Marchers commemorate the Battle in Seattle and protest the World Trade Organizations Ministerial meeting in Geneva last week. Photo: Janae Schiller
Pedestrians braving the icy winds that cut through downtown Portland, Ore. last Saturday witnessed what would have at first appeared to be a random assortment of activist sentiment. The crowd of protesters – filling the street sidewalk-to-sidewalk for about a block and a half – carried signs expressing their dissatisfaction with everything from corn ethanol to healthcare to global warming. Timber industry union members marched alongside black-clad anarchists. Ten-year-old kids held signs that claimed 9/11 was an inside job and their grandparents followed with t-shirts reading “I paid more for this shirt than most corporations pay in taxes.”
This flare-up of dissent didn’t come out of nowhere. Those gathered actually did have a common purpose, and it was two-fold: to ask for radical change in trade policy from the World Trade Organization, which met in Geneva last week, and to commemorate those who did the same ten years ago at the infamous Battle of Seattle.
Actually, “ask” is too mild a verb for what happened in Seattle in 1999. The World Trade Organization is an international panel of industry and government representatives that designs trade policy with little or no regard for the environmental or labor issues that come with it. When the WTO convened in Seattle for its ministerial meeting in 1999, 50,000 protesters took to the streets to express their disapproval. They formed human chains and physically blocked the path of delegates on their way to meetings, and the attention they drew to the WTO’s doings actually slowed its expansion for years to come.
Union workers, environmentalists, health-care reform advocates, anarchists and dozens of other groups united in opposition to the WTO. Photo: Janae Schiller
As it turned out, the WTO greatly underestimated the power of these groups to organize. As activists who were at both the Seattle event and the demonstration that took place last weekend noted, ’99 was really the first time in protest history that “turtles and teamsters” – environmentalists and union members – united under a common cause. Even if many of them hadn’t ended up getting tear gassed and hauled off to jail, that was a development worth paying attention to. It meant that institutions like the WTO were causing problems that go beyond the loss of American jobs or pollution or third-world hunger, that the idea behind the whole system – placing profits over people – was finally identified as flawed.
Unfortunately, this is not how the Battle in Seattle is usually remembered. Activists describe a unified front of citizens fighting for justice while being pushed at on all sides by cops in riot gear. Those who didn’t participate saw the news coverage and believed those activists were a bunch of domestic terrorists standing in the way of free trade and progress. This rhetoric hasn’t changed – last week, when 5000 protesters in Geneva gathered to oppose the WTO meetings there, the media focus was on the car burning and looting caused by a small number of those demonstrating. Meanwhile, peaceful protests took place all over the world and were largely ignored by the press. Portland’s event (dutifully covered by the Willamette Week), was well organized, with a website and the endorsement of 80 separate interest groups.
Despite the popular support, those who were expecting something like Seattle ’99 in Portland ’09 would have been understandably disappointed. The rally, organized in partnership with the local police department and billed as “family-friendly”, drew a crowd of 700 that together generated just enough venom to allow passers-by to dismiss the whole spectacle as a gathering of wing-nuts. It lacked a goal beyond commemorating Seattle and expressing a wide range of disagreement with war, environmental destruction, job loss, bank bailouts and just about any other problem that can be tied back to the WTO and free trade. Although it was a good outlet for the collective frustration of people from across the region, many were left wanting more.
Sentiments and solutions to world trade inequity ranged from anarchy to simple WTO reform. Photo: Janae Schiller
It would be easy to blame the gradual decline in protest activity (and its mainstream acceptance) since its heyday in the 1960s on the flaccidity of the current generation, the success of new crowd-control tactics or even a change in the political reality. The truth is, as usual, more complicated. Young people are finding a more effective voice in the online realm than in direct action on the streets. Thanks to cell phone cameras and other technology, cops have a much harder time getting away with the unnecessary use of force. And despite the change in political leadership, the WTO has permeated the trade negotiation process to a level that it couldn’t when it was only four years old back in 1999.
When it comes down to it, the Battle of Seattle took place at the right place and right time both to generate widespread participation and make an actual impact on trade negotiations. Those conditions are not likely to occur again, and they definitely didn’t in Geneva or Portland last week. That doesn’t mean activists are becoming irrelevant or that the WTO has to become a permanent part of the political power structure. It just means that marching and sign-waving may not be enough this time.
This woman, like many at last Saturday's protest, was also present at the infamous Battle in Seattle in 1999.
Over the past decade, the WTO has liberalized trade to the detriment of developing nations and the benefit of global conglomerates with control over media, agriculture, consumer goods and just about everything else. But, at the same time, there have been positive new developments in the ways we think about trade. “Fair Trade” has become a household term, and, thanks to the economic crash, people aren’t as trustful of schemes to liberalize markets as they once were. There’s a palatable sense of outrage over the way the overall economy is structured. Let’s hope that the next ten years provide more opportunities to harness that outrage to bring compassion and responsibility to global trade.
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Tuula Rebhahn is a freelance farmer and food security advocate. She grew up in Oregon, where she recently received undergraduate degrees in Environmental Studies and journalism. Immediately thereafter, she escaped to Canada for a practical education as an apprentice on an organic farm on Vancouver Island. Tuula enjoys being on the move; her travels have included Central America, the Galapagos Islands, Europe, and South India, where she spent three months as an intern with an agricultural NGO. Her passions include writing, cooking, eating, goat-walking, and plotting the local food revolution. She proudly blogs for Conducive as well as at notulips.blogspot.com.
“We don't just vote in the ballot box, we vote for the kind of world we want every time we choose what to eat." –Alice Waters
It is nice to see people working together on something like this to try and make a difference in a decision usually they are left out of .This helps show the rest of the world Even though we are a free country .We are sometimes Left out of the decisions and regulations that imposes laws and regulations on us.It is a lot like communism,even though originally, it was always intended for the people to be over the government,not the government over the people,today you see on television many parts of the world Who despises and hates Americans.Let along would like to kill us ,But as for American citizens, we have a little or nothing to do with most of the decisions Coming from our beloved gov’t .
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