PageWTO and What Went Wrong
In the rush to judgement, the temptation to conclude that everything went wrong in Seattle is hard to resist. After all, deep divisions over the agenda even before the ministerial began were brushed aside in the vain hope that they could be overcome through intensive negotiation and bargaining in which the parties typically "deal" at the eleventh hour under the pressure of a looming deadline. However, US Trade Negotiator Charlene Barschefsky's contention that the 11 complexity and novelty of the issues stretched the capacity of governments" is only a starting point for understanding what went wrong. The real reasons actually go much deeper.
It has been said that success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan. In this case, however, just the reverse holds. The negotiators, the Americans in particular, over reached, giving insufficient attention to the depth of resistance from their EU counterparts as well as the developing countries, losing touch with the intensely political and above all domestic nature of the process which each government present had to address. But they were not alone.
In a deeper sense, the "battle of Seattle" was a backlash against globalization, ironically, in a city and state which has profited more than any other in the U. S. from the process. However, here we are dealing with the difficulty of defining an abstraction which for many - for better or for worse - has become the personification of the multinational corporation. For the "oversimplifying" albeit well-intentioned protester the multinational corporation is the villain in the piece - the purveyor of pollution and violator of labor laws, or where none exist, the exploiter for profit of poverty-stricken populations. Conversely, albeit paradoxically - for the oversimplifying government official in many developing countries, the multinational corporation brings the unwelcome baggage of the high labor and environmental standards which threaten the local corporation.
Sorting out the reasons for this paradox of dual perspective can be very difficult , although the facts are relatively straightforward. In effect, the very corporations that the protest groups railed against in the streets of Seattle are committed to enhancing environmental and labor standards in developing countries as they have been forced to do in the advanced countries in recent decades. Thus, for example, if we look at the maquiladoras along the U.S-Mexican border (U.S, Japanese, Korean companies), they are not only providing jobs for Mexicans, but set the standard that Mexican companies must match regarding labor conditions and environmental priorities. And while the protesters failed to take this reality into account - either being ill informed or for fear of destroying the rationale of their opposition - so did the governments of many developing countries which feel threatened by them, although for the opposite reason.
However, this is only part of the story. U.S. government trade officials, in particular, failed to see the forest for the trees, failed to understand that trade liberalization was a political process in the deepest sense of citizen and interest group participation, not merely a negotiating process among representatives of sovereign states in which popular sentiment was secondary. Nor, in retrospect, was it realistic to expect that a one time event would suffice for an agenda as ambitious as the Millennium Round or that a deadline would "impose a deal" - as if by fiat as it had so often in the past when weeks, indeed, months of prior efforts had failed to appreciably narrow the gap in key areas such as agriculture and services. Finally, the confidence that, right up until the last minute, an agreement could be salvaged proved terribly misplaced, so much so that no one bothered to devise a fallback plan for failure.
The mantra "that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed" holds only if the parties believe that "any agreement is better than no agreement." This time, however, the conventional wisdom proved wrong. In a curious way, the demonstrations outside the convention hall and the trade deliberation inside fed off each other, reminiscent of how mass protest in the past has shattered shaky political assumptions. In this case, resistance in the streets stiffened resistance by the "have-nots" in the hall who chose to walk away from what they viewed as a bad agreement.
Finally, the perception that the WTO had perhaps come too far, too fast in too secretive a manner was evident, albeit exaggerated. The WTO, whatever the ambitions of its founders and the breadth of its agenda, is stretched thin, hobbling along on a $70 million a year budget, hardly the out-of-control "colossus" its detractors have painted it as. Indeed, many delegations, including the EU, were of the view that the assumptions underpinning how the WTO itself goes about its work were in need of re- examination. The WTO cannot ask others to practice openness and transparency without doing so itself. Overcoming the boomerang effect of Seattle, will not be easy, nor will the lessons learned be easily applied. One thing, though, is for sure policy-makers will have to start paying greater attention to the public mood and warning signs of resistance, rather than simply plunging ahead on the basis of principles which may make sense in the abstract but which stretch the body politic beyond its limited capacity to absorb change. A temporary "timeout," as called for by Ambassador Barschefsky, is clearly in order and in everybody's interest. When negotiations begin again in January, the tempo needs to change in keeping with the mantra that "slow and easy does it every time."
Also to be kept in mind is that the WTO operates by consensus. In Seattle, 135 individual nations negotiating 11 across the board" proved to be too unwieldy a formula for progress. To be successful, future negotiations will have to address issues sector by sector before inter-sectoral trade-offs can take place, while limiting the parties to those directly concerned and instituting a method of proxy balloting. Unlike the maiden (1996) WTO ministerial in Singapore, the most conspicuous failure at Seattle was that of APEC members to maintain even a semblance of solidarity (as they did in the realization of an information technology and subsequently a basic telecoms agreement) despite their pledge to do so at Auckland, and thereby provide effective leadership across the developmental divide.
Has globalization met its Waterloo in Seattle? Hardly! But what can the private sector do to make it respectable again? Firstly by beginning a campaign to educate the public, garnering popular support by providing a balanced picture of globalization, including its drawbacks as well as its benefits; secondly, by meeting the challenge of globalization "head-on" and "clear-headed," as many multinationals are already doing in leading the way toward a better tomorrow for the world's "have-nots."
John Barry Koich (Ph.D. Columbia University) is adjunct Professor of Political Science at Hanyang University Graduate School of Asia- Pacific Studies. He ha, written for the New York Times, The South China Morning Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and other publications
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