|
| |
|
| |
| Responding
to the anti-globalisation protesters 
What I think of as "antiglobalisation.com" has become the world's most successful internet-enabled service industry. Someone, it appears, does know how to use the internet. The question confronting governments is how best to respond to the protests. Policing the violence is a duty but it is not enough. In a recent Personal View (FT, August 20, 2001), Felix Rohatyn, investment banker and former US ambassador to France, suggested a new Bretton Woods conference, to include "representatives of the developing world as well as of the developed world; it would also include representatives of non-governmental organisations and private sector leaders". Such a conference appeals to the sadist in me. To put several hundred such people in a big hotel with instructions to "determine the facts behind the assertions of anti-globalisation protesters" and "recommend policies to address the most contentious issues" would be great fun for outsiders. It would be like watching scorpions in a bottle. It is wrong to imagine that the protesters agree even among themselves. There are strong tensions between organised labour and campaigning non-governmental organisations; between people who want to protect national autonomy and those who want to override it; between those who want to save the environment and those whose main aim is development; between those who want to protect traditional ways of life and those who wish to upset them; and, of course, between those who want reform and those who seek a revolutionary transformation. Some protesters are self-interested. Others are idealistic. What they share is only their enemy: liberal capitalism, or "corporate globalisation". The collapse of communism, it turns out, liberated the utopian left to dream dreams, free of the burden of "real existing socialism". But it also created a mood of euphoria among supporters of the free market. For that reason alone, protest is valuable. Reigning orthodoxies need to be challenged. Those in charge of the world's leading market economies have a duty to respond. I suggest eight priorities. First, leaders need to recognise and react to the sources of the present disquiet. Some protesters worry about looming environmental catastrophes; others lament the prevalence of extreme poverty. Neither problem has been created by economic globalisation. But policymakers need to explain why this is the case and, as important, how they intend to allay both of these anxieties. Second, the rich countries must admit that they have failed to help large parts of the world, notably Africa, to take off into sustained growth. Nobody has the answer. Certainly, no institution can impose success from outside. But a start could be made by cancelling official debt, though only for those countries with demonstrated performance. In addition, there needs to be a greatly expanded programme of research into tropical diseases and agriculture - and resource transfers for human development, particularly for basic education and health. Grant aid must be a part of any new package. Third, leaders need to recognise that some aspects of the global economic process have worked poorly. This is true, above all, for financial markets. The Tobin tax on financial transactions cannot be implemented. It would make no useful difference if it could. Yet financial market liberalisation does need to be done with care. More important, there has to be a procedure for dealing with unmanageable debt burdens. Highly indebted countries should not stagger, like zombies, for years. Fourth, countries should, for the most part, be allowed to decide their priorities and policies for themselves, even if the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank or, for that matter, Greenpeace and Oxfam, disapprove. Imposed conditionality almost always fails. Outside agencies should merely be free not to support what they consider either unworkable or immoral. Carrots should also be preferred to sticks: if rich countries want children in poor ones to go to school, they should be prepared to pay for the schooling and compensate for the forgone income. Fifth, advanced countries must at last act in accordance with their own stated principles. Liberalisation of imports of textiles and clothing was a commitment of the Uruguay round of multilateral trade negotiations. Virtually nothing has happened so far. Agricultural trade remains massively distorted by irrational trade barriers. Agreement on a liberalising agenda for a new round of multilateral trade negotiations at the forthcoming ministerial meeting in Doha is essential. Sixth, NGOs are right to complain about the excessive intrusion of narrow corporate interests into policymaking. Exactly the same complaint can, of course, be made about the intrusion by NGOs themselves. But people are naturally suspicious of any process in which sectional interests appear to dominate. For this reason, inclusion of so-called trade-related intellectual property into the World Trade Organisation was a political blunder. It is an example that should not be repeated. Seventh, the legitimacy of decisions imposed by the high-income countries is questionable. A global democracy does not exist. But leaders of the Group of Seven should regularly meet the leaders of the world's biggest developing countries to form a consensus on necessary reforms. Eighth and most important, leaders should realise that they will never satisfy the protesters. Democratic politicians are accountable to electorates, not to the street. Demonstrators are entitled to pose questions. They cannot be allowed to impose mistaken answers. http://www.ft.com |
