First published in FEED, 11/99.

What do the United Auto Workers, the Sierra Club, and nameless vandals in black ski masks have in common? Not much, actually, which is why it’s surprising to see them all together protesting the current round of World Trade Organization talks in Seattle. The amassed protestors represent a broad spectrum of views: The WTO should be given the power to enforce labor issues; it should have its power to lower tariffs stripped away; it should be made more transparent; it should be abolished. The central fact currently uniting these incongruent positions is the WTO’s secrecy and lack of accountability. And yet, if the protestors manage to force the WTO to become more accountable to the citizens of the countries it represents, two things will happen: The WTO will become more a part of the emerging world government, not less; and the differences between the protestors who want to improve the WTO and the protestors who
want to destroy it will break out into the open. Both of these things would strengthen, rather than weaken, the WTO.

The WTO has consistently maintained that it is not part of a world government, but that claim is just an expedient fiction. Cross-border trade is a classic governmental issue, and an organization with the power to set and enforce rules on world trade is a de facto governing body. Like the European Union and the International Olympic Committee, both of which endured crises this year occaisioned by their back-room dealings, the WTO has a crisis of legitimacy on its hands. It began life as GATT, the
General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, with a mandate to set rules but no enforcement powers. (Unsurprisingly, laws with no cops didn’t make for much of a system.) In response, the WTO was formed, giving it both the ability to make rules and some ability to enforce them, though without any real transparency. This may be an efficient way to proceed, but of course efficiency without oversight is a recipe for pure self-interest
to carry the day. The challenge now presented in Seattle is to open the process to input from the people whose lives will be affected.

But democratizing the WTO will not provide all the protestors what they want, because they want such different things. Reformers only make common cause with revolutionaries when things are so bad that the differences between their position are blurred, and if the WTO addresses the protestors’ demands, it will quickly become clear that the central difference between the groups in Seattle is between those who accept that globalization is not going away and those who don’t. Globalization is not a program being advanced by a cabal but a by-product of changing costs. When shipping costs fall in a manufacturing economy, international trade rises because the number of suppliers is less bounded by geography; when communications costs fall in an information economy,
international trade rises even faster because geography becomes even less important. The WTO did not start this process, it does not control it, and it could not end it even if it wanted to.

International trade can only be shaped — not stopped — and arguing about what that shape should be is a task of Solomonic complexity. The protestors who want to improve the lives of Honduran workers making sneakers bound for the US are not likely to find common cause with labor unions who don’t want US sneakers (or steel, or cars) made outside the US at all. Environmental groups might not like increased popular input
into the WTO’s decisions, because most of the people affected by the WTO care more about raising wages than drowning turtles. The people talking of abolishing the WTO will be least happy of all, since reform and compromise are the enemies of revolution. The WTO is at a crossroads: If it does not open up, the rising tide of protest will strip it of its legitimacy and perhaps derail the current Millennium Round. However, if they don’t panic in the face of public expression of real grievances, and if they
find some way to give the protestors a seat at the table, the WTO will enter the Millennium Round as a strengthened institution rather than a weakened one.