Rough Trade in Seattle

But the summit has obsessed every other nation on earth for months. Seattle introduced the United States — tardily — to the brass-knuckles politics of globalization. The Geneva-based WTO, which grew out of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1994, is like GATT in its mission: to promote free trade worldwide. But it is unlike GATT in its enforcement powers. Countries that erect trade barriers can see their exports blocked from the markets of the WTO’s 135 member countries.

If Americans have had the luxury of ignoring the WTO, there are two good reasons: First, while the economic boom of the last decade owes much to trade, the dislocations and social problems that get protesters worked up arise mostly from technology — something the United States, uniquely, has little need to trade for. Second, the enormousness of the U.S. market means that the WTO cannot do without it. So the United States gets to steer the organization — witness its de facto veto power over China’s entry — while steering clear of its rules. To take just one of the environmental issues raised last week, WTO regulations forbid the United States to ban shrimp caught in nets that harm turtles — which the Clinton administration would love to do, and does (informally) anyway. Where is the country that will risk half its trade to enforce its trading rights over a few prawns? Mercedes can’t sell its standard European cars in the United States because of our rigorous emissions standards. Is that backdoor protectionism, as WTO regulations say it is? Mercedes might have to go through bankruptcy to find out.

But a preponderance of trading power is no longer enough to protect the United States from political backlash. It is true that just who did the bulk of the car-burning and vitrine-smashing in Seattle remains largely unclear. Was it foreigners, like Jose Bove, the Roquefort-brandishing leader of the French Peasants Confederation who has become a national celebrity for vandalizing a McDonald’s and sowing paranoia about the health hazards of “la malbouffe”? Or was it a few trust-fund “anarchists” from the University of Washington and Seattle Community College, who next summer will be begging for internships at Paine Webber?

Whoever it was, we can discern two main currents of complaint about the WTO. The first is that it’s authoritarian. Pat Buchanan sees it as an infringement of American sovereignty, and Ralph Nader calls it a “super-national autocratic system that runs courts that would be illegal in this country.” They’re right. Many of the WTO’s deliberations are secret. The bilateral arbitration sessions it sponsors work with sealed records. A country wishing to show that imported products harm its citizens faces an almost insuperable burden of proof. The WTO’s current head, Michael Moore of New Zealand, claims the WTO is “merely carrying out the democratic will of the people in the countries that make up its membership” — but that’s nonsense, since many member countries are autocracies. A second complaint is that the organization is simply not left-wing enough, and doesn’t do enough for workers and the environment.

Almost all establishment commentary conflates the two problems, assuming — without evidence — that, if the WTO were more democratic, it would be a global force for green economics and human rights. The Village Voice writes: “The WTO is unaccountable to citizens, a threat to hardwon environmental standards and health and safety regulations, and willfully neglectful of human and workers’ rights.” The Washington Post has a particularly lunatic idea of how to combat the body’s “perceived lack of legitimacy.” Earlier in the decade, the Post noted admiringly, the World Bank, facing environmentalist protests, “responded by reaching out to critics and by channeling a growing share of its money through those agencies.” The WTO could do the same — which amounts to saying that any clown who can assemble a hundred protesters in Rome has a right to my taxes.

What was most extraordinary about President Clinton’s catastrophic intervention in Seattle was the evidence it provided that he does not, at a basic level, understand global trade. “Today,” he said, “we have about 4 percent of the world’s people. We enjoy about 22 percent of the world’s income. It is pretty much elemental math that we can’t continue to do that unless we sell something to the other 96 percent.” The president’s “elemental math” is confused. We already sell to most of the world. And we’d probably still have our 22 percent — granted, of a smaller pie — if no one ever traded anything again.

But President Clinton’s larger problem is that he shares the Village Voice’s assumption that more “democracy” in the WTO will turn it into a responsible organization. “Opening up” the WTO is not without problems. “Openness” merely enslaves the organization to political horse-trading (your Roquefort hostage to my beef) and domestic posturing. That’s the kind of politics the president enjoys, but “responsible,” in this case, is a synonym for “anti-free trade.”

The United States’s every move at Seattle was a pitch for backdoor protectionism. The president was right to say that Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy created unfair subsidies for European farmers. But those subsidies also save small farms — and Europe is no more unreasonable in its pursuit of that goal than the United States is. To drive his point home, the president hauled out a Washington state fruit farmer named John Butler, who said, “As a third-generation family farmer, I fear that I may be the last on my farm. The family farm won’t last much longer if we don’t tear down these barriers.” So, saving Europe’s farmers is not our problem, but saving our farmers is Europe’s.

Services were the president’s other top priority: specifically, to get the WTO to continue its moratorium on Internet taxes. This is a preposterous and arbitrary directive, amounting to a subsidy from low-tech corner-store owners to the president’s classmates who own Internet boutiques in Silicon Valley. So why do the less advanced countries put up with it? Perhaps because the Third World bureaucrats present in Seattle belong to the Internet-using classes themselves. Mister Apologize-to-Guatemala is thus doing what he always claimed right-wing governments did — allying with elites of poor countries against their populations.

What Third World elites cannot be persuaded to do, however, is relinquish the only competitive advantage they possess: their labor markets. The president’s big push in Seattle was to enforce “minimum labor standards” around the world. “I implore you,” he said. “Let’s continue to find ways to prove that the quality of life of ordinary citizens in every country can be lifted.” As if, say, Pakistan’s representatives are so callous that they care less about Pakistani laborers than Clinton does. The president, of course, was only responding to labor’s demands that he do something to reduce pressure on American wages. He met one-on-one during the Seattle proceedings with AFL-CIO head John Sweeney, who has never claimed free trade as his heart’s desire.

Clinton was met with howls of derision when he told the union-friendly Seattle Post-Intelligencer that a workers’ rights group should develop labor standards that would be part of every trade agreement. “Ultimately,” the president said, “I would favor a system in which sanctions would come for violating any provision of a trade agreement.” In other words: Give me a trophy to bring home to my AFL-CIO, or we’ll starve you.

This crypto-protectionist platform was pressed with an insolent double-talk that expressed the attitude: Maybe you see through me — but what are you going to do about it? Particularly annoying was the insistence of the administration’s friends that anyone who disagrees with the WTO’s policies is simply stupid. The New York Times quoted “some longtime devotees of free trade” present in Seattle as saying that “the hostile reception they got from protesters on the street persuaded them that there is widespread ignorance about trade.” The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, chief ideologue of the world’s yuppie elites, dismissed the protesters as “ridiculous,” “a Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates,” “ridiculous” (again), “nonsense,” “crazy,” “yapping,” and “duped,” without naming a single protesting group or what it was protesting about.

In Friedman’s view, the protesters should just shut up and let bureaucrats rule them. Friedman doesn’t seem to mind the managerialism that trade makes necessary. “The more countries trade with one another,” Friedman wrote, “the more they need an institution to set the basic rules of trade, and that is all the W.T.O. does. ‘Rules are a substitute for walls — when you don’t have walls, you need more rules,’ notes the Council on Foreign Relations expert Michael Mandelbaum.” (True enough, but in democracies, people get to vote on their rules.) “There’s never going to be a global government to impose the rules the protesters want,” according to Friedman. “But there can be better global governance — on the environment, intellectual property and labor.” (We’re not ruling you, you see — just engaging in “governance.”)

This arrogance, this high-handedness, this double-talk, is the real source of the fury that sent protesters onto the streets of Seattle. Yes, free trade is better, for the most part. Yes, it creates prosperity. Yes, protectionists can be ignorant of economics. But self-determination is more important to most people than the global economy, and the WTO leadership has fallen into autocratic habits: dogmatism, self-interest masquerading as disinterested system-building, outright authoritarian contempt for democracy. If this continues to be the attitude of the WTO’s leaders, then the backlash against globalization has only begun.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.