The World Trade Organization (WTO) is  vested  with  judicial, legislative and executive powers so all-encompassing that they amount to a form of global governance.  The WTO is not only a threat to the democratic rights and freedoms of people everywhere, but also the launching-pad for a systematic  assault  on those rights and freedoms.  For citizen movements in Canada and around the world, the challenge now is to build on the momentum generated at Seattle by continuing to delegitimize the WTO.   By Tony Clarke

Those  who  participated  in  the  five-day Battle of Seattle' against the World Trade Organization (WTO) late last year have good reason to feel they were involved in a history-making event. It is important, however, for campaign activists to ponder the strategic lessons that were learned in that particular exercise.

One of the most useful insights is that, following Seattle, the WTO is now suffering from a  crisis of legitimacy. As the great social movement strategist Antonio Gramsci observed back in the 1920s, political power and control cannot be sustained in the long run without popular support, or at least tolerance. Such a crisis of legitimacy occurs, he noted, when organizations are stripped of their moral or cultural prestige and reduced to their basic  economic/corporate' status. Then their real objectives and methods of control are exposed. 

In other words, the rule of economic and political elites is maintained through an ideology that is accepted by the general population. When that bond of a shared system of beliefs is broken, the legitimacy of the elites is called into question.

In the aftermath of Seattle, this is the WTO's Achilles heel. Its legitimacy rests on five elements, all of which have now come under close and critical scrutiny.

1. Global Governance 

The WTO was devised to be the centre piece of a new system of global economic governance, in addition to taking over the General Agreement  on   Trade and Tariffs (GATT), it was given authority to administer a new body of global trade rules. These include Trade Related Investment Measures (TRlMS), Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), a General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), and a General Agreement on Trade in Agriculture (OATA), to name a few.

Taken together, these rules form what the previous WTO Director-General called  a constit- ution for a new global economy.'             

To administer and enforce    this    new constitution,' the WTO was armed with a dispute-settling mechanism that hands down binding decisions. Under this system, any member country, acting on behalf of a corporation, can challenge the laws, policies and programs of  another country and charge that they violate WTO rules. The complaint is heard behind closed doors by a panel of unelected  experts' with the power not only to find a country guilty of the charge, but also to impose economic sanctions.  In short, the WTO is vested with judicial, legislative and executive powers so all-encompassing  they amount to a form of global governance.  Armed  with a guilty' verdict against a country that breaks its rules, the WTO in effect can force that country to withdraw or change its laws and policies, or else risk punitive trade penalties.

The WTOƒxs de facto legislative power is exercised not by duly elected representatives of its General Council, but by a self-appointed body called the QUAD.  Comprised of officials from the United States, the European Union, Japan and Canada, the QUAD meets separately on a regular basis and plays a dominant role in setting the WTO's agenda.  It also coordinates its work with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. 

The fact  an unelected  group of trade bureaucrats can ride roughshod over the laws and policies of democratically elected governments in WTO member countries has helped precipitate its  crisis of legitimacy.'                      

2. Corporate Rule

The WTO has clearly been set up to serve the interests of transnational corporations. Its administrative apparatus is interlocked with a battery of big business coalitions, including the International Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Business Round Table, the European Round Table of Industrialists, Japanese Keidanren, and Canada's Business Council on National Issues.

These major corporate players actually write (or dictate) the WTO's rules themselves Crules that are designed to serve their global market interests.  The TRIPS  agreement, for  example,  was initially drafted by the WTO's Intellectual  Property  Rights Committee, which is comprised of 13 major corporations including Dupont,  Monsanto,  General Motors, Bristol Myers, Squibb, and Pfizer.

Similarly the U.S. Coalition on Services, led by other big American corporations like IBM and American Express, is taking the lead role in developing global trade rules on cross-border services ranging from computer and data processing to health care, education and social services. 

The fact that the  WTO is a global government of, by and for unelected, unaccountable, and (as yet) uncontrolled transnational corporations is now becoming apparent to more and more people ---and this heightens its  crisis of legitimacy.'

3. The Loss of Democracy

As a powerful institution of global corporate rule, the WTO is not only a threat to the democratic rights and freedoms of people everywhere, but also the launching-pad for a systematic assault on those rights and freedoms.

Already WTO rulings have overridden such democratic rights. Take, for example, the beef hormone case brought against the European Union by the United States, Canada, Australia, and other major beef-exporting nations. The EU's decision to ban hormone-treated beef imports was motivated by its concern for public safety and had strong public support. And yet the WTO ruled that the ban broke its rules and launched an escalating series of economic sanctions against the EU countries.

In the same vein, the WTO's rulings against Canada's split-run magazine policy (intended to protect our cultural heritage from American domination) and Canada's drug patent laws (aimed at preserving our generic drug industry and its cheaper pharmaceutical products) were also direct assaults on Canadians democratic rights.

There can no longer be any doubt the WTO's trade and investment rules uphold the rights and freedoms of corporations, while superseding the rights and freedoms of citizens enshrined in the  UN's covenants and charters. Indeed, many of the WTO's core rules act to prevent the exercise of democracy at all levels.

The WTO's  national treatment' clause is a clear example. Ostensibly it is supposed to prevent national governments from discriminating against foreign-based corporations. ln practice, however, the opposite pertains. Intimidated by the possible imposition of WTO sanctions, national and local governments now bend over backwards to favour foreign corporations over domestic ones, thereby practicing a form of reverse discrimination.

The same inhibitions against democratic decision-making are evident in the rulings against a country's efforts to adopt environmental safeguards. If a company manufacturing a toxic substance feels its profits or even its reputation are adversely affected by legislated restrictions, it can file a complaint under the trade and investment rules, with every expectation that the charge will be upheld. Ethyl's success in having our federal government rescind an import ban on its toxic MMT gas additive is but one of many similar cases.

The fact that the WTO's rulings openly override the democratic rights and freedoms of governments and people around the world further intensifies its  crisis of legitimacy.'               

4.  State Collusion

The lynch-pin that holds the WTO together is the collusion that exists between governments and corporations in the WTO's member countries.

Governments have developed their global trade and investment policies almost exclusively in collaboration with their major domestic corporations and corporate coalitions, with little or no concern for the needs and interests of their own citizens.

In Ottawa, for example, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) is the driving force behind Canada's WTO) agenda, virtually eclipsing most other federal departments, including Health, Human Resources, Labour, Culture, and Environment. (Only Finance might exercise similar clout in some areas.)  DFAIT officials  police' these departments to ensure  their policies and pronouncements conform with WTO and NAFTA rules.

DFAIT's trade and investment agenda is largely set in collusion with the BCNI (Business Council on National Issues) and the leading corporations in key sectors of the economy. The collusion occurs partly through the Sectoral Advisory Groups on International Trade (SACITs), but more often than not informally, through the corporations influential lobbying activities. The federal government, admittedly, does sometimes hold public hearings on trade issues, but such  consultations' are merely window-dressing and have no impact on DFAIT's policies and practices.

Corporate-government collusion of this kind is rife in most (if not all) of the 135 member countries that make up the WTO. So much so that the  corporate state'C or  corporatism' Chas become the predominant model of governance. The role of government now is to restructure the national economy and social system in ways that promote  efficient' transnational investment Cand never, never, to intervene in the economy to promote or protect the public interest. Over the past 20 years, the civil service  and the entire operation of government has been overhauled and  re-invented' to perform this key corporate-serving function in the new global economy.

The fact that corporate-government collusion in public policy-making has now been institionalized through the WTO Cand is increasingly visible to most thinking people Cadds to its  crisis of legitimacy.'

5. The Final Frontiers

The WTO's decision to resume negotiation. on its  built-in' agenda is intended to open up markets in what could be coiled the last frontiers of capitalism: the public sector and the global commons.

The failure to launch such a new round in Seattle did not preclude further negotiations. At the end of the Uruguay Round in 1994, commitments were made to commence global trade negotiations on both services and agriculture in the year 2000. This is the  built-in' agenda on which the WTO has decided to move forward following the Seattle debacle. Of these, the GATS negotiations are expected to target services that are provided by the public sector; including health care, public education, social assistance, culture, and municipal and water services. By converting these public services into open markets, the WTO would allow foreign-based corporations to compete with the public sector in providing (and thus privatizing) them.

The other  last frontier' to be targeted is agriculture. The major agribusiness companies and food exporting countries want to eliminate national programs and policies that now support subsistence farming, sustainable agriculture, and rural development and one way to do that is subject them to WTO rules.

The Canadian government, for example, is joining other states in acting on behalf of the biotechnology industry, pushing hard to allow the marketing of genetically modified foods and opposing efforts to have such products more rigorously tested.

At the same time, the WTO is proceeding with its review of the TRIPS agreement, with a view to permitting pharmaceutical and agrochemical firms to obtain  patents on all life-forms, from plants to human genes. For the developing countries of the South, where most of the Earth's bio-diversity is located, the patenting of seeds, genes, and other life-forms in the global commons is tantamount to bio-piracy 

The fact that the WTO plans to subject vital public services and the essential elements of life on this planet to global market forces can only exacerbate its  crisis of legitimacy.'

In the wake of Seattle, this  crisis of legitimacy' continues to swirl around the WTO. For citizen movements in Canada and around the world, the challenge now is to build on the momentum generated at Seattle by continuing to  de-legitimize' the WTO. To do so, country-based campaigns should direct their energies on fanning the flames of the crisis. The target must not only be the WTO, but also the corporate-government trade policy mechanisms (such as that of the DFAIT in Canada) that exist in some form in every member country. The underlying thrust of these campaigns should be to expose Cand oppose C the systematic assault on what remains of democracy, the public sector, and the global commons.

If this  crisis of legitimacy' can be inflamed, the WTO's centre cannot hold. The WTO knows this, and so do governments and corporations. That is why they have been so anxious since Seattle to  enter into dialogue with  civil society.' They know that the WTO must be re-legitimized, and that this requires winning over its critics.  Their strategy is to divide civil society into two sets of groups: the good and the bad. The  good' ones are those who generally agree with the basic goals and practices of global capitalism, asking only that social and environmental concerns be addressed. The  bad' groups are those who reject the entire corporate globalization agenda and are prepared to fight for a people-oriented alternative.

The battle after Seattle will, therefore, be a struggle for the hearts and minds of civil society. In the months ahead. we can expect governments and their corporate allies to do whatever they think is necessary to accommodate and make deals with the  more reasonable' civil society groups, while actively targeting and trying to discredit the groups of >radicals' and  troublemakers' as being non-representative, undemocratic, and even anti-Third World.

The post-Seattle battle lines have thus been drawn. It is no exaggeration to say that its outcome may very well decide the future, for good or ill, of all the worlds inhabitants. #   Tony Clarke is the founder and director of the Polaris Institute in Ottawa, and a member of the CCPA's board of directors.

Selfishness, Greed, and lust for power are the enemies of a civilized society.