It’s the easiest thing in the world to dismiss those who protested in Seattle as irrational–and, for that matter, selfish. The case for free trade is one of the rare propositions in social science for which there is empirical proof. By encouraging nations with widely differing economic, social and geographical characteristics to specialize in the production of what they do best, trade maximizes total prosperity. For poor people and poor nations in particular, the right to trade their goods freely is an essential way of improving life chances. The historical record is clear; periods when world trade has been more rather than less free are associated with economic growth. And growth is not an abstract phenomenon. For a shopkeeper in India it means an electric fan to ease the blistering heat; for a farmer in Kenya, a mobile phone to check the latest crop prices.
Put solely in those terms, it’s hard to see why anyone sensible could be against free trade. But the protesters in Seattle had a broader target in their sights; not trade as such, but the word of the 1990s–globalization. It’s a truism to say that globalization means different things to different people. For some the term is wholly benign; it describes a world in which technologies have rapidly shrunk the cost of distance, so that goods and services can be produced and distributed on a global scale. As we all become linked in a global economic web, so we will all understand each other better. For others globalization is a plot by multinational companies, which can source their production wherever the costs are lowest, encouraging nations to shred their social safety nets in a “race to the bottom.” Some critics would go even further, and insist that greater prosperity is not an unqualified human good–at least, not if it means the destruction of threatened habitats and the disappearance of traditional lifestyles.
A number of factors have sharpened the recent criticism of globalization; all were on display in Seattle. First, for many outside the United States, globalization is simply Americanization–a process by which the world is shaped according to the tastes and priorities of large American companies, from Microsoft to McDonald’s. The only surprise about modern anti-Americanism is that anyone should be surprised by it. The United States is, as the French say, a hyperpower; it dominates the world politically, economically, militarily and culturally. The United States may be (as Americans fervently believe) a uniquely benign hegemon, but since Eden, the little guys have resented the big ones. Yet one of the paradoxes of today’s world is that some of the most outspoken opponents of globalization are themselves American–union members in declining industries, environmentalists, consumer-rights activists. As Norbert Walter, chief economist of Deutsche Bank, argued recently in The New York Times, many Americans use globalization as a convenient scapegoat for issues that “primarily warrant debate within the United States”–like income inequality. But neither inside nor outside the United States would the Seattle coalition have been able to make headway without benefit of this truth: globalization makes anti-globalization possible. The Internet, virtually free telecommunications, cheap travel–all of them have been used to mobilize forces against what is seen, however fairly or not, as an agenda set by and for the benefit of the powerful.
Where does this leave us? If we are wise, we can learn two lessons from Seattle. First, history is not a smooth progress toward the sunlit uplands of a world safe for commercial interests. Capitalism is the greatest producer of wealth that the world has ever seen, but it is a profoundly destructive force, too; it changes familiar habits of work and leisure. One would have thought that this was well understood–at every stage of the development of capitalism since (at least) the 17th-century English bourgeoisie stood the known world upside down, those threatened by change have fought back. Luddism, Marxism, turn-of-the-century American progressivism, all of them were manifestations of a popular unease at the power of the market. Why did anyone think that globalization–the most advanced form of capitalism (for now)–would be any different?
Second, there is a desperate need to make the case that globalization is not a purely commercial phenomenon. It is the new technologies that allow distance learning; that enable doctors in New York to perform, by means of sophisticated robotics, operations in Thailand; that bring the suffering of the poor world into the living rooms of the comfortable. Globalization is not–need not be–merely a way for the rich to get richer and to hell with the rest. If it took broken windows in Seattle to get that message across, the price will be worth it.
