Is This What Failure Looks Like?

In the annals of global trade policy, there is no denying that 1999's anti–World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, held five years ago next week, were a critical event. They helped inspire Third World delegates to rebel against the U.S. party line and inspired hundreds of millions around the globe, including left-leaning governments in South America. It was a shot in the arm that has led to further gridlock for the WTO and multilateral trade agreements. In the United States, the WTO protests created a debate where little debate had previously existed.

But it's one thing to shut down a high-level meeting for a day; it's quite another to get your priorities enacted as public policy. And so, in the half-decade since Seattle's groundbreaking protests, anti-globalization and fair-trade organizers in the United States have struggled to find ways to not simply create debate but win.

The Battle for Hearts and Minds

"In the first year after WTO [in Seattle], people were so energized, but there was a naive idea that we could prevail just by putting 50,000 people on the street," says Jeremy Simer, director of Seattle's Community Alliance for Global Justice (CAGJ), the city's primary inheritor of the anti-globalization torch lit by WTO. "It was a fluke here; the stars aligned in this amazing way based on months of hard work and luck.

"Since then, a lot more activists have started to think like organizers, working to educate people in their own communities in a way that's strengthening and deepening the movement. Protest continues to be important when it's needed, but it's also about reaching out and bringing new hearts and minds into the work."

"There are more of us now than there were five years ago," says Antonia Juhasz, project director for the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), a San Francisco–based think tank that was at the center of organizing in 1999. "There's been immense progress in this country. Five years ago, my task was to explain that there were institutions like the WTO, International Monetary Fund [IMF], and World Bank. Now we are facing the conundrum of being the seat of the empire. We're the last to feel the dire consequences of these institutions because they were designed to benefit us. In countries like Argentina and Brazil, they've already figured it out."

The protest success in Seattle led to a dozen or more attempts, in cities across North America and Europe, to protest economic and political summits of various sorts, beginning with an IMF/World Bank meeting in spring 2000 in Washington and going on to Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiating meetings in Quebec City, Canada; a G8 summit in Genoa, Italy; the 2000 major party political conventions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles; and a host of lesser events.

But by 9/11, the flame of Seattle-inspired protest was already beginning to sputter. While activists were attempting to create another Seattle, law enforcement was learning from what went wrong here (see story on p. 25). More forceful police (and army) tactics led to escalating, ever-more-ugly confrontations that encouraged street-battling young radicals but which discouraged the sort of middle-class, family-oriented attendees who made more recent antiwar protests larger and, in the public's eye, more credible.

The window breaking perpetrated by a few dozen anarchists in Seattle became justification in the American public's mind for violent law-enforcement measures that in turn further limited the public's sympathy for future demonstrations. At the same time, the violent protester image—the urban myth that Seattle's downtown had been burned to the ground by thousands of "rioters"—was hugely popular outside of the U.S. As one Mexican friend notes, "The attitude among people was that we didn't know you [Americans] had it in you."

Angry, even violent anti-globalization demonstrations were not invented in Seattle; in places like India and Malaysia, protesters died during the '90s in battles with police. But the Seattle demonstrations and the resulting WTO gridlock gave rise to a new generation of fair-trade activism, particularly in South America. The anti-privatization protests in Bolivia in 2000 and 2003 (the latter of which deposed the government), the fiscal meltdown in Argentina in late 2002 (which did the same), the popular protests that kept Venezuela's anti-globalization president, Hugo Chavez, in office, and a continentwide wave of elections of left-leaning leaders critical of the "Washington Consensus" are all part of a lineage that runs through Seattle. Those governments, particularly in Brazil and Venezuela, have given rise to a powerful new bloc opposed to American trade policy. In 2003, that bloc stymied WTO expansion (at Cancún) and further negotiation of the FTAA (in Miami).

Even as negotiations inside stalled, the Miami FTAA summit also showed the current limits of anti-globalization protest in the U.S.: widespread allegations of civil rights abuse, of arrests without provocation, and of buses of elderly protesters turned back by police at the city limits. Most importantly, the turnout—after months of local media hype warning of "another Seattle"—was a relatively anemic 20,000. The protests generated little national media coverage. In an era when police routinely warn of the possibility of a "terrorist" attack during any large protest, Miami was the first, and perhaps last, test of the possibility for post-9/11 anti-globalization mass protest.