Understanding anti-globalisation

Protestors are in fact the flower children of globalisation

N Chandra Mohan

Understanding the anti-globalisation protest movement is not easy. There is a temptation to dismiss the whole bunch as a noisy rabble who lay siege to summit venues like Seattle, Davos and Genoa. Not only do they grab attention, they also determine the terms of the debate on globalisation. The renewed interest in the Tobin tax and Naomi Klein’s No Logo exemplifies the power of the anti-globalisation movement to influence public discourse.

Terming the movement as anti-globalisation, however, is a misnomer. These protestors — one million of whom took to the streets during the last 18 months — are, in fact, the flower children of globalisation. They materialise from all corners of the world at all important summit locations, leveraging the resources of the World Wide Web. A flotilla of ships carrying them will thus descend on Doha for the World Trade Organisation talks in November.

The backlash against globalisation has both a social and economic component, of which the former is often understated. According to Professor Jagdish Bhagwati, feminist groups at Seattle denounced globalisation for harming women. Social anthropologists support the cultural status quo, allying with Jose Bove (who vandalised a McDonald’s vend in France) and Shiela Copps, Canada’s culture minister, to oppose those who root for change.

As for the economic component, the movement is represented by the likes of Black Block which violently opposes any form of private property. At Genoa, public places had its slogans declaring class war. Then there is the Slow Food movement which opposes American fast food. They also include the British group War on Want or France’s Attac which is campaigning for a Tobin tax to raise resources for development projects in the third world.

Clearly, the anti-globalisation movement has diverse strands and cannot be treated as monolithic in nature. Yet the starry-eyed globalisers choose to do exactly that and end up not addressing their serious concerns. According to The Economist’s latest essay on ‘Globalisation and its critics’, these protestors have an aversion to capitalism: a deep suspicion of markets and a strong collectivist instinct, which is not quite socialistic in nature.

This is valid, perhaps, for the anarchists but not the more serious development-oriented groups who espouse causes like the Tobin tax as part of a campaign on world poverty. Indeed they are doing exactly what The Economist is urging them to do — notably, “to address the scandal of third world poverty.” The fact that their agenda is “far more productive” is precisely why the tax proposal has dominated European discourse.

With their ears to the ground, powerful Euro politicians like the French prime minister, Lionel Jospin and German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder have lent support to the Tobin tax. Their motivations obviously are political. Jospin faces an election next year in his bid for the presidency and also seeks to influence the terms of the debate on globalisation. The Belgians too have done their bit to ensure that it remains on Europe’s agenda.

What is the Tobin tax? Why has it become so important for the Europeans? Thirty years ago, James Tobin, now professor emeritus at Yale University, responded to the troubled times in the aftermath of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, with the US dollar in disarray during the early 1970s. He proposed a tax on foreign exchange transactions to curb excessive speculative transactions so as to stabilise exchange rates.

Unlike the anti-globalisation protestors, Tobin didn’t think that the IMF-World Bank represented evils of capitalism. His objective was to limit speculative transactions and the tax proceeds were to be used for World Bank activities rather than development projects in poor countries. Yet, according to campaigners, a 0.1 to 0.25 per cent tax on forex trades of $1.8 trillion a day raises $100 bn to $300 bn a year to fight world poverty.

The surprising fact is that the anti-globalisation movement has elevated an impractical idea which “throws a spanner in the works” to the level of a global debate. War on Want thus claimed that Indians, Swedes, Short and Soros are all in favour of the Tobin tax. This in turn forced Soros to clarify his stand that it wouldn’t work: there were too many problems with taxing derivatives and questions of how and whether to enforce the tax.

European finance ministers who met recently at Liege also rejected the Tobin tax, but Belgium’s finance minister Didier Reynders proposed that it should be studied in a report on ‘Responses to the challenges of globalisation’. Neither he nor the prime minister Guy Verhofstadt are any great fans of the Tobin tax but domestic political compulsions dictate the need for a closer dialogue with the anti-globalisation movement in Belgium.

This hullaballoo on the Tobin tax would not have come to pass if the idea was a downright loony notion or just a campaign for moral upliftment by the anti-globalisation movement. The point is that these proposals are well-founded. A mere rabble could not thrust this matter to the forefront of public discussion which, by the way, has reached a stage where even the IMF’s MD Horst Kohler is not averse to examining it!

The iconic status of Naomi Klein’s No Logo also supports the general point that the concerns of the protest movement deserve to be addressed seriously. Her argument that brands represent a “fascist state” in which everyone gives a Sieg Heil to corporate logos; that the world is one in which MNCs controls newspapers, TVs, retail spaces, leaving no room for criticism and forcing a “grey cultural homogeneity” has struck a chord.

The starry-eyed globalisers would typically denounce all of this as anti-capitalist babble but couldn’t it also be a voice that seeks to preserve social, economic and political diversity? Perhaps a more satisfying way of looking at such protest movements is through the prism of the turbulent 1960s — the flower children who rebel, denounce, lay siege to summit venues to focus attention on burning socio-cultural and economic issues which make the globalised world a better place to live in.