Below is a response by my colleague, Matt Sparke, to the Thomas
Freidman column in the NYTimes last week (called "Senseless in
Seattle"). Thought it might interest readers, so I asked him if I could
forward it to you (he said yes!)...
 >
 > Making Democratic Sense of the Battle in Seattle
 >
 > Matthew Sparke
 >
 > Sleepless in Seattle? Certainly. But senseless? No. Sleepless probably
 > are the hundreds of protesters now locked-up. Sleepless too, one hopes,
 > are the Mayor and Police Chief as they ponder the results of their move
 > from strained but well-intentioned attempts at protecting civil rights on
 > the opening day of the world trade meetings to the draconian
 > implementation of martial law for the rest of the week. However, to think
 > that the protests against the WTO are senseless is mistaken. To assert
 > this is also to deny an opportunity for democratic debate and development.
 > The small group of twenty or so anarchic adolescents who did the worst of
 > the property damage downtown and stole the headlines from the over seventy
 > thousand peaceful protesters were definitely senseless. But their actions,
 > and the police-state retaliations, should not be allowed to foreclose
 > debate about how to make sense of what has happened in Seattle.
 > In particular the substance of the criticisms of the WTO should
 > not be ignored. Perhaps from a distance these criticisms seem like so
 > much Buchananite paranoia about the WTO as some kind of global Big
 > Brother. But on the ground, at the teach-ins that preceded the trade
 > conference and in the march organized by the AFL-CIO and joined by
 > numerous environmentalist and international groups, a far different set of
 > messages were being articulated. These were messages which in one way or
 > another recognized that the WTO is the tip of the iceberg of
 > globalization. Chauvinist angst about national sovereignty was not what
 > people around me were talking about as they marched. Instead, in a range
 > of different languages and vernaculars, the question of the day came down
 > to the dangers of laissez-faire economic globalization run amok: the
 > downward harmonization of environmental standards and wages, the
 > straight-jacketing of democratic governance, and, most of all, the
 > wholesale reduction and re-coding of nearly all aspects of life on earth
 > to the language and logic of the global market.
 > These are all legitimate criticisms and they are not naively
 > focused on the WTO as a small institution of just five-hundred people in
 > Geneva. The problem is much more about the ways in which the legal
 > protocols of the WTO provide an institutional mechanism through which what
 > Adam Smith once called the invisible hand of the market can crystallize
 > out in a series of judgements that represent the invisible hand-cuffing of
 > democracy. When Europeans express scientifically sound concerns about
 > hormone fed beef, and yet the WTO panels still rule that they have to
 > consume it, that is anti-democratic. When the US EPA is forced by the WTO
 > to re-write US clean air laws to accommodate the importation of dirty
 > gasoline, that too is anti-democratic. And when South
 > Africa and Thailand are both forced to give-up the planned production of
 > cheap generic drug treatments of HIV-AIDS, that too goes against the whole
 > spirit of democratic governance. No 'Globalization without Representation'
 > read the Sierra Club placards in the protest march, putting the point
 > about these and many other cases of democratic hand-cuffing with
 > historical poignancy for Americans.
 > Clearly, while the gurus of globalization mock from the sidelines,
 > President Clinton has already heard some of these messages and has begun
 > to respond: signing an anti-child labor agreement and urging the WTO to be
 > more transparent. And perhaps other changes in the future may lead to
 > less economistic bias within the WTO so that panels can begin to
 > distinguish between the protection of people and the environment and de
 > facto economic protectionism . But changes to the WTO itself will only
 > ever serve as crisis-management if they are not accompanied by a far more
 > radical reappraisal of how we can create global democratic
 > counterweights to global free trade. One important step in that
 > direction, I think,
 > would be to allow other global agreements on environmental protection, on
 > world health, on labor rights and on human rights to function as trumps
 > within the WTO
 > settlement mechanism. In other words, to allow countries to appeal to
 > other international agreements in the context of the trade panel hearings.
 > This would not lead to a world government or super-state at all, but it
 > would make the kinds of environmental and human rights agreements that are
 > now (like the NAFTA side-accords) so toothless much more legally
 > meaningful. It would also enable the more robust if still uneven
 > development of a global public sphere, a global place, in other words,
 > for democracy itself.
 > I told students at UW before the protests that the WTO is like an
 > onion: the more you cut through its legalized layers and cases, the more
 > you want to cry. I also said that if you want to stop crying you have to
 > make sense of globalization. Little did I expect that the eyes of some of
 > those same students would shortly be made to cry with the senselessness of
 > tear gas attacks. The sensible thing to do is not to gloat over their
 > pain, but rather to think seriously about how we can make democratic sense
 > of today's global interdependencies.
 >
 > Matthew Sparke is an assistant professor of Geography and International
 > Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.
 >
 >
 > Matthew Sparke,
 > Box 353550,
 > The University of Washington,
 > Seattle, WA 98195
 > Tel 206 543 5194 Fax 206 543 3313
 >
__________________________________

Kim England,
Associate Professor,
Department of Geography,
Box 353550,
University of Washington,
Seattle, WA, 98195-3550.
Tel: (206) 221-7988; Fax: (206) 543-3313
e-mail: [log in to unmask]


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