FUTILITY OF ALLIANCES IN GLOBAL JUSTICE MOVEMENTS By Patrick Bond

[Michael Pugliese <debsian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

*** FUTILITY OF ALLIANCES IN GLOBAL JUSTICE MOVEMENTS ***
By Patrick Bond

(Editor's Note: The following contribution by Patrick Bond is excerpted
from a longer FPIF discussion paper entitled, "Strategy and Self-Activity
in Global Justice Movements." It represents the start of a new effort by
FPIF to stimulate constructive South-North Dialogue on citizen campaigns
and global affairs issues. Excerpted below, the entire discussion paper is
posted at: http://www.fpif.org/papers/gjm.html The views do not necessarily
reflect those of the FPIF staff or the boards of the IRC and IPS. We
welcome your comments, which should be directed to John Gershman,
codirector of the IRC's Global Affairs Program, at <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>.)

To contextualize the importance of the Global Justice Movements as an
independent force for change, we can dwell briefly on how difficult it is
for this current, and others, to establish lasting alliances. A few
initiatives to break down barriers have certainly emerged but just as
quickly petered out, and the five competing blocks have grown more divided
than ever.

The Washington Consensus heavies, for example, practically exterminated
their intellectual opponents on the Post-WashCon left beginning in
September 1999. After World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz raved
against IMF incompetence in Russia, he was effectively dismissed--as
Columbia University's Jagdish Bhagwati put it in the Financial Times--"with
a fig leaf, a sorry episode." Bank president James Wolfensohn first
censured Stiglitz, weakly rebutting his critique of the IMF and then
apparently prohibiting him from press comment. In a scathing New Republic
attack in April 2000, Stiglitz named his WashCon enemies: "third-rank
economists from first-rate universities." But according to a reliable Bank
insider quoted in the Left Business Observer (February 2000), U.S. Treasury
Secretary Lawrence Summers made it clear that if Wolfensohn wanted a second
term as World Bank president--to start on June 1, 2000--"Stiglitz had to
go." Soon thereafter, Ravi Kanbur--the Bank's redistribution-minded
consultant who was to be lead author of World Development Report: Poverty
2000--also resigned due to explicit censorship by Summers. Reform of the
Bretton Woods institutions from within appeared doomed.

Still, there exists a tendency among some Global Justice Movement players
to reach out to Washington/Geneva/Davos, as if persuasion would change
matters. Jubilee 2000 UK, for example, sought the approval of the Pope for
its extremely circumscribed debt campaigning, while the Pope sought former
IMF managing director Michel Camdessus as an adviser. Jubilee's UK and U.S.
chapters also called for help from outspoken economist Jeffrey Sachs on a
regular basis, notwithstanding the Russian financial scandal that festered
at his Harvard institute and his tendency to still preach the virtues of
sweatshops in third world countries.

Washington's hegemony continued. Minor reforms to global financial market
regulation announced at the Cologne G-8 meeting and 1999 IMF/World Bank
annual meetings were not sufficient to prevent a future wave of financial
panics (as Turkey and Argentina now demonstrate). Debt relief promised in
Cologne was simply ignored by most of the G-8 finance ministers. Only the
rightwing threat required an occasional modification here or there,
especially when Sachs temporarily allied with conservative economists on
the Meltzer Commission that in 1999-2000 recommended the Bank and IMF be
downsized (instead of with the commission's Washington Consensus liberal
internationalists, whom the Democratic Party had deployed to win the
arguments).

Meanwhile, the conservative members of the U.S. Congress and rightwing
populists everywhere enviously realized that when it came to mass
mobilization around international financial and trade matters, the Right
had nothing like the capacity shown by the Left in Seattle, Washington, and
Prague. One deal that brought the Washington technocrats of the Global
Justice Movements together with creative Republicans was a successful
effort in October 2000 to prevent the World Bank and IMF from imposing user
fees on healthcare and education among future loan conditions. But the
dangers of anything more than an occasional convergence of interest with
the Right are too obvious to belabor.

As their power to disrupt and raise consciousness grew, the Global Justice
Movements earned glances from Post-WashCon reformers, now and again. On the
verge of leaving the Bank in early April 2000, Stiglitz praised the
incoming street protesters. But that too was a stillborn friendship, as
Stiglitz was quickly drawn into an elite-intellectual exercise on "the
alternative" (funded, predictably, by Ford Foundation) at Brookings,
Stanford, and Ottawa's North-South Institute, which didn't give the Global
Justice Movements a second thought. But likewise, few on the Left regarded
Stiglitz's contorted rebuilding of neoclassical economics through
"information-theoretic" augmentations as a worthwhile exercise, when their
champion was so obviously now out of the power loop.

Some Global Justice Movement strategists tried reaching out a bit to the
Third World Nationalists, in part because of the influence of Third World
Network in Penang, Malaysia. Other internationalist activists--from Global
Exchange, Ruckus Society, and other organizations (organized by a small
group with excellent email contacts, United Peoples)--concluded in mid-2000
that alliances with Southern rulers are possible:

With regard to the fundamental debt cancellation and fair trade issues, the
G-77 summit in Havana once again confirmed the accordance between the views
of the G-77 and the new worldwide antiglobalization movement that protested
WTO/IMF/WB in Seattle and Washington. A cooperation between the two parties
therefore would seem appropriate in order to achieve our common goals in
the most efficient and speedy way.

The well-meaning but naive effort came to naught, as Nationalists looked to
the centers of power for relief, not to disruptive leftwing groups with
which they too experienced regular friction at home. Some third worldists
were heartened by grudging elite acknowledgements in September 1999 (led by
Stiglitz but joined too by IMF researchers) that the previous year's
Malaysian currency controls were effective medicine. However, efforts by
Mahathir Mohamad to gather like-minded world leaders both at home and, by
invitation of Robert Mugabe, at Zimbabwe's Victoria Falls, had no apparent
success in expanding the nationalist current. (South Africa, for example,
was distinctly uninterested in nationalist-type financial boat-rocking.)

But from the perspective of radical critics, the failure of the varied
alliance initiatives in recent months and years is no tragedy. It not only
leaves open the option of more systemic, thoroughgoing challenge, but also
confirms that within the Global Justice Movement, greater internal
coherence must also now be sought. Forging a general interest from numerous
particular challenges to neoliberalism will not be easy in the face of
sometimes debilitating strategic differences.

(Patrick Bond <pbond@xxxxxxxxxx> is an associate professor at the
University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development
Management, and a research associate of the Alternative Information and
Development Centre.)

For more FPIF analysis on global economy issues, see:
http://www.fpif.org/global/index.html