Civil Society and the Collapse of the WTO Agenda in Seattle  

by Nicanor Perlas

There are a number of key lessons to be learned as the smoke clears around the WTO debacle in Seattle. But one lesson stands out and is now seemingly being articulated with increasing clarity and intensity especially among journalists and the economic ministers from 135 countries. For one thing, this lesson has become etched indelibly in the psyche of these economic leaders as they desperately tried, in vain, to hammer out a new trade agreement at the waning moments of the last day of the WTO summit.

And what is this lesson? It is now clear that the fate of the world is no longer to be determined by the bipolar power struggle between large transnational corporations and powerful nation states—such bipolar power that is represented in the very structure of the WTO. The defeat of the WTO in Seattle now shows that a third global force has emerged with elemental strength to contest the monopoly of world economic and political leaders over the fate of the earth. This third force is what we now know as global civil society. 

It was global civil society as the third force that actually determined the outcome of the WTO talks in Seattle. We now live in a tri-polar world of large businesses, powerful governments, and global civil society. If we are to learn the central lesson of the defeat of the powerful WTO in Seattle, now is the time to understand the nature of global civil society as the third force. And one way to develop this understanding is to flash back to another major defeat of the powers behind the WTO early last year.

The fate of the WTO talks in Seattle was actually sealed last year in Europe. Global civil society mobilized and defeated the secret and highly controversial Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI). The MAI was to be a WTO, Phase 2, or a more powerful WTO.

The powers-that-be behind MAI, the leaders of the 30 richest countries of the world making up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), had made a bad miscalculation. They thought that they could easily approve the MAI, an agreement aimed at bestowing almost absolute rights to TNCs and other investors over and above the rights of citizens and countries. The MAI would allow transnational corporations unparalleled access to the resources of a country with minimal obligations or responsibilities to that country. The MAI wanted to transfer enormous power to transnational corporations (TNCs). If the MAI were passed, then that would have seriously eroded the sovereignty of nations and citizens.

 The pushers of MAI were riding high on their euphoria over their unprecedented global victory in 1994. Then they had successfully manipulated or forced the elites of many Southern governments to usher in the age of the highly undemocratic, non-transparent, and highly inequitable World Trade Organization (WTO). They were hoping that they could do it again with the MAI. But they underestimated the organizing, advocacy and legitimacy-conferring powers of global civil society.

 On the last week of April 1998, civil society organizations all over the world were celebrating. Through Internet activism, and the many meetings of parliaments as a result of this activism, they achieved an unprecedented and massive victory over the most powerful countries in the world. An estimated 20 million of their members launched a global initiative to stop the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). And they succeeded.

The defeat of the MAI by global civil society stunned the OECD ministers. “’This is the first successful Internet campaign by non-governmental organizations’, said one diplomat involved in the negotiations. ‘It’s been very effective.’ Canadian Trade Minister Sergio Marchi remarked that “the lesson he has learned is that ‘civil society’—meaning public interest groups—should be engaged much sooner in a negotiating process, instead of governments trying to negotiate around them.”[1] Remarking on their own victory, one civil society activist remarked: The MAI is ‘like a political Dracula, [which] simply cannot survive sunlight’.[2]

 The MAI negotiations had been sidelined, waiting for the next global venue to sell itself. They thought that this would be at the WTO Ministers Meeting in Seattle, Washington, USA. However, recent developments of the past several days have shown that this hope turned out to be a nightmare.  Around fifty thousand (50,000) activists from around the world unfurled a massive protest against the WTO and any attempt to revive the MAI under the wing of the WTO. Meanwhile, millions of civil society activists, who could not be present, supported and cheered their colleagues on to victory in Seattle.

It is instructive to note the perception of the mainstream powers of this defeat of a very important initiative of the institutions behind destructive forms of globalization and the WTO. For example, in the Fall Issue of Foreign Policy. Stephen Kobrin writes an article entitled, “The MAI and the Clash of Globalizations”. This is what Kobrin has to say.

 “. . .  the story of the MAI is a cautionary tale about the impact of an electronically networked global civil society. The days of negotiating international treaties behind closed doors are numbered, if not over. A much broader range of groups will have to be included in the globalization debate, and much more thought will have to be given to how non-participants will interpret international negotiations and agreements. . . Policymakers cannot assume that all reasonable people share their assumptions and values. Not everyone believes that a constitution for a new global economy or a new international economic order is desirable. Not everyone believes that an open international economy, with free flows of trade, capital, and direct investment promotes the general welfare.  .  . .

 “. . . The Information Age gives new powers, and new responsibilities, to the wide variety of actors forming the core of the new global, electronically interconnected civil society. It is a large virtual community that unites the like-minded groups across great distances; some estimates have put the total number of transnational NGOs at 20,000. . . . As one observer of the MAI debate has noted, the NGOs have ‘tasted blood’ and will be back. No longer satisfied with simply opposing whatever proposals the negotiators happen to place on the table, there is growing talk among them that their organizations should play a direct role in drafting the agenda”. [3]

Unfortunately, the WTO did not heed the warning of perceptive participants in the on-going debate about globalization.  It isolated civil society from the negotiating process. But civil society returned through the back door and did so with a certain irresistible force. It started advancing an alternative analysis of the WTO, one that ultimately resulted in the internal fragmentation among members of the WTO.

 The United States and the European Union, for example, are having a bitter debate over labeling of foods produced through the use genetical engineering technologies. Being the largest producer of biotech foods, the US does not want labeling of biotech foods as this would threaten their exports. The European Union and other countries, including Japan, New Zealand and Australia are increasingly worried about the environmental and health hazards of producing and consuming biotech foods. In all these countries, civil society was responsible for the heightened concern over foods grown through genetic engineering technologies.

 Similarly, the US is at odds with developing economies over the issue of the application of US environmental laws as a standard for other countries to follow. The WTO, for example, recently struck down several environmental laws of the US and judged them to be barriers to trade. In one widely known case, the WTO said that the US cannot use its laws to prevent the import to the US of seafoods from developing economies that were harvested using methods that harmed endangered species. Again, civil society, especially environmental organizations, triggered the public outrage against the WTO for gutting environmental considerations in world trade.

Meanwhile in the issue of agriculture, developing economies were split over the raging battle between the US and the European Union over the latter’s continued use of agricultural subsidies to protect its agriculture industry. The EU has argued that agriculture has multiple functions including environmental protection and cultural preservation and therefore cannot be subject to the rigors of competitive trade requirements. Similarly, developing economies, including the Philippines, have argued for “special and differential treatment” for their agriculture sectors, thereby seeking for additional protection and concession for this threatened sector of their economy.  Civil society was central in developing the direction and content of these debates among the different members of the WTO.

These developments show that an important global force has emerged just in time to give hope to a tired, weary, violent and polluted world. Global civil society is cause for major concern for those who want to continue aspects of globalization and development policies and programs that are clearly unsustainable.

 Governments are not the only ones that have to adjust to the new reality. Even giant, powerful corporations now have to be accountable to the public for their business decisions.

 In January 1997 PepsiCo sold its 40% stake in a venture in Burma (Myanmar). It joined the long list of “victims” of the Free Burma Coalition (FBC), an alliance of citizens groups based in the United States. The FBC convinced Harvard University to terminate its $1 million contract with PepsiCo due to Burma’s continued violation of human rights. PepsiCo thus joined Macy’s Department Store, OshKosh B’Gosh, Eddie Bauer, British Home Stores, and other corporations who have pulled out of the country as a result of boycott pressure from FBC on their products.[4]

 More recently the chemical and biotech giant, Monsanto Corporation was subjected to a similar backlash. Over a period of several years Monsanto, a multi-billion dollar transnational corporation (TNC), worked very hard to build its image as a champion of the poor. It engaged in a high profile effort to be one of the champions of micro-credit lending for the poor.

 First it successfully became the Chair of the International Summit on Micro-credit.

Monsanto infiltrated the Micro Credit Summit, a very visible and influential forum for different business, government and civil society leaders active in the area of micro-credit for the poor. It was easy for Monsanto to infiltrate this group because Monsanto donated large amounts of money to the Micro Credit Summit to assist in the latter’s effort of eradicating poverty.

Then Monsanto tried to manipulate the widespread concern for the poor for its own selfish interest. It convinced Mohammad Yunus and the famous Grameen Bank in Bangladesh to enter into a joint venture. Grameen Bank is an institution that is world famous for its pioneering efforts in providing micro-credit for the poor. In the proposed agreement, Monsanto would sell its biotech products to the poor and Grameen would facilitate the whole process with micro-credit. Thus through Grameen, Monsanto aimed to deliver its dubious agricultural biotechnologies to the poor in their villages.

But the success for Monsanto was short lived. Environmentalists and development activists learned about the agreement and were appalled. They launched a global campaign, asking Yunus and Grameen Bank to terminate its joint project with Monsanto. They posted messages in the Internet, explaining the problems of biotech seeds and food and arguing that Grameen was ruining its own reputation by its tie-up to Monsanto.

On July 29 Grameen relented.  Its founder and Managing Director, Mohammad Yunus, announced that the Grameen Bank was pulling out of its joint project with Monsanto Corporation.  The spokesperson for the bank explicitly cited the ‘fuss’ created by civil society as the reason for terminating the project.[5]

This Monsanto fiasco was also a fiasco for a much broader attempt to subvert the ends of poverty eradication and harness global sympathies to advance the agenda of elite globalization.

With these developments, and dozens of other examples can be cited, the reality of global civil society has taken center stage. With these victories, the power of civil society is becoming more and more manifest. It is clear that global civil society is a counter-veiling force to the rapid rise of elite or undesirable forms of globalization.

In its modern form, civil society means the active and organized formations and associations in the cultural sphere. These would include, among others, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), people’s organizations (POs), academia, media, and Church groups, in contradistinction but not necessarily in opposition to the formal apparatus of governance in the political sphere and the web of business enterprises in the economic sphere. Business has economic power. Governments wield political power. But civil society uses cultural power.

Culture deals with the realm of ideas in its various diverse forms including worldviews, knowledge, meanings, symbols, identity, ethics, art, and spirituality, among others. The “cultural sphere” of society is that subsystem of society concerned with the development of full human capacities and the generation of knowledge, meaning, a sense for the sacred, art, and ethics. Culture is that social space where identity and meaning are generated. The two are inseparable. Identity and meaning give human beings their cognitive, affective and ethical orientation. In short, it is the wellspring that determines and sustains all human behavior. Loss of meaning results in a cluster of aberrant and destructive behaviors. Discovery of meaning results in greater creativity, compassion, and productivity. It is clear that the institution, in this case, civil society, which controls meaning and identity and, therefore, behavior, will have a tremendous clout in the direction and affairs of national and world society.

 The cultural power of civil society is also manifested in the kinds of questions and critiques that are now arising in the mainstream newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals of the world especially after the demise of the WTO in Seattle. The December 6, 1999 issue of Newsweek, for example, complains that NGOs, a key segment of civil society, do not always represent their constituencies. There is the question why NGOs get the right to wield so much power even if they are not democratically elected.

This opinion piece in Newsweek does not understand the manifestation of "cultural power" in the events at Seattle. When cultural power is active, it does not work in the realm of votes and elections. Rather it unveils issues connected to meaning, truth, ethics, morality, authenticity, legitimacy and so on. Since the articulation of such concerns deeply affects politicians and chief executive officers at the cognitive and behavioral levels, cultural power can have large effects in society. This is the reason why elite globalization wants to ensure that cultural life is suppressed.

Humanity’s attempt to confront the grave challenges of elite forms of globalization has resulted in a new social innovation: “global civil society”.  The emergence of civil society in the 20^th century is as significant as the “inventions” of the “nation state” in the 17^th century and the “market” in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Now the task is to answer the question: What indeed is this global civil society force? What is its size, number, geographic spread, mobilizing capability, and financial resources of global civil society?

 One clue to the vibrancy and power of civil society is number of civil society organizations (CSOs) around the world. This is very difficult to establish with precision. But the estimates are that there are over a million CSOs. Using a broad definition of CSOs that can include Rotary Clubs and so on, the US alone claims over 1 million CSOs. But let us take a look at other countries.

In Japan, for example, CSOs number in the thousands. CSOs in Japan are not very visible because the government tries to suppress civil society in Japan. Often they come in small groups — two, three, twenty-five people.

But CSOs in other countries can also number in the millions. In the US, for example, the National Wildlife Federation claims anywhere from three to six million members. Consumers International has membership of 5 million in 100 countries. The Philippines, as of last count, has around 80,000 CSOs. Around 6,000 of these are engaged in development work. Brazil and India also have tens of thousands of CSOs.

The global networks of civil society have attained a size and geographic coverage that is unprecedented in history. The International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), which advances policies and practices in sustainable agriculture, has hundreds of thousands of members through individual or national organizations situated in over 100 countries. The global network of the Friends of the Earth (FOE), a militant environmentalist CSO, claims a membership of 1 million in 60 countries. Consumers International (CI) is much larger with millions in over 100 countries. As we have seen above, one estimate places at 20,000 the number of transnational CSOs.

With this kind and diversity of influence it is not surprising to discover CSOs in the forefront of many recent historical events. It is, for example, difficult to understand the dramatic changes in Poland without realizing the strong civil society support that was given to Solidarity, the union of laborers that finally toppled the communist regime of Poland. Many mass movements in Latin America were heavily influenced by “liberation theology” and come from civil society. At least 5 of the most recent UN Summits were heavily influenced by the presence of CSOs. For example, over 39,000 people attended the parallel civil society Conference on Women in Beijing. This number was much larger than those that attended the official government summit. Over 5000 CSOs from all over the world attended the UN Conference on Environment and Development or the Earth Summit in Brazil in 1992.

 Is civil society sustainable financially? Research in this area shows the massive financial resources of global civil society.

For example, Care International, a relief agency, has a budget of $400 million, larger than the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Here is a CSO with a budget larger than a UN agency. 

But that is not unusual. The UN Commission on Human Rights has a smaller budget than Amnesty International, another CSO. Plan International, a Dutch-based global organization, has a $300 million budget, which may make it larger than UNICEF. 

The obvious access to financial resources goes on. Eight major transnational NGOs each command about $500 million of resources or a total of $4 billion. This amount is around 50% of the total funds of $8 billion available for relief. These 8 organizations are CARE, World Vision International, Oxfam Federation, Médicins Sans Frontières, Save the Children Federation, Eurostep, CIDSE, APDOVE (Association of Protestant Development Organizations in Europe).[6]

There is another kind of test. This time it is a measure of financial support coming from the same culture which spawned civil society and manifesting its values in the realm of business. Individuals are putting their values to work for sustainable development. Socially responsible investment funds in the United States have reached $1 trillion. Individuals are making conscious choices as to where to put their money. And this trend is growing. Later on we will see what kind of cultural force is behind this movement for socially responsible investing as well as green consumerism.

Civil society is clearly an emerging force in the world. Jessica Matthew adds another dimension that indicates the long-term nature of civil society’s influence with the following observations:

“Except in China, Japan, the Middle East, and a few other places where culture or authoritarian governments severely limit civil society, NGOs’ [non-government organization] role and influence have exploded in the last half-decade. Their financial resources and–often more important-their expertise, approximate and sometimes exceed those of smaller governments and of international organizations. . . . Today NGOs deliver more official development assistance than the entire U.N. system (excluding the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund)”. 

 Matthews’ point is well taken if we recall the budgets of Plan International, CARE International, and Amnesty International. Ibrahima Fall, head of UNCHR, therefore cannot be blamed when she noted bluntly in 1993, referring to the declining support for the UN: “We have less money and fewer resources than Amnesty International, and we are the arm of the U.N. for human rights. . . . This is clearly ridiculous.”[7]

A recent study done at Johns Hopkins University is even more astounding. CSOs have mobilized over $1 trillion for their work all over the world. In some countries like the Netherlands, more than 10% of all those employed are working in CSOs.

 The triumphalism of capitalism, as ostentatiously displayed in Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History, was misguided. Even Fukuyama himself, in his sequel, Trust, was already concerned that capitalism was starting to eat up the social capital of society. Without trust, social capital is weakened. Without social capital, the productivity of the economy suffers.

If we take a broad sweep of history and view it from the perspective of the emergence of global civil society, we come up with a different and more exciting vision of the future course of humanity. This vision differs from the current one where a new world order, basically the large-scale creation of political and economic elites, would dream of imposition a dictatorship of materialism and egotism around the world.

Since the 15^th century, there has been a significant process of emancipation of the three subsystems of society. And this process of emancipation is a grand preparation for the current global emergence and diffusion of a threefold social order, where three key actors — civil society, government, and business, are determining the direction of the planet as we all enter the new millennium.

In 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia formalized what was unconsciously emerging, with an elemental force, into the plane of world history: the birth of the nation state. The invention of the nation state was meant to reduce the incidence of wars among the diverse ruling powers of Europe. But this nation state had a tenuous relationship with cultural powers, especially the Catholic Pope. It also dominated economic life. However, it marked the birth of a form of polity that dominates the modern age—the form of the nation state. With the birth of the nation-state, we find the emancipation of polity from the prevailing social modes of that time.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, we see the emergence of Adam Smith and the 19th century classical economists. This marked the emancipation and emergence of the market, a powerful innovation in the realm of the economy. Of course, at that time, the emancipation of the economic realm via the market, was actually still constrained within the context of an all-powerful state like it was in Germany. Civil society was not too visible, except in the form of the academia and the various religious institutions.

In the subsequent centuries since their birth and most of the decades of the 20^th century, both the state and market have become the dominant driving force of the world. Higher values and strivings in life, which were nurtured in the realm of culture, were reduced to commodities in the sphere of laissez faire economics and to mere power plays in the arena of a totalitarian polity. And both aberrant political and economic forms were then transplanted by force through colonialism and imperialism in the other countries of the world.

In our time, at the end of the century, we are actually witnessing before our very eyes the emancipation of culture through the powerful activity of global civil society. It is from this broad sweep of history that emboldened us earlier to describe the emergence of civil society as the most important social innovation of the 20^th century.

This emancipation of the cultural life of the planet is going to play a significant and powerful role for the whole direction of human evolution. And this role is intimately connected with the introduction of threefolding processes in pursuit of a comprehensive form of sustainable development at all levels of social phenomena.

[1] “Civil society net activism defeats investment agreement” Globalization Review, Volume 1, Issue 2, p.2.

[2] Kobrin, op.cit. p.105.

[3] Ibid., pp.99,106,108.

[4] Bray, J. 1997. “A Web of Influence”. Downloaded from the Internet, p.1.

[5] “Grameen Bank ends tieup with Monsanto”. SUNS #4264, Thursday, 30 July 1998

[6] Simmons, op.cit., p.92.

[7] Matthews, J.T. 1997. “Power Shift”, Foreign Affairs, January/February 1997, p. 53.