Truth Only Becomes True Through Action

The Meaning of Seattle

Walden Bello

01/12/2009

Opinión

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Before 1999, the momentum of globalisation seemed to sweep everything in front of it, including the truth. But in Seattle, ordinary women and men made truth real with collective action.

It is now generally accepted that globalisation has been a failure in terms of delivering on its triple promise of lifting countries from stagnation, eliminating poverty, and reducing inequality. The current deep global downturn, which is rooted in corporate-driven globalisation and financial liberalisation and the ideology of neoliberalism that legitimised them, has driven the last nail into the coffin of globalisation.

But things were very different over a decade ago. I still remember the note of triumphalism surrounding the first ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Singapore in November 1996. There, we were told by representatives of the U.S. and other developed countries that corporate-driven globalisation was inevitable, that it was the wave of the future, and that the sole remaining task was to make the policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the WTO more "coherent" in order to more swiftly get to the neoliberal utopia of an integrated global economy.

Indeed, the momentum of globalisation seemed to sweep everything in front of it, including the truth. In the decade prior to Seattle, there were a lot of studies, including UN reports, that questioned the claim that globalisation and free market policies were leading to sustained growth and prosperity. Indeed, the data showed that globalisation and pro-market policies were promoting more inequality and more poverty and consolidating economic stagnation, especially in the global South. However, these figures remained "factoids" rather than facts in the eyes of academics, the press, and policy makers, who dutifully repeated the neoliberal mantra that economic liberalisation promoted growth and prosperity. The orthodox view, repeated ad nauseam in the classroom, the media, and policy circles was that the critics of globalisation were modern-day incarnations of Luddites, the people who smashed machines during the Industrial Revolution, or, as Thomas Friedman disdainfully branded us, believers in a flat earth.

Then came Seattle. After those tumultuous days, the press began to talk about the "dark side of globalisation," about the inequalities and poverty being created by globalisation. After that, we had the spectacular defections from the camp of neoliberal globalisation, such as those of the financier George Soros, the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and the star economist Jeffery Sachs. The intellectual retreat from globalisation probably reached its high point over two years ago in a comprehensive report by a panel of neoclassical economists headed by Princeton's Angus Deaton and former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff, which sternly asserted that the World Bank Research Department—the source of most assertions that globalisation and trade liberalisation were leading to lower rates of poverty, sustained economic growth, and less inequality—had been deliberately distorting the data and/or making unwarranted claims.

True, neoliberalism continues to be the default discourse among many economists and technocrats. But even before the recent global financial collapse, it had already lost much of its credibility and legitimacy.

What made the difference? Not so much research or debate but action. It took the anti-globalisation actions of masses of people in the streets of Seattle, which interacted in synergistic fashion with the resistance of developing country representatives in the Sheraton Convention Centre and a police riot, to bring about the spectacular collapse of a WTO ministerial meeting to translate factoids into facts, into truth. And the intellectual debacle inflicted on globalisation by Seattle had very real consequences. Today, the Economist, the prime avatar of neoliberal globalisation, admits that the "integration of the world economy is in retreat on almost every front," and a process of "deglobalisation" that it once considered unthinkable is actually unfolding.

Seattle was what the philosopher Hegel called a "world-historic event." Its enduring lesson is that truth is not just out there, existing objectively and eternally. Truth is completed, made real, and ratified by action. In Seattle, ordinary women and men made truth real with collective action that smashed an intellectual paradigm that had served as the ideological warden of corporate control.

* Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines and a senior analyst with Focus on the Global South. This article first appeared in YES! magazine. (Source: Focus On Trade, Number 147, 30 November 2009).

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