(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The government's fierce opposition to those who criticize liberal globalization is a direct consequence of its growing rejection of public opinion. Therefore, opponents of globalization are also characterized as "genetically" violent. In the same way as in the former Soviet Union, where dissidents were sent to psychiatric hospitals.
The spectacular demonstrations against globalization must not underestimate other forms of deeper resistance originating in social movements and unions in both the south and the north: Indian peasants in the fight against Monsanto's biopratery, the landless association in Brazil, the world women's march, the fight against privatization in Latin America, against layoffs commanded by stock exchange rates, or for workers threatened by business relocation.
In addition to these, we have non-governmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders, and a number of organizations for fair trade, for ethical finance, for deletion of the national debt and for taxation of financial speculation.
Until the mid-1990s, demonstrations against globalization "by capitalist recipe" rarely developed into violent conflicts between protesters and police. Since then, the meeting between protesters and police has developed into a kind of seemingly inevitable and predetermined ritual. Each time, law enforcement transforms the summit cities into a security zone under the control of thousands of riot police. The meeting buildings and the surrounding areas are closed off in an exaggerated attempt to be precautionary. In Quebec, and even more grotesquely in Genoa, the entire city was shut down.
But every time what one feared – or perhaps wanted – fights happen between police and protesters. And each time the police violence becomes harder, this was especially evident in Prague, Nice, Quebec, Gothenburg, Barcelona and Genoa where one was killed and more than six hundred injured. The testimonies of brutality against and even the mistreatment of non-violent protesters who practiced civil disobedience – all while the police did not care about gangs of professional crushers – are particularly disturbing. Many representatives of non-governmental organizations admit that they have lost their "democratic virginity", that is, the belief in the possibilities of working with democratic methods in democratic countries.
Time for revenge
Why this tightening of the authorities, which leads to a local and temporary restriction or revocation of the right to demonstrate? How to explain that activists from thousands of organizations around the world, organizations that express pacifist, religious, ecological and ethical ideals and traditions, who fight for the third world, for a fairer world order, for democracy, for the environment, have become "undesirable" in the eyes of the government, and being treated like wild hordes of invaders and mobs?
I think there are two important reasons.
The first is linked to the success of the anti-globalization movement: the defeat of the Multilateral Investment Treaty in October 1998 and the failure of the Millennium WTO Summit in Seattle in December 1999. For rich countries, these were two losses of great symbolic value because they touched two of the by capitalist globalization; the "freedoms" of finance and trade. The defeat of the multilateral investment agreement was particularly painful because it was the result of a government decision in one of capitalism's foremost countries, France, which was just put under pressure from popular protests. The collapse of Seattle was also an intolerable event: it showed in broad daylight that the majority of governments in the so-called developing countries shared much of the criticism that the opposition in the north had made against globalization. And it is thanks to what has since been called the "Seattle people" that these governments finally took the courage to say no to continuing the negotiations that they would otherwise have had to accept.
Americanization of the world
These two victories have ethically discredited the practice and principles of "lords of capital". On the other hand, they have made the fight for "other globalization" credible. This is unacceptable to today's leaders, and has become an important factor in their increasingly harsh repression of peaceful demonstrations. When they can no longer explain such demonstrations as "folklore", and do not want to take responsibility for police violence – Genoa is a prime example of police provocations – and when for good reasons they can not reject opposition to today's globalization as "unscientific", there is only one solution: to criminalize the opponents. When they do this, they hope to legitimize their own violence and delegitimize the activities of a large part of the social movements and non-governmental organizations to which they also try to challenge representativeness.
The second reason is linked to a key aspect of globalization: that the United States is the only military, technological, economic, political and cultural superpower. The United States is the symbol of today's world-wide capitalism, and carries with it an imperialistic logic and a world order that gives them control over the various societies in the world.
The opposition has made it clear that the globalization we have seen in the last 20-30 years is primarily a result of the US military and economic power, and of the socio-economic and cultural changes that the US has caused and that have spread in greater and lesser degree to all countries (China included). This globalization consists mainly of ideological, technological, military and economic Americanization of the world community. It was not necessary to wait for the collapse of the Soviet Union to notice that the globalization of markets, capital, production, consumption, etc. was a "product" of the United States' worldwide presence through the US Army, US Navy and US Air Force. This presence has paved the way for the globalization of Coca Cola, IBM, Levi's, Walt Disney, Ford, GM, ITT, McDonald's and closer to us Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, AOL-Time Warner, Citicorp, Wal-Mart and Fidelity.
In such a context, any anti-globalization demonstration is perceived as a resistance to the world capitalist system itself by a growing number of US leaders and its "allies." And as opposition to the United States since the United States and its "allies" to the extent that the United States is the regulatory force in this system. This was also enough for the Pentagon and other sectors in the United States to develop and spread the "theory" of the "genetically determined" violent nature of the opponent of globalization. According to this theory, the attack on the current world order, its rules, institutions and legally elected governments is also an attack on democracy. These are therefore necessarily "violent and criminal" opponents of democratic order, in short "the new barbarians" of the global age.
Two planets
It is hardly necessary to show how absurd and simple such accusations are. What is both worrying and important is that these accusations seem to be accepted by the majority of the political leaders in the developed countries and a good part of the leaders in the developing countries. This shows very clearly the division that globalization has intensified between the "lords" of world power and their vassals on the one hand, and those who dominated and excluded on the other. As if they did not live on the same planet. This diagnosis is confirmed even in the Financial Times, which in its coverage of the two contemporary world forums (one economic and the other social) writes that there are two planets, the one in Davos and the one in Porto Alegre – the first for descending and the second for upward – and that they may collide.
Reproduced with permission of Le Monde Diplomatique. Translated by Ole-Jacob Christensen
