G20 - Anti-Globalisation: Eulogy for a Movement

The G20 protests of November 2006 took place a long time after the glory days of Genoa and Seattle. It’s easy to forget, but back in the mid-1990s, a leftist roadblock of the IMF / World Bank steamroller was only a few skeleton costumes away. Or at least it seemed so, to the earnest Western students and intellectuals who kept the anti-globalisation fires a-burning for a decade.

It may hurt the believers, but it needs to be said: the anti-globalisation movement is dead. The finger can be pointed in many directions. Following the change from Clinton to Bush governments in the US and the Al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, the global focus has shifted away from economic liberalization and back to nationalist chestbeating. But let’s be honest. The killer reason for the movement’s demise was internal. The ahistorical contradiction of its messages slowly unpicked themselves at the seams. Come one, come all, let’s protest economic integration! Demonstrate your resistance to the military-industrial complex by insulting local police officers! And practice moral unity with the poor, who live in exotic places where travel is cheap and hot foreigners are waiting to nail you during an ecotour!

Easy to be cynical in hindsight, perhaps; but over the course of known history, culturally distinct groups have barely spent five minutes together before trading goods for goods and services. The international economy is a damned complex beast, or at least more complex than the movement acknowledged it to be. Accordingly, the anti-globalisation movement repeatedly missed the mark. By the time the millennium rolled around, global economic integration was, if not fait accompli, only a matter of practical negotiation. The drummers and face paint had drowned out an obvious point: between 1990 and 2001, the business had been done, and not always unwillingly.

This is both a sayonara to anti-globalisation protests and a hello tiger! to smarter public protest. Times have changed, and methods of protest have – thankfully - changed along with it. As recession and inflation return to the front pages, we are reminded that wealthy countries were never immune to structural economic failure, and that within them too, there are those who never shared in the spoils or concerns of global wealth. It’s not just terrorism that has sobered up the party; it’s the old wolf at the door.

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The G20 ‘was created as a response both to the financial crises of the late 1990s and to a growing recognition that key emerging-market countries were not adequately included in the core of global economic discussion and governance’. Read ‘unless we get cheap stable labour, inflation is going to ruin our infallible liberal logic’. Hence the inclusion of Brazil, India, Argentina, South Korea and Indonesia at the table, joining the normal glowering underdogs, China and Russia. The G20 Forum in September 2006 in Melbourne touted itself as a series of informal talks focused on ‘clean energy’ and ‘flexible labour’ as necessary elements of trade liberalization. It also stated that trade liberalisation was a demand of industrialising nations, not of the big information economies, a claim which is neither uncontroversial nor unfounded.

But the palaver that ensued in Melbourne – the awkward spectacle of trainee-hippie-meets-trainee-copper at the barricades – actually had little to do with the G20. If anyone should have been blamed, the first finger should be pointed at the Australian government. The then Federal Treasurer Peter Costello treated the G20 forum like a favourite daughter’s debutante ball. Knowing the party was unrepeatable, he controlled the guest list, amped up security, and made insidious threats to those who would besmirch his baby girl’s honour. An economic rationalist from Melbourne, he behaved like a pig in poo. In doing so, he trampled some civil and political rights many hold dear. Not only was the right to democratic assembly affronted by regulations in place that weekend, but so was freedom of movement. Half of the Melbourne CBD was shut off to citizens for a weekend, supposedly for the ‘positive exposure of our city’ i.e. for your own damned good so shut up. They say the same shit about Pine Gap.

The second finger can be pointed at the protesters’ poorly defined purpose in protest. The series of organized gatherings ran under the name ‘Carnival Beyond Capitalism’, which was about as watertight as calling it ‘Fiesta in the Fourth Dimension’. Employing the usual ‘all groups unite in resistance’ motto, it was rather difficult to get a straight message from the milieu. It melded into a little noisy puddle. I attended two days not as protester so much as observer, because it’s hardly prudent to trust media accounts of such events. I was also damned cranky that lines of police on horseback were paid to bar citizens from public spaces. I did not like the attitude of the police; but nor did I like the attitude of the protesters. I was one ‘the people united will never be defeated’ squeaked by a man in a dress away from starting up a gruel factory and paying my child workers in smacks. And I’m a Marxist.

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Maybe I’m not the only bleeding heart who had come to feel that way about the anti-globalisation movement. The G20 Forum was not long ago by anyone’s standards; yet even in the intervening few years, the anti-globalisation movement seems to have receded into history. Not only have protesters have finished university and moved on; some major changes to have taken place in both domestic and international affairs. The Howard government, at that time still comfortably entrenched in power, is now a memory, the Liberal Party a shadow of its former self. The Bush administration is now cowering behind the march to victory of the Democrat candidates.

These administrative changes reflect a wider shift in voter mood. The weaknesses of the global economy economics are now better understood by shareholders than by activists. Only the intellectual stragglers among us still believe that a global liberal economy can address the possibility of terrorism, can control inflation, or deliver parity to women and the poor.

And thanks to long predicted yet still uncanny faltering of the US economy, it’s painfully evident to most that the global economy cannot prevent its own periodic combustion. The debt crisis, inflation, recession, affordability, oil dependence; these recent phenomena all go to show that globalization was not the evil orchestration of a cartel of Gordon Geckos. It was a moment in the development of a much older, much more complicated process of global interaction that works by imbalance and movement, and only rarely by design.

As such, real alternatives to resource and labour abuse are being clarified and implemented by people within (horror) traditional institutions of power. And a new generation of protesters has come forward to keep watch. The new breed of political movement is more likely to be issues-focused and digitally based, with a vertical rather than a horizontal demographic. They use formal articulation and traditional representation to forward their goals, and maybe that’s the key difference – they have goals. Local examples include the Blue Wedges Coalition, Get Up!, ANTaR, Friends of the ABC, even The Greens; international examples multiply each day. The glare of time will no doubt strip some of the sheen from this contemporary wave of political protest. But if the success and adaptability of Get Up! is anything to go by, we will look back more kindly on issues-based movements than on the colourful mess that preceded them.

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Libraries were filled in the 1990s with zeitgeist scriptures proclaiming the essential good or evil of globalisation. But looking back it seems that the health, wealth and confidence of voices of both sides of that debate had yet again managed to drown out the voices they both claimed to stand for – the marginalized, the enslaved, the persecuted.

If activism is to be about integration and not polarisation, about vertical rather than horizontal collectivism, then alienating the political centre is hardly sensible. It’s the political centre, after all, that is generally in control of trade and commerce. But it’s worth contemplating whether flamboyant activism addresses itself to the banalities of political practice at all. It’s quite possible that history may judge the anti-globalisation movement of the 90s as having had less to do with collective outcomes than it did with identity politics. Oh the irony.

The quiet question in all of this still hasn’t been answered: if and when the world swings back towards the glory pole of international governance, wil we behave any better? Was any benefit actually gained in adopting broad, smothering platforms of resistance? How can local issues such as chronic homelessness, Aboriginal disadvantage, and inherited underprivilege be practically addressed by the adults of the middle class, as opposed to being worn on badges by their indignant freegan children?

In my crank opinion, far greater political effect is achieved through directing reasoned argument at local centres of power – the parts of the map we are democratically required to shout about. Writing a letter, visiting the local member, that sort of thing. It ain’t sexy, but it’s democracy. The tendency of issues-based movements such as to use mainstream channels of participation such as the courts, the media and the major parties is a happy resurgence of democratic muscle that will only get stronger the more it is used.

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