Some observations on the anti-globalisation movement.

Buttel, Frederick H.

Introduction

Much of the sociological common knowledge about the current era can be summed up in the claim that globalisation represents the master process and direction of social change. There is a certain kernel of troth to this claim. Since the 1960s, and especially over the last decade, there has arguably been a trend toward an increased sway of global-scale markets in many commodities, including not only goods but also "intellectual property," money capital, financial services, and other "financial instruments." Over the past few decades there has been enormous "time-space compression" due to astounding changes in the technologies of transportation and communication. There is an increased density of cultural interactions (with respect to "high" as well as "mass" culture, and with respect to scientific knowledge), and growing interconnections and interdependencies of all sorts across nation-state borders. The commonality of problems facing all of the world's inhabitants (e.g., global environmental problems, drug-trafficking, and refugees) is another tangible expression of globalisation. There exist networks of increasingly powerful transnational actors and organisations (especially transnational corporations, but also international governmental organisations such as the United Nations, nongovernmental organisations [NGOs] and global social movements) (Cohen and Kennedy 2000:24 ff.).

Despite the ample evidence of the scope of and momentum behind "globalisation" and frequent pronouncements that national-state autonomy is in inevitable decline, there are sound reasons to say that the globalisation trend is in reality something less than an overwhelmingly inexorable and singular social force. The late twentieth century advent of "freer" world trade, for example, has been very uneven and selective. There have been only modest changes in the national rules according to which undifferentiated food, other agricultural, and raw materials commodities (as well as many and routine industrial goods such as textiles) now move more freely across international borders. Most developing countries, for example, find that the industrial countries' import barriers on commodities such as sugar, textiles, and steel have remained largely intact. It should also be stressed that the economies of contemporary societies, including both those in the industrialised OECD bloc as well as most developing countries of the South, are less internationally integrated than was the case for Latin America in the eighteenth century and England in the nineteenth century. Indeed, most developing countries have become progressively more marginal to foreign investment and trade over the past two decades. Many observers suggest, in fact, that "in some respects, the current international economy is less open and integrated than the regime that prevailed from 1870 to 1914" (Hirst and Thompson 1999:2). The international scope of markets has thus been very uneven, and does not reflect an unambiguous long-term secular trend of either more widespread or freer trade. Finally, it should be stressed that there is nothing automatic or inexorable about globalisation (McMichael 1996). Many social scientists, for example, have stressed the fact that in the early 1970s, when the contemporary globalisation trajectory first got underway, the social forces then at play could have just as easily led to more state-directed market institutions (the "Japanese model") rather than to global "liberalisation."

One of the most distinctive features of late-twentieth century globalisation is that many of its predominant features--especially the reinforcement of trade liberalisation institutions and the growing ability of national-states and corporate capital to exercise off-shore veto of domestic social and environmental legislation--are challenged directly and aggressively by a global-scale social movement, the anti-globalisation movement. Previous world systems of globalisation such as British global hegemony of the nineteenth century (roughly 1870-1914) involved no global-scale organisations or social movements aimed at curbing one or another of the processes of international integration. Indeed, a growing number of social scientists believe that in this era of globalisation social movements must necessarily be global in their vision and scope if they are to be successful (O'Brien et al. 2000). The power and sway of transnational actors, particularly transnational corporations and trade liberalisation institutions such as the World Trade Organisation, regional trade institutions, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the G7/8, implies that the only possibility of effective challenge to these actors is by organisations and movements that can counter their prerogatives across the globe. Indeed, many argue that the anti-globalisation movement is the most significant left movement of the new Millennium, and is a movement that has the potential to alter the course of social change in the decades that follow (Brecher et al. 2000).

In this paper I will begin by discussing the major structural characteristics of the anti-globalisation movement, which I define in a broad manner to include not only the participants in protests and in the confederations that have loosely coordinated these protests, but also other NGOs and groupings that consider themselves to be anti-globalisation and to be part of the movement. I will then comment on the recent history of the anti-globalisation movement. (2) I will want to focus on two particular aspects of this movement. First, I will briefly examine the relationships between the anti-globalisation movement and another important global-scale social movement, that of the international environmental movement. Second, I will take up the matter of the possible effects that the anti-globalisation movement might have on various transnational actors and institutions of globalisation, and on selected nation-states. In this regard I will suggest that despite the obvious potential of this movement to usher in major social changes, the movement also faces a number of major crossroads in terms of ideology, discursive approach, and overall strategy. One implication of my analysis is the hypothesis that while the current vitality of the anti-globalisation movement can be gauged by its having adopted an increasingly coherent and radical ideological stance in which international--especially North-South--inequality and global corporate dominance are targeted, to be successful the movement will need to have more of a coalitional character in which social-justice goals share center stage with environmental and sustainability agendas. (3)

The nature of the anti-globalisation movement

There are a number of structural bases for the rise of the anti-globalisation movement other than the premise that the growing power of transnational actors "requires" global-scale movements to successfully contest these new power relations. First, while there is a general consensus among professional economists and among state officials in most countries of the North that there are mutual gains to be realised through comparative advantage and "freer" world trade, in reality a good many citizens of most contemporary nation-states have reservations about subjecting their countries and themselves to the vagaries of distant, unelected, and unaccountable trade regimes. Increased dependence on trade can create social benefits, but it also creates social losses and engenders insecurities such as the movement of jobs offshore, an increased risk of unemployment, and the loss of worker protections. Second, contemporary trade liberalisation institutions such as the World Trade Organisation and the North American Free Trade Agreement have essentially been established to permit offshore veto of ostensibly protectionist environmental regulations or of the traditional measures for enhancing social security such as the welfare-state "safety net." Anti-globalisation discourses stress the role of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the North American Free Trade Agreement ((NAFTA), and the G8 as enforcers of the rules of globalisation which privilege transnational corporations and, to a considerable but lesser degree, the citizens of the nation-states that host the bulk of these corporations. Movement discourses refer to the competitive global-scale prerogative of offshore corporate veto as creating a powerful "race to the bottom" as nation-states face pressures to "water down" their regulations in order to remain attractive for capital investment. Third, there is also a sizable share of cultural revulsion against the homogenisation, "McDonaldisation" (Ritzer 1993), and Americanisation, that are thought to be associated with globalisation. The rise of the anti-globalisation movement also seems to be related substantially to the advent of a unipolar, American-dominated world order following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the general demise of state socialism, and the relative absence of a countervailing world power.

As noted earlier, while there is a good deal of public and scholarly debate about the socioeconomic and cultural impacts of trade liberalisation and related institutions and practices of globalisation, there is a surprising consensus on the growing role of global anti-systemic social movements such as the anti-globalisation movement. (4) Anti-globalisation movement proponents and a good many social scientists see much promise in the development of "global civil society." In addition to seeing that global social movements are intrinsically better positioned than nationally based movements to advance causes such as environmental protection and ensuring the conservation of protective labor legislation and social insurance programs, movement proponents and a number of social-scientific analysts agree that global social movements (GSMs) have been very adept at creating coalitional movement structures across (and within) national borders and new discourses. Movement opponents, by contrast, are fearful that the continuing attraction of trendy mass rallies at meetings of the WTO, the G8, World Bank, and IMF will create a tidal wave of mindless opposition to the fragile institutions that now facilitate freer trade. (5)

Many sociologists and social scientists from related disciplines are now employing the notion of GSMs nearly as often and as casually (McMichael 1996) as the notion of globalisation has come to be used. Generally, what these observers of global social movements have in mind is that these movements are a logical w even necessary--response to global processes such as the establishment of new regional and international free trade agreements, the expansion of markets, the establishment of international governmental organisations and regimes, and the growing role played by transnational corporations. GSM theorists (e.g. O'Brien et al. 2000; Cohen and Rai 2000) believe these movements can be very influential because dominant global actors can be vulnerable to negative public opinion and to scrutiny by governments that are generated by public sentiments. GSMs also combine the strengths of popular NGOs (such as environmental and development-justice NGOs) in "resource mobilisation" (especially in attracting foundation and other funding), and of new social movements or "identity-driven" movements in the strength of collective sentiments. There is also general agreement that the master global social movements are the environmental movement, the peace/human rights movement, the women's movement, the development-justice/hunger movement, and the anti-globalisation movement itself. Some observers of GSMs have tended to see the global environmental movement as the key overarching or umbrella movement, while the more recent tendency has been to assign that role to the anti-globalisation movement.

One of the basic arguments of this paper is that there has been coalescence of a good many GSMs, including the international environmental movement, under the banner of the anti-globalisation movement. I will focus primarily on the interrelations of these two GSMs by noting that over the past decade there have been trends toward both the "environmentalisation" and "de-environmentalisation" of the anti-globalisation movement. Clearly, an assessment of the current status and future role of GSMs must address the matter of the articulations between the global environmental movement and the anti-globalisation movement. I will suggest below that the role that environmental claims and strategies play in the anti-globalisation movement's "repertoire of contention," to use Tilly's (1978, 1986) terminology, will be critical to the movement's future.

There are several focal structural properties of the anti-globalisation movement. First, while we in the North almost always presume that the essence of the movement is that of periodic protests by citizen-protesters from OECD countries against institutions located in the North (such as the WTO, World Bank, IMF, or G8) or corporations headquartered in the North, the lion's share of protests have actually occurred in the global South. Protests have been particularly common in Bolivia, Argentina, Thailand, India, Brazil, and Indonesia. It has been estimated, for example, that on May 1, 2000, there were anti-globalisation protests in about 75 cities on six continents across the world. While I acknowledge this very central point (and see Podobnik 2001, for an impressive elaboration), my guess is that these anti-globalisation protests in the South are essentially protests that are confined (either by intention, or else by practicalities) to getting the attention of heads of state and finance ministers in the South. My guess is that the anti-globalisation movement in the North is the more important segment of the movement, and will be that which I focus on in this paper.

The energy and vitality of the anti-globalisation movement are clearly very substantially due to the actions of the protesters who now contest the annual meetings of essentially all globalisation institutions. But another critically important component of the movement is its active NGO supporters and affiliates. As I will note below, the anti-globalisation movements' cast of NGO supporters and affiliates essentially encompasses the "Seattle coalition," the unprecedentedly broad coalition that formed during the lead-up to and in wake of the protest at the 1999 WTO Ministerial meeting at Seattle. If the 95 percent rule--that 95 percent or more of movement work is devoted to "education" (especially writing publications of various sorts and doing media relations work), and to meetings at which coalitions and tactics are negotiated--holds in the case of the anti-globalisation movement, a sizable share of the work of the movement is in some sense that undertaken by other movements and associated NGOs. The anti-globalisation movement, for example, is now endorsed in the publications and on the home pages of a vast array of NGOs and related movements, and these other groups consider themselves to be integral components of the anti-globalisation movement. A wide variety of environmental, agricultural, labor, consumer, human rights, animal rights, and related groups now have "trade" or "globalisation analyst" staffers. The AFL-CIO has been a dependable and effective organiser and has a very strong presence at North American anti-globalisation protests. Much of the ideological coherence of the movement is provided by a small group of prominent intellectual figures (e.g., Walden Bello, Jose Bove, Vandana Shiva, Kevin Danaher, and Lori Wallach), all of whom are associated with NGOs whose work appears to accord with the 95 percent rule. Not unimportantly, these NGOs turn out a goodly number of their members--and probably many-fold more sympathisers who visit their websites--at anti-globalisation protests. (6)

Third, the movement is largely acephalous, with the partial exception of the important role typically played by the organisers of local protests. Much of protest organising occurs by way of the internet--websites, email, and chat rooms--without the need for a central source of command, and eliminating much of the resource and bureaucratic needs for organising protests. The organisations established to loosely coordinate protests (e.g., the Initiative Against Economic Globalisation in Prague [INPEG] at the September 2000 Prague World Bank/IMF protest, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence of the April 2001 Quebec City Summit of the Americas protest, the Mobilisation for Global Justice at the September 2001 World Bank/IMF protest, and the Genoa Social Forum at the July 2001 Genoa G8 summit protest) largely recede after the protests are concluded. Months prior to a protest multiple "clusters" and "affinity groups" form to organise traveling "road shows" and teach-ins throughout the host country. Cellphones are the principal means of communication and coordination during protests, often enabling protesters to outmaneuver law enforcement and security personnel. The interact and cellphone modalities of protest organisation have facilitated the accommodation of considerable diversity within the movement. The lack of direct contact among these various groups tends to militate against infighting.

Stressing the diversity that has been accommodated within the street protest component of the movement, Varyrnen (2000) goes so far as to refer to anti-globalisation movements in the plural, stressing that:

 anti-globalisation protest is not a single transnational movement,
 but consists of multiple and variable, even contradictory trends
 folded into one. So far, close to 100,000 people have taken part in
 the demonstrations, among them professional protesters who travel
 from one event to the other. The appearance of continuity in the
 transnational protest movement is somewhat deceptive. In fact, it
 may better be viewed as a series of episodes--a chain of separate,
 but interlinked events (Varyrnen 2000:1). (7)

A fourth structural characteristic of the movement appears to be tendency for many of its most active participants, particularly in protest actions, to be young people. (8) Some observers, in discussing the distinctive culture of the movement, refer to it as having a strong dose of "Generation X," referring to the contemporary young culture. In general, movement participants tend to be young and well educated--or, in other words, to have a social structural profile similar to that of the "new class," the presumed base of support of so-called new social movements (Scott 1990).

A fifth structural characteristic of the movement can be depicted in contrast to Keck and Sikkink's (1998) portrayal of "transnational advocacy networks." The transnational advocacy networks depicted by Keck and Sikkink have a certain similarity to the anti-globalisation movement in that each is global in its scope and aims to achieve goals that are consistent with a left or progressive worldview (though it should be noted that there is some evidence of far-right participation in anti-globalisation protests, and also that some agendas of transnational advocacy networks are ambiguous in their political coloration). Keck and Sikkink describe transnational advocacy networks mainly by way of their being coalitional groupings of likeminded NGOs which join together to pursue specific and concrete aims (e.g., achieving an International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources through the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, or preservation of tropical rainforests in the Amazon). The anti-globalisation movement has specific targets and goals, but unlike transnational advocacy networks the anti-globalisation movement is characterised as much or more by having a very strong collective identity and a very definite political culture. Anti-globalisation participants not only oppose multinational corporate power, but they also tend to reject the consumerism and the dominant ethos of modern capitalism. Movement participants strongly embrace social and environmental justice, human rights, and the ideal of democratic participation. Democratic participation is valued sufficiently strongly so that participatory diversity, organisational diversity, and ad hoc organisational arrangements take precedence over organisational hierarchy and enforcement of consistency of ideology and discourses. The scholar-activists Brecher et al. (2000) have subtitled their book "the power of solidarity" to stress that there is a shared worldview that drives its the "self-organisation from below" and that permits coherence despite diversity.

Finally, the anti-globalisation movement finds itself being defined both advantageously and destructively by the mainstream press. To a significant degree, the size and scope of protest events have been shaped by press attention. Publicity in the press, even when it has the clear overtone of foreboding the anticipated violence and disruption, tends to result in protests taking the form of self-generating growth; more press attention attracts more supporters and onlookers, which attracts more press attention, and so on. But since the Seattle protest, which received some positive mainstream press commentary for having raised issues of concern to many U.S. and world citizens (as well as considerable negative coverage), the mainstream press' treatment of the anti-globalisation movement has tended to cast the movement in a distinctly unfavorable light--of increasingly angry, antagonistic, violent protesters; of youthful protest participants who would rather demonstrate than negotiate; of the growing presence of the "Black Bloc," white supremacist, and anarchist groups; and so on.

Historical antecedents of the anti-globalisation movement

While there is yet only a small amount of published literature on the anti-globalisation movement, the literature that exists (e.g., Brecher 2000; Danaher and Burbach 2000; Dunkley 2000; Gills 1997; Cohen and Raj 2000; O'Brien et al. 2000; Start 2000; Epstein 2001) has suggested a variety of historical tributaries to the movement. Some of the postulated historical antecedents include the late 1960s New Left and the Paris protests of 1968, the NGO activism leading up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, during the mid-1990s.

While not denying that these factors and antecedents may have played some role, there were four particularly critical events and phenomena that led up to the debut of the mass anti-globalisation movement in Seattle in 1999. First, in the early 1990s Mexico filed a complaint against the U.S. to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Given that the GATT dispute resolution process would almost certainly have involved a ruling adverse to the U.S., there was a bilateral negotiation that led to removing the component of the Marine Mammal Protection Act (a 1991 amendment) that prohibited import of tunas produced under conditions that result in widespread death of dolphins. Then, in one of the first rulings of the WTO, it acted in support of a complaint by Venezuela and Brazil alleging that the U.S.' ban on imported gasoline that exacerbates air quality problems was an impermissible trade barrier. A similar ruling, against a 1998 U.S. law banning shrimp imports from countries whose shrimp harvesters kill sea turtles in shrimp nets, was handed down by WTO in 1999. The importance of these rulings cannot be overestimated. Until these 1990s trade liberalisation rulings groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, Audubon, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Defense Fund had supported NAFTA and WTO, while the Defenders of Wildlife and the Nature Conservancy had been at least nominally neutral toward trade liberalisation. The WTO rulings shook most mainstream environmental groups--especially those that had supported or been neutral toward NAFTA and WTO--to their foundations. More generally, it became apparent to environmental organisations that a domestic environmental regulation may not be very effective unless its scope can be extended to pertain to the conditions of production of imported goods, as had been the case with the tuna-dolphin import amendment to the MMPA. Further, it became apparent that the WTO might indeed give foreign governments (and capital) leverage to overturn domestic environmental legislation under some circumstances. As the end of the 1990s approached, it was becoming apparent to American environmental organisations that the environmental side-agreements to NAFTA were largely ineffective. As a result of these revelations there was a significant shift in the center of gravity of mainstream environmental NGO opinion about globalisation in general and trade liberalisation in particular. By early 1999 these mainstream moderate environmental groups had joined Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and Public Citizen in taking a generally negative stance toward corporate globalisation.

Second, the Kathie Lee Gifford revelation on live television in 1996 to the effect that her clothing line was manufactured in Honduran sweatshops, and the subsequent revelations about the social and environmental conditions of production of Nike and Reebok athletic gear in Asia, spearheaded an aggressive and highly visible student/labor anti-sweatshop movement. The Nike incident in particular dramatised the social impacts, in both North and South, of footloose corporate capital shifting its production facilities to low-wage countries in the South. Third, though its significance has not often been appreciated in the North, the Asian financial crisis, and the fact that the IMF appeared to privilege the protection of investors in the North over the livelihoods of billions in the global South, created an IMF crisis of legitimacy. The Asian financial crisis demonstrated to many state officials and activists in the South that the "big three" globalisation institutions--the IMF, the World Bank, and WTO--had less regard for the well-being of people in developing countries than for international monetary stability. Finally, the explosion of public sentiments against genetically modified (GM) foods in Europe and East Asia created a crisis of legitimacy for the WTO. WTO rules suggested that the EU would have no little legal basis for excluding GMO agricultural input products and GM foods, while European public sentiments against these technologies were so strong so that the EU had little choice but to act in conflict with WTO rules and with American corporate and federal government views. The GMO controversy galvanised the anti-WTO sentiments of many farm groups, such as the U.S.' National Farmers Union and sustainable agriculture organisations. These precipitating events and processes combined to help forge the 1999 Seattle coalition.

The Seattle coalition was impressive in its breadth. The coalition included anti-globalisation groups (e.g., International Forum on Globalisation, Global Exchange, Public Citizen Global Trade Watch); joint anti-globalisation/environmental organisations (e.g., International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development, International Institute for Sustainable Development); farm, sustainable agriculture, and anti-GMO groups (e.g., the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Genetic Resources Action International); organised labor; consumer groups (e.g., Consumers International); development activist/world hunger groups (Oxfam, Development Group for Alternative Policies); animal rights groups; and the governments (as well as NGOs and activists) of many countries of the South.

Perhaps the most telling symbol of the Seattle coalition was the ubiquitous poster which read, "Teamsters and Turtles--Together At Last." (9) It is arguably the case that what made the Seattle WTO Ministerial meeting protest so pathbreaking was the (temporary) environmentalisation of the anti-globalisation movement, and the prominent role played by mainstream as well as radical environmental groups in a coalition involving anti-WTO and labor activists. The strong environmental overtone of the Seattle protest was among the major factors that conferred on it a certain legitimacy among the U.S. public--and among the citizenries elsewhere among the OCED countries--and that contributed to the partially favorable press coverage of the Ministerial protest.

Following Seattle, there were numerous anti-globalisation rallies and protests across the world. The presence of protesters at the April 2000 World Bank/IMF meeting was such that the meeting could be held only with heavy police protection. The September 2000 World Bank/IMF meeting in Prague attracted tens of thousands of protesters and involved the first significant violence. The Quebec City Summit of the Americas, which organised to negotiate a Free Trade Area of the Americas, attracted substantial protest in April 2001. The G8 Summit at Genoa in July 2001 has been the most violent protest to date (as of this writing), involving one death, widespread police repression and brutality, indiscriminate violence by some protesters (especially the various anarchist groupings), and hundreds of casualties on both sides. Even the United Nations, which is often associated with pro-South and pro-democratic sentiments, was the target of a large protest at its September 2000 Millennium Summit in New York. A protest was organised for the 2001 World Food Summit of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome, though the influence of the United States was the primary focus. Protests rivaling or exceeding these in size and intensity also occurred in such places as Bangkok (the protest at the Tenth Assembly of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, February 2000), Melbourne (the demonstration against the World Economic Forum, September 2000) and Sydney in November 2002.

Transformations and dilemmas of the anti-globalisation movement

As noted earlier, the anti-globalisation movement is arguably the most significant global social movement, and clearly is the single most important global-scale left movement. The movement has registered some major successes. As is expanded upon below, it has led to concessionary responses from various quarters of the "big three," particularly the World Bank. Anti-globalisation protests and related movement activity have essentially disabled the machinery for negotiating the Millennial Round of the WTO. The anti-globalisation movement has arguably been indirectly influential in helping to stiffen the EU's resolve to hold its ground in the Millennial Round negotiations, e.g., by emboldening the EU member-states to persist in rhetoric about "multifunctionality" in the WTO Millennial Round agriculture debate (Burmeister et al. 2001). But despite the movement's stature and successes, it faces some very significant dilemmas, if not contradictions.

Many of the dilemmas faced by the anti-globalisation movement are issues of discourse and strategy typical of mass movements aimed at widespread social transformation. Should the movement seek to transform or disable the main institutions of globalisation? On one hand, the dominant institutions of globalisation are entrenched and the only game in town. Thus, a possible shift toward a more conventional "advocacy network" approach, involving formal organisations, a decision-making hierarchy, and greater ability to mobilise resources, could exact more concessions from the dominant institutions and create more favorable press coverage. On the other hand, these dominant institutions have as their bottom line a neoliberal agenda and doctrine that cannot respond meaningfully to the concerns and demands of a diverse array of NGOs, social movements, and national-states. One of the key challenges to the movement is that the World Bank and IMF "have been surprisingly responsive, expanding and accelerating their policies on debt relief and strengthening their focus on the mitigation of poverty" (Varyrnen 2000:1). The Bank has devoted its World Development Report for 2000/2001 to poverty alleviation, and in so doing has gone beyond the standard claims about macroeconomic restructuring to giving major attention to health, environmental, and educational mechanisms for reducing poverty and increasing the quality of life in the developing world.

Second, as the resource mobilisation tradition of social movements research has suggested, the nature of social movements is substantially shaped by their ability to extract resources of time and money from major social institutions as well as from adherents and sympathisers. Many resource mobilisation theorists went so far as to suggest that successful social movements are those that are best able to extract funds from philanthropic foundations or government agencies (see the overview and critique in Scott 1990), and that the outer limits of what radical social movements can accomplish consist of the outer limits of what foundations are willing to fund.

The anti-globalisation movement is in some senses both the antithesis and the confirmation of resource mobilisation theory's perspective on philanthropic foundations' roles in bankrolling and de-bankrolling the rise and decline of social movements, on one hand, the protest mobilisation components of the movement appear to have required relatively few resources, and the most actively involved of protest groupings appear to have received essentially no funding from the major foundations and elsewhere. On the other, as noted earlier, there is a vast NGO network of movement supporters whose legitimacy and support have been lent to the movement, and which are arguably critical to the movement's legitimacy and public support over time. And it is in the NGO affiliate wing of the movement--at least that of the U.S.--where philanthropic foundation support has been critical. Pew, MacArthur, Ford, Rockefeller, Kellogg, Mott, McKnight, and other smaller foundations have funded numerous NGOs, particularly environmental NGOs, to weigh in on the trade/globalisation/environment nexus. Foundation support of the NGO affiliate wing (encompassing groups such as disparate as the Hemispheric Social Alliance, Alliance for Responsible Trade, Institute for Policy Studies, Development Group for Alternative Policies, Center for International Environmental Law, Friends of the Earth, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Global Exchange, Oxfam, and the International Gender and Trade Network) has been sufficient to attract the attention of the right-wing foundation watchdog NGO,

Capital Research Center. The Capital Research Center is a largely invisible, but well funded NGO that undertakes exposes on left-leaning social movement organisations that are funded by major foundations. It aims to pressure the families and firms whose names are affixed to these foundations into influencing these foundations to withhold funding from movement groups. The anti-globalisation movement, not surprisingly, is now one of the Center's main targets. The Center may very well not succeed in de-funding the NGO affiliate wing of the anti-globalisation movement, but it is also arguably the case that the foundation community may not need to be pressured to do so. Foundations are fickle in their funding priorities, since they see themselves as agents of innovative thinking and tend not to give long-term funding to a group to undertake essentially the same program or project. The cult of newness among foundations may very well lead to foundation de-funding of the NGO affiliate branch of the movement. The de-funding of this component of the movement will probably not deter protests, but it is likely to detract from the legitimacy of protests due to a reduction in more mainstream NGO and civil society support.

A third dilemma common to global movements concerns the matter of whether international strategies can succeed in a unipolar, U.S.-dominated global political economy. This concern is even more immediate now that the Bush Administration in the U.S. appears willing to resist any international agreements that institutionalise agendas that conflict with the prerogatives of international capital.

While some of the dilemmas the movement faces are those characteristic of related social movements, the anti-globalisation movement faces some dilemmas that are specific to its sphere. One dilemma that is most widely recognised concerns violence and the Black Bloc (Epstein 2001). The Black Bloc is the most frequently referenced anarchist group involved in violence at anti-globalisation protests, but there are numerous others, most notably the Third Position. Violence, and the adverse press coverage associated with escalating violence, represents a key dilemma. Violence gets official and press attention, though almost always of a negative sort. (10) There are indications that the violence and anarchist-group dilemma may be prompting a change in tactics. Mainstream movement participants are striving to distance themselves from violent tactics and from participants such as those from the Black Bloc. Following the World Trade Center and Pentagon destruction on September 11, 2001, violent protests may come under greater scrutiny and control, further constraining the standard type of anti-globalisation protest that occurred in 2000 and the first half of 2001. The need to address the matter of violence, and the fact that the November 2001 WTO meeting was held in the largely inaccessible city of Doha, Qatar, has led many in the movement to ponder eschewing the strategy of staging a single mass action. Instead, they are suggesting that future protests should stress community-based actions at the local level across the world. (11)

Another significant dilemma concerns the nature of the movement's coalition and ideology. Since the Seattle protest in 1999, the movement has exhibited a significant shift in its discourses. While the defection of mainstream environmental groups from the "Washington consensus" and the resulting environmentalisation of the trade and globalisation issue were critical to the Seattle mobilisation, there has been a significant decline in the movement's embrace of environmental claims and discourses, and a corresponding increase in its use of social justice (redress of socioeconomic inequality) discourses. The most recent major protest action as of this writing (the Genoa G8 protest in July 2001) was one in which the predominant emphasis of movement claims-making was focused on global-scale (especially North-South) inequality and growing international economic disparities, and the imperative to roll back globalisation rules in the interest of the poor in the South.

There are some notable rationales for the movement having undergone a progressive "de-environmentalisation" and having undertaken a shift toward North-South inequality claims. One is that while there are good reasons to predict that the WTO and other trade liberalisation agreements will lead to pressures toward an environmental "race to the bottom," there has in fact been little other clear evidence of an immediate environmental-regulatory race to the bottom (see Kahler 1998, for an early analysis on this point). Williams (2001:47) has likewise suggested that the WTO dispute resolution system now appears to be bending over backwards to avoid making more controversial anti-environmental rulings such as tuna-dolphin and shrimp-turtle.

By contrast, there is ample evidence that since the establishment of WTO there has been an exacerbation of global economic inequality, with roughly three to four dozen countries in the South having exhibited persistent declines in per capita incomes since the mid- 1990s while most industrial nations exhibited vibrant growth. Even the Harvard University free-trader and neo-liberal proponent Jeffrey Sachs has expressed the view in The Economist that the IMF essentially functions as the debt collection enforcer of private banks, and that as a result of these policies the IMF has sacrificed the economic recovery of most of South and Southeast Asia, and elsewhere in the South. Further, the concessions that have been granted thus far by the "big three" globalisation institutions lie mainly in the arena of North-South inequality. The establishment journal Foreign Affairs published a paper by Bruce Scott (2001) documenting the exacerbation of North-South inequality that has occurred since 1990. Thus, there is in some sense an empirical underpinning to the shift of discourses on the part of the movement.

Arguably, though, the shift of anti-globalisation discourses to North-South inequality has been due mainly to ideological dynamics and to the growing coherence and self-confidence among movement members rather than to a close reading of The Economist or Foreign Affairs. The de-environmentalisation of movement discourses and the predominance of claims-making about international inequality and social justice involves a major dilemma, however. In most of the North, which is the most critical audience for the anti-globalisation movement, the North-South inequality issue is not likely to attract a wide swath of support. Environmental claims-making, along with discourses stressing environmental and domestic social-policy "races to the bottom" in the North, are more likely to generate long-term public support. It is arguably the case that the current core and strength of the movement--a highly committed, dynamic group of young radicals who see pro-corporate globalisation rules reinforcing mass poverty in the South--will not be sufficient to attract a long-term mass following that will assist in effecting policy changes. It seems apparent that the anti-globalisation movement will need to be a coalitional movement--involving, at a minimum, labor, environmental, and minority groups--to achieve its goals (Epstein 2001).

Further, the shift of the movement toward speaking primarily on behalf of the poor in the global South has some potential problems. One is the "representation dilemma," of the movement increasingly being positioned to represent groups that are quite different from themselves. For example, movement opponents now point to movement participants' relative affluence and question whether protesters really have knowledge about what the Third World poor really want. Perhaps most fundamentally, the anti-globalisation movement, in taking up the cause of the nationstates of the South, will inevitably come to stress agendas, such as adding labor and environmental standards to the WTO, that state officials from most countries of the South will be ambivalent about at best. A good indicator of this is that the WTO dispute resolution panel rulings that overrode U.S. environmental laws were the result of complaints filed by developing country governments such as those of Mexico, Thailand, Venezuela, Pakistan, Malaysia, and India (Williams 2001).

Regardless of whether the anti-globalisation movement maintains its emphasis on the North-South economic inequality question or returns to the more diversified coalitional emphasis of the Seattle protest, the political success of the movement will depend on whether it can help induce two potential blocs of nation-states to resist a "deepening" of the WTO during its Millennial Round negotiations. In a sense, the most likely bloc to be enabled and induced by anti-globalisation protests to support major reform (or to attempt to disable) the WTO is that of nation-states of the South (other than those agro-exporting Southern nation-states in coalitions such as the Cairns Group of the Uruguay Round). In the Uruguay Round, developing countries essentially signed away their rights to use trade policy as a means of industrialisation and development (a strategy which was quite effectively employed by the Asian Tigers during the 1970s through the early 1990s). Governments of the South also agreed in the Uruguay Round to open up their markets for agricultural imports from the agribusiness superpowers, while receiving few benefits of liberalised markets in the North (Madley 2000:Chapter 1). In addition, liberalisation of agricultural markets in the South has unleashed a tide of depeasantisation that will have lasting negative effects (e.g., unemployment, overurbanisation, and perhaps environmental degradation) decades hence (Araghi 2000).

Indeed, state officials from nations of the South can take heart in the successes of the anti-globalisation movement and in the movement's shift toward seeing its beneficiaries as the people and countries of the South. In particular, most developing country states welcome the movement's efforts to press for debt relief. But most states of even the highly impoverished developing countries see little advantage to disabling the Uruguay Round agreement. Developing country governments now tend to be more interested in enforcing--if not deepening--the Uruguay Round WTO agreement than they are in achieving a decisive roll-back of the WTO. In the early twenty-first century milieu of a unipolar world and the decline of economic foreign aid, these desperately poor countries have few options other than participating in the world trading system on the most favorable terms possible. Thus, while one of the reasons the WTO is now paralysed has to do with North-South disagreements, the ultimate negotiating position of most governments from the South may not be in sharp conflict with the U.S. position of further market liberalisation, deregulation, and more effective enforcement of WTO rules. Developing countries are more likely to side with the overall U.S. position against building labor and environmental protections into the next WTO agreement than they are to support the position of the anti-globalisation movement. Prohibitions against child and prison labor will be difficult for most developing country governments to accept without significant concessions.

The other bloc of nation-states with a potential interest in significant WTO reform is that of the EU. Hirst and Thompson (1999:228) have noted that:

 The role of the European Union is central because it is at one and
 the same time the most developed and the most completely structured
 of the major trade blocs. The evolution of the EU's capacities for
 coordinated common action by its member states will determine to a
 considerable degree whether the governance of the world economy is
 strong or minimalist.

There are growing reasons to suggest that the EU's sympathies could well lie toward the minimalist pole. Public support for the anti-globalisation movement's agenda--and for related agendas such as curbing GMOs--appears to be significantly stronger in the ELI than in the U.S. WTO rebukes of a number of European environmental, trade, and social policies that were prompted by U.S. complaints appear to have created a growing Continent-wide view that the EU must stand up for the preservation of the social safety net and for its worker and environmental protections. The fact that the EU is a customs union, and thus is built around the notion that fair trade among equal partners on a "level playing field" is desirable, gives the EU rhetorical license to resist claims that it is "anti-trade." The anti-globalisation movement has not, to my knowledge, specifically endorsed the EU governments' efforts to promote "multidimensionality" in the Millennial Round WTO negotiations. But the EU states' multidimensionality line is clearly derived from the European (and Japanese) impulse to include social and environmental protections (i.e., of its agriculture and farmers) into the fabric of the Millennial Round Agreement. And the fact that strong advocacy of multifunctionality could derail the Millennial Round is no doubt music to the ears of the anti-globalisation movement. Thus, while the movement drifts toward radical North-South inequality discourses, it may find that its most amiable constituencies for tangible policy changes are the EU and Japan, and the North's NGO communities.

Conclusion

The anti-globalisation movement is a highly complex one that is enormously difficult to research and understand. In addition, the movement has changed very substantially over its first two years (presuming that, for all practical purposes, its debut was the build-up to the 1999 Seattle WTO Ministerial). Its dynamics cannot be comprehended adequately by relying exclusively on either resource mobilisation or collective identity/"new social movements" perspectives. Much more theoretical work on "global social movements" needs to be developed before this perspective can tell us much more than that the emergence of these movements is the logical outcome of globalisation.

The anti-globalisation movement has already achieved some significant successes. International institutions now must meet in remote locations or behind immense fortifications. These institutions, which already have public relations problems because of their inaccessibility, are having to insulate themselves from the public to an even greater degree. There is sufficient public support for the movement's agendas that several of these international regimes have been forced or prompted to make changes in their practices (or to make gestures portending future changes). The Millennial Round of the WTO has been stalled for over two years and counting.

Despite major political gains, the movement faces important dilemmas of structure, ideology, discourses, and tactics. But since the movement will very likely continue to be acephalous, it will not "make decisions" in the same manner that most social movements--particularly "professionalised," NGO- and issue-advocacy-type movements--do. It seems likely that the choices that will be made in the future are not so much choices within a leadership and organisation hierarchy, but choices made by many different groups of actors who consider themselves to be part of the movement.

In the foregoing I have implied that some of the most difficult dilemmas and future choices to be made concern the discursive emphasis of the movement. Among the critical choices will be whether to emphasise benefits to groups in the North of restructuring or disabling the institutions of globalisation as opposed to emphasizing a social justice agenda of reducing North-South economic inequalities. This is not to suggest, of course, that it is impossible to image anti-globalisation movement agendas that have potential benefits for both groups in the North as well as those in the global South. The Fair Trade movement, a movement that is closely related to and allied with the anti-globalisation movement, strives to link conscienceconsumption-oriented groups in the North with peasants and artisans in the South (Dunkley 2000:Chapter 12). But the fact that a great many more examples such as this do not yet exist suggests that there is a strong element of truth to the notion that a difficult choice will need to be made, albeit within a highly decentralised structure.

Endnotes

(1) An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Sociological Association (ASA) annual meeting at the pre-conference session on "Globalisation and the Environment," Anaheim, CA, August 2001. The pre-conference session was co-sponsored by the ASA Sections on Political Economy of the World System and Environment and Technology. This research was supported by the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Ken Gould, Jonathan London, and Patrick Jobes provided helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

(2) As such, I recognise that the anti-globalisation movement has not been formed de novo, but draws has drawn many of its adherents from the groups and networks associated with previous social movements, including but not limited to trade unions, left-leaning student groups, and development/justice and international hunger groups.

(3) In this paper the expression "social justice" refers specifically to considerations relating to distributional economic in/equality.

(4) I will generally refer to this movement as the anti-globalisation movement because this is the most common terminology. Note, however, that there is an enormous amount of debate and contention over the most suitable terminology for describing this movement. Movement proponents tend to be most comfortable with the notion of "anti-corporate globalisation movement," but even so there is considerable disagreement among movement supporters as to whether the most suitable terminology is that which pronounces the movement's radical sentiments, or rather that the most desirable terminology is that which sounds more moderate and which is accordingly more likely to appeal to more moderate or casual supporters. The movement's opponents are most likely to refer to the movement as the "anti-trade movement," suggesting, somewhat inaccurately, that anti-globalisation movement supporters object to international trade as a whole rather than to the pro-corporate and proWestern rules that currently tend to govern world trade. Some movement supporters also strongly reject the anti-globalisation label, retorting that they favor globalisation in the form of globally agreed-to labor and environmental standards, while rejecting corporate globalisation institutions and practices (neoliberalism, workforce "flexibility" measures, the "race to the bottom" engendered by offshore corporate veto, and so on).

(5) Perhaps the most poignant example of this is the speech of C. Fred Bersgten, a tireless supporter of trade liberalisation, entitled "The Backlash Against Globalisation," at the April 2000 Meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Tokyo, in which he said candidly that "anti-globalisation forces are now in ascendancy." Another example is that an impressive array of corporate and governmental supporters of trade liberalisation felt the need to create a process through the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, to consider whether globalisation leaves some countries and groups behind, and if so what should be done about it.

(6) Press accounts of various sorts indicate that the following groups are relatively consistently represented at anti-globalisation protests in the advanced countries: developed-country trade unions such as the AFL-CIO, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other animal-rights groups, Rainforest Network, Sierra Club, Global Exchange, Alliance for Global Justice, Direct Action Network, Radical Roots, Ruckus Society, and Co-Motion Action.

(7) These and most other estimates of the number of persons at anti-globalisation protests need to be taken with a small grain of salt. Varyrnen's numbers obviously pertain only to protests in particular focal point cities in the advanced countries up through the time his paper was written (apparently mid-2000). By contrast, there have been informal estimates that 300,000 people took to the streets in cities around the world after the death of a protester at the G8 summit at Genoa in July 2001.

(8) There is no substantial evidence on this point, however. This is merely my assessment from my attempts to reconstruct movement dynamics from the popular press, the websites of movement groups and affiliates, and so on. For the record, I have never attended an anti-globalisation protest, and so I also lack first-hand information of this sort.

(9) Notge that the reference to turtles was the 1999 shrimp-turtle ruling by WTO.

(10) Note, though, that there is some advantage to nonviolent activists having the opportunity to distance themselves from violence and anarchists in the media in the days and weeks following major protest actions.

(11) Also, note that in some cities anti-globalisation activists have visibly weighed in in supporting local causes (e.g., the resistance against privatizing D.C. General Hospital in Washington, DC).

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* Frederick H. Burial is William H. Sewell Professor of Rural Sociology and Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is also Co-Director of the Program on Agricultural Technology Studies and a Senior Fellow of the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy.