracy is synonymous with majority rule. Decision making often takes place through decentralized processes of deliberation and encompasses an explicit willingness to disagree, about tactics for example and the kinds of actions in which individuals feel willing to participate, whilst continuing to share an opposition to corporate globalization (e.g., Prokosch and Raymond 2002). In Seattle, many of the participants in the action “were organized into small groups called affinity groups. Each group was empowered to make its own decisions around how it would participate in the blockade. There were groups doing street theater, others preparing to lock themselves to structures, groups with banners and giant puppets, others simply prepared to link arms and nonviolently block delegates. Within each group, there were generally some people prepared to risk arrest and others would be their support people in jail as well as a first aid person” (Starhawk 2002, 135–36). Relations between groups, both in events like Seattle and in the “movement” more generally, are arranged in a series of more or less formal links and networks, within which particular groups and organizations retain their own identity and autonomy; hence Klein’s term: a movement of movements. The conception of democracy that emerges out of such processes is both richer than liberal democracy and defined in important ways against its perceived failings.
What is at stake in the “antiglobalization movement” and its struggle against neoliberalism and the burgeoning institutions of global governance, then, is neither “globalization” and “democracy” per se nor their absence. It is the quite dramatically different conceptions of what globalization can and should be—whether and in what ways it is inevitable, and to whose benefit it should be organized—and what democracy might mean—both in theory and in practice—that animates these movements and their critics.
For and Against Neoliberalism: Narratives of Globalization and Democracy
It is widely recognized that globalization was “the buzzword of the 1990s” (Hay and Marsh 2000, 1). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, to paraphrase Zygmunt Bauman, globalization is still “on everybody’s lips” (1998, 1). However, if “everyone” is talking about globalization, they are not saying the same thing. Analyses of globalization differ, often profoundly, over the conceptualization of globalization, its effect on the state, and its normative implications, amongst other things. There is no single account of what globalization is or what it means. Instead, we are faced with a large and diverse range of competing accounts, an ever-expanding “global babble” (Abu-Lughod 1991, 131). That said, not all discourses of globalization are created equal. Recognizing the existence of competing discourses or narratives of globalization opens up the question of how these discourses relate to one another and to other forms of social power as well as their effects. In this section, we compare and contrast the competing narratives of globalization and democracy put forward by advocates and critics of neoliberalism.
Different discourses construct globalization in different ways, producing significant material and ideological effects. Put simply, the representations that people entertain about globalization—what they think it is and how they think it works—affect how they act. When allied with economic, cultural, and political power, this can render globalization discourse a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Hay and Marsh put it, “Somewhat ironically, the very discourse and rhetoric of globalization may serve to summon precisely the effects that such a discourse attributes to globalization itself” (2000, 6). At the same time, the discourse and rhetoric of globalization may also obscure or render politically neutral the agencies and relations of power through which this phenomenon is produced. For instance, understanding globalization as simply the way the world is, as something to which we must respond, serves significantly to produce the state of affairs alleged already to exist. Many discourses of globalization work by claiming that globalization is already upon us and that we must respond to its new “realities.” In implementing the policies supposedly designed to manage those “realities,” state actors render them true, or at least increasingly true, while also making it harder to see the ways in which “globalization” doesn’t just happen but must be made to happen.
“Liberalization Works”: Corporate Globalization and Democracy
At the heart of neoliberal discourses of globalization sits a narrative of progress, driven by technological change. This narrative presents globalization as evolutionary, inevitable, and beneficial. Using “history” as his evidence, Mike Moore, former head of the WTO, stated in a speech “In Praise of the Future”: “Globalization is a process, not a policy. It’s just accelerating. Just as we went from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural, feudal societies and then into the industrial age, so today we are in the post-industrial age” (1). Governments and businesses do not debate globalization’s existence but respond to its effects. Driving this “process” is technological change, which has made globalization “a fact of life”: it is “simply the latest phase in the evolution of international business and the integration of the world economy” (Fitzgerald 1997, 739).
The most important changes—both cause and effect of globalization—concern the expansion and institutionalization of free trade. The “integration of the world economy,” driven by technology, is an unambiguously good thing, according to the neoliberal discourse: “trade liberalization and economic growth” form a “virtuous circle” (Moore, “The WTO,”2). “From the ancient Egyptians onwards the countries that have prospered—and not just economically—have been those that were open to new ideas, that traded” (Clare Short, qtd. in Underhill 2001, 2). According to The Economist, an enthusiastic globalization booster, the multinational companies that bring globalization to the developing world are “the embodiment of modernity and the prospect of wealth; full of technology, rich in capital, replete with skilled jobs” (Hooper 2001, 64). As Moore announced to a New Zealand audience in 2000: “Ladies and Gentlemen: I come to praise the future. There has never been a time in the history of our species when we have had such an opportunity to build better living standards and a safer and more secure world for all. Globalization is a part of this opportunity” (“In Praise of the Future” 1). The reason? “Liberalization works” (Moore, “The WTO,” 2).
Moreover, these benefits are virtually universal: “For the rich world, almost as much as for today’s poor countries, the next twenty-five years will be a time of unprecedented opportunity” (The Economist, qtd. in Hooper 2001, 65). Despite the recognition that globalization is developing unevenly—a recent IMF staff report acknowledges, “Some countries are becoming integrated into the global economy more quickly than others” (2000, 1)—the assumption remains that globalization will benefit the developing countries by producing economic growth. The IMF report continues: “Countries that have been able to integrate are seeing faster growth and reduced poverty” (2000, 1). Even more emphatically, Renato Ruggiero, another former head of the WTO, asserted in 1996 that “No one stands to benefit more from globalization than developing countries” because “production is now mobile, capital footloose, technology diffuse. . . . Globalization has erased the old ground rules for economic growth, providing countries, once relegated to perpetual ‘third world’ status, the tools to fast-forward their development” (1996, 3). The WTO mantra has become that “Poor countries need to grow their way out of poverty” (Moore, “Promoting Openness, Fairness, and Predictability,” 4). Achieving this end, however, requires rewriting the rules of the world economy. “Globalization,” asserts Ruggiero, “is an evolving reality. Our choice is between managing this reality and taking advantage of its immense potential, or attempting to resist the inevitable” (1996, 7).
Despite the benefits that derive from free trade—including greater international peace and harmony4—individuals and groups often have incentives to resist free trade, particularly if it threatens their established privileges in terms of exclusive access to markets, for example, or protection from competition in the provision of services. Governments too, for reasons having to do with the dynamics of liberal democratic electoral systems and election cycles, have incentives to reward their supporters and disadvantage their opponents in ways that distort the operations of the world economy. The influence of lobbyists can shape policy in ways that reduce economic efficiency. Making free trade a reality requires the reduction of trade barriers and protectionism but liberal democracy in its formal institutional expression provides means by which groups and individuals can mobilize public power to secure private benefits that hurt other producers and consumers. Imbalances of power between states put small states at a disadvantage, while enabling stronger states to shape terms of trade in ways that may benefit them whilst undermining the global efficiencies free trade produces. For all these reasons, then, it is necessary to implement a set of rules and institutional mechanisms through which the ideal of free trade can be realized.
Mike Moore explained it like this in defense of the WTO: “People do want global rules. If the WTO did not exist, people would be crying out for a forum where governments could negotiate rules, ratified by national parliaments, that promote freer trade and provide a transparent and predictable framework for business” (“The Backlash against Globalization?” 4). The past decade has seen a growing number of international agreements that taken together establish such a framework, in particular the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the FTAA, and the General Agreement on Services (GATS).5 Through these means is brought into existence “a system of multilayered global and regional governance . . . marked by the internationalization and transnationalization of politics, the development of regional and global organizations and institutions, and the emergence of regional and global law” (Held and McGrew 1998, 233). In the words of Ruggiero, speaking as head of the WTO, “We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among separate national economies. We are writing the constitution of a single global economy” (1996). The issue raised by a proliferating structure of global governance beyond the state, however, is, What happens to democracy?
Democracy in contemporary world politics is organized in territorial terms, within the context of particular sovereign states. The establishment of a global system of rules governing international trade, as both a function of past globalization and a commitment to a globalized future, potentially undermines the place of democracy in the brave new world envisaged by neoliberalism. The growth of new structures of governance beyond the state potentially puts in doubt the ability of citizens in liberal democratic societies to effectively express their preferences and exercise sovereignty. For proponents of neoliberal globalization, however, concerns about the process by which such arrangements are chosen and put in place, as well as their effects, are misplaced. From their point of view, democratic control of the process of globalization already exists. This is particularly apparent in the WTO, for example.
Recognizing that “Current trade rules affect the lives of everyone on this planet” (“The WTO” 1), Moore has been at pains to convince his audiences, “We are not a world government” (“In Praise of the Future” 4; “The Backlash against Globalization?” 4). Instead, the WTO is an intergovernmental arrangement and so is democratically accountable. The agreements made by WTO are “negotiated by Ambassadors and Ministers who represent their governments. We operate by consensus and every member government, therefore, has veto power.” Moreover, “governments are in turn accountable to parliaments” and “elected parliamentarians are the measurable and accountable representatives of civil society” (“Openness, Fairness, and Predictability,” 2). At the end of this long chain, the people still rule. Contrary to the critics of neoliberalism, then, the WTO is the concrete expression, not the antithesis, of the democratic control of the global economy. No reason to worry, then. The discourse of neoliberal globalization paints an optimistic vision of a globalized future that rests on a liberal, market-oriented, techno-utopian individualism. Neoliberal discourses have not gone uncriticized, however. What, then, is wrong with neoliberalism?
“Outing a Global System”: Anticorporate Globalization and Democracy
Opponents of corporate globalization stress three interrelated concerns (e.g., International Forum on Globalization 2002). First, against the claims that neoliberalism will produce a dramatically richer and more peaceful world, critics argue that neoliberalism cannot deliver on its promises. Not only is the empirical evidence against the neoliberal model of free trade and its effects but the understanding of economic globalization itself also is wrong or a deliberate misrepresentation. Second, there is nothing inevitable about the “process” of globalization. Instead, it is the product of particular agencies and institutions, promoting some interests over others in pursuit of a very specific and contestable future, itself only one of many possibilities. In its dominant neoliberal form, globalization is the millennial dream of corporate capital (Smith 1997). Third, against the claims that corporate globalization is an expression of democracy, critics charge that both the means by which globalization is being pursued and its consequences work against the ability of citizens to exercise meaningful democratic control over their everyday lives. At the heart of all three lines of criticism, then, is an understanding of neoliberalism as a form of political, economic, and cultural order promoted by and for corporate capitalism, not for the vast majority of the world’s people; the critique of neoliberalism amounts to nothing less than “outing a global system” (Naomi Klein, qtd. in Chihara 2002).
Protests against corporate globalization have long focused on the democratic deficits in the process by which the global economy’s new constitution is being written and cemented in place, both at the international level—in international institutions and agreements—and in the policies and practices of states around the world. For example, much attention has focused on the secretive means through which agreements like those of GATS are negotiated. A major target of contemporary neoliberal globalization is the privatization of public services, most notably public utilities, health, and education. It is difficult to organize effective resistance to these efforts if members of national and global civil society do not know what is under negotiation or on what terms. Lack of information about the content of negotiations also makes it difficult to assess the truthfulness of statements by state actors and international institutions—many of which turn out on inspection to be false or misleading—about the aims and effectiveness of international agreements (e.g., World Development Movement 2003). Meanwhile, corporate interests enjoy privileged access to policy makers and play a dominant role in structuring the terms of debate in international negotiations such as those concerning the environment, which consistently define corporations not as a source of environmental degradation but instead as part of the solution to the environmental crisis—through the privatization of services, for example (see Chatterjee and Finger 1993). Democracy, both in substantive input into decision-making processes and in the legitimization of outcomes, requires transparency and good quality information, something simply impossible if negotiations are held in secret or interested parties are excluded from them altogether.
Critics of neoliberalism have also highlighted its antidemocratic consequences. In particular, critics have been keen to highlight the authoritarian character of the WTO. The WTO is a “rule-making and rule-supervisory organization” (O’Brien et al. 2000, 137). Through its procedures, “the organization and control of vital national decisions have been gradually and irretrievably [sic] displaced from national control to a supranational organization shrouded in secrecy” (O’Brien et al. 2000, 136). Typical in this regard is the Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM). It is through the TPRM, in part, that “trade liberalization is increasingly subjecting domestic policy and regulations to the standards of the global trade regime” (O’Brien et al. 2000, 137). The WTO thus “wields unprecedented powers of surveillance and enforcement” in the areas of trade in goods, trade in services, trade-related investment, and trade-related intellectual property issues. This produces the “‘harmonization’ of (formerly ‘domestic’) rules and regulations governing business insofar as these appear, from the neoliberal perspective, as potential non-tariff barriers to trade” (Rupert 2000, 45–46). In the process, the meaning of “free trade” is stretched to cover issues and relations that range far beyond “trade” as it is more commonly (and narrowly) understood.
Neoliberal constructions of the WTO as “a rules-based, member-driven organization—all decisions are made by the member governments, and the rules are the outcome of negotiations among the members”—obscure its role as a vehicle through which an authoritative discourse of liberalization is institutionalized and imposed on the world economy. Indeed, as the Summary of the Final Act of the Uruguay Round makes clear, “The WTO framework ensures a ‘single undertaking approach’ to the results of the Uruguay Round—thus, membership in the WTO entails accepting all the results of the Round without exception” (www.wto.org). The policy choices of democratic states, in other words, are at the mercy of a distant, technocratic elite. Similar relations are apparent in the policies and practices of the IMF and the World Bank. These globalizing institutions, also bastions of neoliberalism (e.g., O’Brien et al. 2000, 189–91), impose the discourse of corporate globalization on poor states as a condition of assistance. Another, if less global, example of suprastate regulation is NAFTA. As some critics have argued, the policies of NAFTA “subordinate democratically developed standards to those created by supranational and democratically unaccountable entities. The ‘impact on trade’ would be the only yardstick for judging a large body of public laws with those who benefit from free trade as the judges” (Alternative Women-in-Development Working Group 1993, qtd. in Rupert 2000, 88).
Despite the liberal arguments praising globalization for its progressive effects on the freedom and prosperity of the individual person, understood essentially as a consumer and occasionally as a voter, globalization has thus far as often as not made things worse. This is especially apparent in relation to democracy. In a neoliberal world, democracy holds, at best, a paradoxical position. On the one hand, democracy in its liberal form is central to how neoliberalism explains and legitimates both the present state of world politics and the future. Neoliberalism equates democracy with polyarchy and defines it in an explicitly formal and institutional manner (e.g., Dahl 1961). What matters, from this point of view, is the character of the procedures through which governing elites are selected. By definition, if they are elected in free elections between multiple competing parties, governments are democratic. Policies adopted by such governments are also by definition democratic and legitimate. In the face of neoliberalism, however, such a conception fails even on its own terms. The imposition of neoliberal policies through mechanisms of global governance such as the IMF and the WTO means “the flip side of neoliberal economic policies is the global crisis in representative democracy” (Naomi Klein, qtd. in Chihara 2002). Efforts to institutionalize global free trade severely circumscribe the ability of democratic publics to determine the political, economic, and social arrangements that shape their everyday lives (e.g., Fisher and Ponniah 2003). In George Monbiot’s words, “Everything has been globalized except our consent” (2003, 1). Faced with choices between candidates and parties who accept neoliberalism as the taken-for-granted framework of policy, voters are increasingly likely to withdraw from the electoral process: Why vote when all the meaningful questions about policy have already been decided?
From this perspective, neoliberalism is not the expression of democracy, as proponents claim, but its antithesis. “Contemporary post-sovereign governance is strewn with democratic deficits” (Scholte 1997, 26). Mark Rupert puts it even more strongly: “Democracy is the unfulfilled promise of liberal capitalism,” he argues, “a promise which could not be met without calling into question the privileged status of private property, the powers of the class who owns it, and the social self-understandings of abstract individualism, which are attendant upon all of these” (2000, 5). Against the stipulated conception of democracy as liberal democracy, critics of corporate globalization such as Scholte and Rupert deploy a stronger conception, grounded in an appreciation of the historically mutable and contested nature of democracy in general and liberal democracy in particular.
There is a persistent tension in liberal democracy between liberalism—the rights of the individual person and of private property—and democracy—rule by the people (e.g., Bowles and Gintis 1986). Indeed, much of the history of Western European and North American societies is driven by struggle between these two ideals. It is in part through reflection on these histories that democracy has come increasingly to be understood not as a fixed set of institutional arrangements but as a project, as the product of political struggle over the degree to which diverse publics can participate in ordering the conditions of their lives. John Dryzek defines democratic projects in terms of scope—the range of social domains to which democracy is considered applicable—franchise—the number and character of those who may participate in deliberations about a domain—and authenticity—whether or not the deliberations take place in a clear, nontechnical language (1996, 4–6). Neoliberalism is in these terms a very thin form of democracy.
Democratic projects are also shaped by local and international relations of power. In other words, different forms of democracy are linked to the particular social contexts out of which they emerge and reflect the relations of power found there, of capital and labor, for example, or core and periphery. C. B. Macpherson and many others have pointed out that a capitalist socioeconomic order of the kind promoted by neoliberalism limits the democratic potential of liberal democracy and constrains the prospects for development beyond polyarchy (1977). The democratic deficits evident in contemporary world politics are not accidental or incidental to the rise of neoliberalism; instead, they are a reflection of the implications of a neoliberal order for the forms democratic projects can take. Applying the litmus test of democracy to neoliberalism, it turns out, is a powerful tool for “outing” the contemporary global system. Naming the beast has not been enough, however; despite temporary setbacks such as the failed effort to establish a Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the neoliberal project rolls on, promoted by governments of diverse political coloration and often in the face of large-scale political opposition. If neoliberalism is not on the ballot, or if political parties are willing to say one thing during elections and then do another once in office, voting is an ineffective means to register dissent from it. Recent resort to direct action on the part of the “global citizens’ movement,” and the emergence of the movement in the first place, is in large part a response to the perceived failings of “democratic” electoral politics.
The existence of multiple, sometimes overlapping, sometimes competing discourses of globalization and democracy highlights the political significance of these terms. “Globalization,” like “democracy,” is multi-accentual in that different interests can be and are refracted in this sign (Voloõinov 1986, 22–23). The meaning of globalization and the ability to define it authoritatively is contested because, as we noted above, the futures of world politics depend on the outcome of struggles in which the meanings assigned to globalization and democracy are central. The existence of competing visions of the future and the social forces that promote them also means that neoliberalism cannot be taken for granted but must be defended, by force if necessary. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS), released by the White House in September 2002, states unequivocally that the twentieth century issued in “a single sustainable model of sustainable success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise” (“Introduction”). According to the NSS, a central aim of U.S. security policy is to unleash a new era of global economic growth through the genius of free trade and free markets, in the service of producing a richer and freer world. The recent onset of a worldwide war on terrorism has not superseded neoliberalism; indeed, the two are inseparable.
Defending Neoliberalism: “Antiglobalization” Protests and the State
Despite the increasing sophistication and strength of the case against neoliberalism, and the growing number and organization of groups opposed to neoliberalism, recent years have witnessed neither retreat nor reform but rather acceleration of the efforts to put in place a global free-trade regime. In one forum after another, corporate globalization has become more entrenched, often aided and abetted by social democratic and labor parties—as in Britain, New Zealand, and South Africa, for example—dependent for electoral support on the very groups most disadvantaged by the privatization of public services and the adoption of free trade. Critics have also made relatively little impact on the international financial and trade institutions, which continue to celebrate and enforce corporate globalization. Looking back over two decades of largely ineffective efforts to resist neoliberalism, Naomi Klein observes, “we’re winning the argument but losing the war, because we have I think failed to really think seriously about power and how political change happens. I think a lot of us on the left still believe that it is about winning arguments, it’s about marshalling facts, being damning, just kind of auditing the record. And maybe we’re not thinking about the fact that nothing’s going to change until we really start organizing counterpowers that can be countervailing forces to the impunity we’re seeing from corporations or the state” (qtd. in Chihara 2002). It is in this context—of an increasing skepticism that governments and international institutions were in fact amenable to intellectual persuasion—that groups opposed to neoliberalism have turned increasingly to forms of direct action, both peaceful and, for a small minority, violent.
In much discussion of globalization—by both proponents and critics of neoliberalism—the role of the state in the world economy is understood to be diminishing. Globalization is about the escape of corporations from state control and this is seen, depending on one’s point of view, as either a positive or a negative development: reduced state control contributes either to greater economic efficiency as businesses make decisions on strictly economic grounds or to greater power for business over citizens as it escapes the reach of their duly elected representatives. In both scenarios, the escape of capital from the state is taken for granted. Such understandings, however, seriously misunderstand the role of the state in the world economy. Economic activity depends on the presence of public authorities able to define, defend, and ensure property rights. Currencies remain a state responsibility. Businesses also depend on the state to ensure a “good business climate,” whether in low and stable interest rates, a well-trained and disciplined labor force, or the provision of physical infrastructure, for instance. Most discussion of the central importance of the state to globalization focuses on its economic functions (e.g., Panitch 1996)). Analysis of the role of the state in the recent wave of “antiglobalization protests” in North America and Western Europe highlights the continuing centrality of the state’s coercive function in the context of neoliberal globalization. It would be a mistake, however, to see the state as simply reacting to the actions of protesters. Opposition to neoliberalism is itself a reaction to the prior use of state power to impose neoliberal policies on people and communities around the world. The state—and its various functions: economic, social, cultural, and coercive—has been and continues to be central to neoliberalism and its imposition and defense.
State “reaction” to the recent wave of “antiglobalization” protests in North America and Western Europe has taken two closely related forms: the criminalization of dissent and, particularly after the attacks of September 11 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the securitization of protest. In the process, the space for democratic expression has been significantly narrowed. We discuss these “reactions” through brief analysis of the 1997 protests at the Vancouver meeting of APEC, one of the best-documented instances of liberal democratic state policing of neoliberalism, and the impact of post–September 11 antiterrorist legislation on the right to dissent.
APEC 1997: The Criminalization of Dissent in Canada
Dramatic protests against the “democratic deficits” and distributional consequences of neoliberal globalization policies have occurred at many recent “global governance” events—at international meetings of governments, international institutions, and economic leaders. Such protests may enable host states to display—and thereby legitimate—their democratic qualities (Ericson and Doyle 1999, 591–92). A more disturbing trend in the policing of “antiglobalization protests,” however, is the growing criminalization of dissent. Through a variety of measures—including surveillance of individuals and groups before and during protests, preventive arrests, censorship of peaceful protest, and police violence—dissent is effectively transformed from a right into a marginalized and criminalized activity. This is well illustrated in the policing of the APEC summit held in Vancouver in 1997.
In November 1997 the fifth APEC summit took place at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver. An organization of eighteen states, APEC is working toward the goal of open trade and investment in the Pacific region by 2020. Already by 1997, ritual celebrations of neoliberalism such as APEC summits were a target for protest. The policing of the APEC summit in Vancouver, which subsequently became the subject of a government inquiry, revealed just how far the government of a liberal democratic state like Canada was prepared to go in defense of neoliberalism. Police forces “made illegal preventive arrests, censored peaceful expression, and assaulted protesters who were already dispersing” (Ericson and Doyle 1999, 602). Before the APEC meetings, Canadian security agencies carried out unprecedented levels of surveillance against lawful groups planning dissent. Extensive lists of security threats were compiled that included many legitimate organizations whose primary threat appeared to be a willingness to exercise their democratic rights to demonstrate. Examples included the National Council of Catholic Women, Catholic Charities USA, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, the Canadian Council of Churches, and the Council of Canadians (Pugliese and Bronskill 2001).
These threat assessments were compiled by the summit Threat Assessment Group (TAG), which included members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Vancouver police, the Canadian military, Canada Customs, and the Immigration department. It was often difficult to determine precisely why particular persons and groups had been targeted. For instance, Joan Russow, a sixty-two-year-old former leader of the Green Party of Canada, attended the summit not as an activist but as a reporter for the Oak Bay News, a local community paper in Victoria. Security staff questioned whether the newspaper existed and withdrew her press pass. However, according to the threat assessment on Ms. Russow, she was a “media person” and a “UBC protest sympathizer” judged “overly sympathetic to APEC protesters” (Pugliese and Bronskill 2001).
Other cases are more sinister, however: threat assessments were also used for preventive arrests. The TAG described Jaggi Singh, a writer and activist, as the biggest threat to the APEC summit. According to evidence produced in the RCMP’s inquiry into the policing of the protests, Singh was under surveillance before the summit and, as a “high profile” member of APEC Alert, an organization opposed to APEC and its neoliberal policies, he was targeted for arrest. On the day before the summit, Singh was “walking alone between two buildings on campus, a pedestrian area. Three men in suits said my name. They grabbed me and pushed me to the ground quite violently, saying I was under arrest. They did not show badges nor their IDs. I resisted their attempts but I’m not very strong physically, or am I a violent person. My hands were wrenched behind my back and cuffed tightly. I was trying to scream for help, but my mouth was covered by someone’s hands. An unmarked car screeched onto the scene and I was thrown into the back head-first” (qtd. in Manning 1999). Singh was driven to the RCMP detachment at UBC; on the way his captors identified themselves as RCMP officers. Held in custody for four nights, Singh was effectively removed for the duration of the summit. The charges against Singh—that he had assaulted a police officer some seventeen days earlier by pointing a megaphone at him—were subsequently dropped in February 1999, two weeks before he was due to come to trial. Nor was this an unusual outcome: according to Ericson and Doyle (1999, 595), of forty-nine protesters arrested and detained before and during APEC, only one—Singh—was eventually charged with a criminal offense.
The policing of the APEC conference became the subject of a government inquiry after complaints about the way in which dissent was handled; the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP subsequently released an extensive 453-page report (www.cpc-cpp.gc.ca/eAPEC.asp). Focusing on technical issues raised by “the policing of public order events,” the report and its recommendations overlooked the larger political context within which the events at APEC had occurred (Commission for Public Complaint against the RCMP 2001). Four years later, many of the techniques deployed at Vancouver in 1997 had become standard practice, in Canada and elsewhere. The criminalization of dissent—aimed at “antiglobalization protesters”—continued apace. In the aftermath of the shootings at Gothenburg in 2001, proposals were developed that entailed the effective criminalization of dissent in the EU by allowing for “the ongoing surveillance of any group whose concerns might lead them to take part in an EU-wide protest” (“The ‘Enemy Within’” 2001). Also in 2001, Belgium and the Netherlands proposed that the EU draw up “detailed common EU public order criteria” as the grounds for “refusing entry to EU citizens and expelling EU citizens from EU member states” (“Public Order Policing in Europe” 2001). This would be used to contain not only so-called football hooligans but also “antiglobalization protesters” and other demonstrators. The major objective was “preventing ‘known troublemakers’—what U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair at Genoa called an ‘anarchists’ traveling circus’—from leaving their own country to join in protest in another” (“Public Order Policing in Europe” 2001). The 1997 APEC debacle is not unusual but rather typical in the policing of protests against neoliberalism. Further acceleration of the growing criminalization of dissent and the emergent trend to securitize protests has occurred in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Post–September 11 Antiterrorist Legislation: The Securitization of Protest
It is often mistakenly assumed that the increased policing of political dissent evident in the state’s response to “antiglobalization” protests is largely a reaction to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In fact, most of the measures rushed into legislation in the aftermath of the attacks had been in preparation before September 11. The primary effects of the attacks were first to make it easier to pass into law legislation that previously had been subject to challenge and second to make the link between protest and security tighter. In many legislative responses to September 11, protests against corporate globalization are lumped in, either explicitly or implicitly, as forms of terrorism with very different events like the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (e.g., Panitch 2002). In equating political protest, and antiglobalization protest in particular, with terrorism—however misleading if not simply wrong it might be to make such an equation—political protest has come increasingly to be defined as a security issue. In short, protest has become securitized, with highly damaging consequences for democratic expression.
In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, major pieces of antiterrorist legislation were passed in the United States, the European Union, and elsewhere. A common feature of this legislation is to expand the array of measures available to state agencies in dealing with a range of activities deemed terrorist in nature. The qualification is necessary because, in the process, the definition of what constitutes terrorism has been both expanded and made more imprecise. As a result, it has become easier to treat public protests and demonstrations—and the persons and organizations that participate in them—as terrorist. In Europe, the main piece of legislation was the EU Framework Decision on Combating Terrorism, which passed through EU Council and the European Parliament before Christmas 2001 and came into effect on June 23, 2002.6 The Framework is binding and must be incorporated into national law in EU member states and those seeking to become members.
Article 1 of the Framework defines “Terrorist offences” to include “the following list of intentional acts which, given their nature and context, may seriously damage a country or an international organization, as defined as offences under national law, where committed with the aim of: i. seriously intimidating a population, or; ii. unduly compelling a government or international organization to perform or abstain from performing any act, or; iii. seriously destabilizing or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country or an international organization.” Under article 1.iii.e, these offenses also include “causing extensive destruction to a government building or public facility, a transport system, an infrastructure facility, including an information system, a fixed platform located on a continental shelf, a public place or private property likely to endanger human life or result in major economic loss” (qtd. in Bunyan 2002, 3). As Tony Bunyan points out, it is relatively easy to imagine circumstances in which such a definition could be made to apply to the actions of protesters at a meeting of an international organization such as the IMF or the WTO. “There are millions and millions of people who, quite rightly, want governments or international organizations (NATO, WTO, etc.) to ‘perform or abstain’ from many acts. If this ‘aim’ is furthered by demonstrations/protests that result—for whatever reason—in, for example, extensive damage to private property resulting in a major economic loss, then these people become ‘terrorists’ through the effects of their actions” (2002, 3). Further reinforcing such concerns is the failure of the majority of EU governments explicitly to protect citizens exercising their democratic right to protest from the provisions of the Framework. Notably, actions by the armed forces of a state in the exercise of their official duties are so excluded.
Similar concerns about the reduced scope for protest after September 11 are raised by the USA PATRIOT—the United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism—Act, which became law on October 26, 2001. The massive, 342-page bill was passed without committee debate or public hearings and was the subject of almost no floor debate in Congress. In the U.S. House of Representatives, amendments to the bill were not permitted. Section 802 of the Act creates the new federal crime of “domestic terrorism.” Domestic terrorism includes “acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws” if they “appear to be intended . . . to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion” and if they occur “primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.” As Nancy Chang observes, the vague and expansive nature of this definition makes it easier for federal law enforcement agencies to read it “as licensing the investigation and surveillance of political activists and organizations based on their opposition to government policies. It may also be read by prosecutors as licensing the criminalization of legitimate political dissent. Vigorous protest activities, by their very nature, could be construed as acts that ‘appear to be intended . . . to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.’” In addition, she argues, “clashes between demonstrators and police officers and acts of civil disobedience—even those that do not result in injuries and are entirely nonviolent—could be construed as ‘dangerous to human life’ and in ‘violation of the criminal laws.’” Environmental activists, antiglobalization activists, and antiabortion activists who use direct action to further their political agendas are particularly vulnerable to prosecution as ‘domestic terrorists’” (Chang 2002).
As even these very brief sketches of the legislation rushed into place in the European Union and the United States after September 11 suggest, similar conceptions of terrorism are being deployed on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, it is also apparent that the kinds of activities that might count as terrorism are sufficiently broad and loose as to encompass many of the types of actions taken by opponents of neoliberalism. As we have argued, at the core of the opposition to neoliberalism sits an overt and abiding concern about the implications of neoliberal policies for democracy. Put differently, the opposition to neoliberalism is not antiglobalization—as politicians and international bureaucrats regularly charge—but prodemocracy. In the aftermath of September 11, such protest is increasingly understood in liberal states as a threat to state security. The implications for efforts to challenge neoliberal policies, and for the future of democracy more generally, are frightening.
Conclusion: Globalization/Antiglobalization and the Future of Democracy
As we have shown, popular opposition to the policies and practices associated with neoliberal globalization is not a new phenomenon. “Antiglobalization” has an international history—even if not under that name—in protests against the IMF and the World Bank. While acknowledging this history, however, our focus in this paper has been on the recent set of protests typically highlighted by the corporate media and by leading elements within the various “antiglobalization” movements themselves. Unlike past and present opposition to the IMF and the World Bank, the great bulk of which has occurred in the developing world, these protests have also taken place in the overdeveloped states of the North. In part, this location explains the attention they have received from the global media. Within contemporary discussions of world politics, these societies—North America and Western Europe in particular—are often held up as models to the rest of the world of what a modern liberal or market democracy looks like. Analysis of antiglobalization protests and the reaction they have engendered here—in well-established liberal democracies such as Canada, Britain, Italy, and the United States, for example—helps us better appreciate the all-too-real limits of democratic expression and the control of political power in our world. It also provides a better insight into the future of democracy in a neoliberal world.
Contrary to myths of progressive enlightenment in liberal democracies, the savage policing of political protest, particularly of labor but also other marginalized groups, has long been a defining feature of public life in both the North and the South. In this sense, the evident willingness of quintessentially liberal states to coercively police antiglobalization protests is nothing new. However, as the array of social subjects rendered insecure by the ongoing processes of neoliberal globalization continues to expand, so it becomes increasingly difficult for the state not only to present itself as the representative of all its citizens but also to claim that the protests are the actions of a radical, marginal few. The emergence of a “global citizens’ movement” suggests just how wide is the social impact of neoliberalism. Perhaps this helps explain growing limitations on free speech, civil liberties, and popular protest itself, and also answers the question: “Why must every meeting of the world’s financial managers be accompanied by police tactics to stifle free speech and disrupt the opposition?” (Guma 2001). The implications of corporate globalization and the growing criminalization of dissent it seems to entail—even for those states long held up as the very models of liberal democracy—is the building of “chain link democracy” (Braun 2001, 7).
Notes
1. Our thanks to Mark Francis and the Department of Political Science, University of Canterbury, Christchurch , New Zealand, for providing the material means of production for this paper.
2. Following Ole Waever’s seminal discussion, we use the term “securitization” to mean the discursive practices through which a potential threat comes to be performed as a security issue (Waever 1996).
3. The qualification is necessary, if only to acknowledge the complexity of the relations between state managers, international financial institutions, and the adoption of neoliberal policies. For two excellent case studies, which highlight different aspects of this complexity, see Broad (1990) and Kelsey (1993); on the relations between the state and neoliberalism more generally, see Panitch (1996). Such research reveals the misleading view of the character of corporate globalization and its sources held by elements of the “antiglobalization” movement itself, something we cannot address here; see Kiely (2002) for related criticisms.
4. On claims for a peace between liberal democratic states (also referred to as “market democracies”), see Barkawi and Laffey (2001). This paragraph draws on the WTO’s own arguments justifying a global organization for the defense of a rules-based world economy. See www.wto.org.
5. Also important is the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI); but see Rosenberg (2002).
6. Our analysis of the EU Framework Decision on Combating Terrorism draws on Bunyan (2002).
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