The Historic Significance of Seattle
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Development. Copyright © 2000 The Society for International Development. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (200006) 43:2; 125–127; 013006.
Last Word
The Historic Significance of Seattle VA N D A N A S H I VA
ABSTRACT Vandana Shiva reflects on the ‘Battle of Seattle’. She argues that the real Millennium Round for the WTO is the beginning of a new democratic debate about the future of the earth and the future of its people.
The failure of the World Trade Organization Ministerial meeting in Seattle was a historic watershed, in more than one way. First, it has demonstrated that globalization is not an inevitable phenomenon which must be accepted at all costs but a political project which can be responded to politically. Fifty thousand citizens from all walks of life and all parts of the world were responding politically when they protested peacefully on the streets of Seattle for four days to ensure that there would be no new round of trade negotiations for accelerating and expanding the process of globalization. Trade ministers from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean were responding politically when they refused to join hands to provide support to a ‘contrived’ consensus since they had been excluded from the negotiations being undertaken in the ‘green room’ process behind closed doors. As long as the conditions of transparency, openness and participation were not ensured, developing countries would not be party to a consensus. This is a new context and will make bulldozing of decisions difficult in future trade negotiations. The rebellion on the streets and the rebellion within the WTO negotiations has started a new democracy movement – with citizens from across the world and the governments of the South refusing to be bullied and excluded from decisions in which they have a rightful share. Seattle had been chosen by the US to host the Third Ministerial conference because it is the home of Boeing and Microsoft, and symbolizes the corporate power which WTO rules are designed to protect and expand. Yet the corporations were staying in the background, and proponents of freetrade and WTO were going out of their way to say that WTO was a ‘member driven’ institution controlled by governments who made democratic decisions. The refusal of Third World governments to rubber-stamp decisions from which they had been excluded has brought into the open and confirmed the non-transparent and anti-democratic processes by which WTO rules have been imposed
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Development 43(2): Last Word on the Third World and has confirmed the claims of the critics. WTO has earned itself names such as World Tyranny Organization because it enforces tyrannical anti-people, anti-nature decisions to enable corporations to steal the world’s harvests through secretive, undemocratic structures and processes. The WTO institutionalizes forced trade not free trade, and beyond a point, coercion and the rule of force cannot continue. The WTO tyr
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