Big Nongovernment
The splendid Benaroya symphony hall, built with donations from Seattle's prosperous global firms, was crammed over the weekend with an impressively global assortment of globalization's critics. Along the sleek slate-and-steel hallway, activists from five continents clustered by the latte bars: African campaigners for debt relief, Brazilian defenders of rain forests, Indians opposed to neocolonial investment, European haters of beef hormones, Canadians concerned about everything.</br></br>Inside the auditorium, a marathon teach-in was underway, convened to denounce the World Trade Organization as "one of the world's most powerful, secretive, undemocratic and dangerous bodies." And yet this festival of activism suggested a rather different notion. Perhaps the activists themselves are the real stealth world government?</br></br>Last time trade liberalizing talks were launched, in Uruguay in 1986, 12 nongovernmental organizations registered to observe the process. But the reach and clout of NGOs have since expanded marvelously, courtesy of the Internet. NGOs set the agenda for the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, and lobbied governments to attend; they publicized the Chiapas rebellion in Mexico in 1994, so preventing the Mexican government from suppressing it violently. Three years ago Jessica Mathews, now head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, suggested that centuries of governmental dominance might finally be ending.</br></br>If that was plausible three years ago, it now seems even more compelling. In 1997 a loose alliance of 350 NGOs from 23 countries set out to ban land mines; they soon persuaded 122 nations to sign on to a treaty. In 1998 another NGO alliance, this time reckoned to number 600 groups in nearly 70 countries, sank a painstakingly negotiated treaty on multilateral investment. This year yet another coalition, known as Jubilee 2000, led an international lobbying effort for Third World debt relief. During the recent budget fight, Jubilee pressure had much to do with the congressional Republicans' last-minute assent to provide money for debt cancellation.</br></br>Fresh from those victories, the NGO community has descended on Seattle to take on the international trading system. Many of the lead players from previous NGO victories are there; they greet each other in hallways with the camaraderie of veterans. Their rhetoric paints the World Trade Organization as a proto-government possessed of frightening power, but their own clout is just as striking. The WTO has a budget of just $80 million a year and a staff of fewer than 500. NGO coalitions wield more money and have thousands of expert delegates in Seattle.