will 'the war' lead to quietism?

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx>]

NEWS ANALYSIS War Transforms the Anti-Globalization Crowd
John Vinocur International Herald Tribune
Friday, November 2, 2001

PARIS After its sudden rise, anti-globalization activism has been
stunned into a phase of relative quiet by the terrorist attacks on New
York and Washington.

But the movement is looking for a second wind, and it may find it in
recasting itself - partly and for the time being at least - as a force
linked to protests against the American military response in
Afghanistan.

As an example of their retrenchment, organizers called off
counter-capitalism demonstrations they hoped would bring tens of
thousands of militants to challenge the policies of the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank at their annual meetings in
Washington in September. Also scratched: a gathering of leaders of
Europe's Socialist-led governments who planned to spend a day together
in Stockholm analyzing (or perhaps laying plans to co-opt) what seemed
then like a potentially significant new political movement.

Essentially, the problem for the globalization movement had suddenly
become its focus of anger and energy against the United States and
other rich countries at a time when those countries are engaged in a
widely supported, mortal struggle with terrorism.
Moreover,geographically at least, terrorism is based in the Third
World that the globalization activists say they seek to defend.

These days, Mobilization for Global Justice, a U.S.-based advocacy
group that was planning the demonstrations in Washington, describes
itself as centering its activities on its old mission, including a
demonstration Nov. 9 against the World Trade Organization, but with
"new colors and shades" that reflect its members' preoccupation with
terrorism and the Afghanistan conflict. One of the first of the
anti-globalization groups in the United States, Global Exchange, has
taken a position summed up in a statement on its Web site called "No
More Innocent Victims." It asserts "Retaliation, we believe, will
offer no consolation."

"As we in the United States endure our suffering, we must pledge
ourselves not to visit similar suffering in others," it says. The
biggest European anti-globalization group, Attac, in a current
newsletter, now makes a link between trade liberalization and war.
"Despite bombing, anthrax, despair and death," the newsletter says,
"trade must go on. In all the political tools used, war is in the
forefront of further liberalization around the world."

Focus on the Global South, described as a Bangkok-based advocacy group
that had concentrated on globalization issues, goes further in
directly identifying the United States as the source of its own grief
with terrorism. In an article, its executive director says "that
terrorists like Osama bin Laden, an ex-CIA protégé, have learned their
lessons on the strategic targeting of the civilian population from
Washington's traditional strategy of total warfare where damage to the
civilian population is not simply seen as collateral but as
essential."

>From all this, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Greens member of the European
Parliament and a member of Attac, says he believes the
anti-globalization groups "are beginning to see themselves a little as
a Peace Movement II." But because the anti-globalization forces, a
loose network of groups with similar views of imposing a tax on
financial transactions or a re-regulation of international trade or
Third World debt relief, have no single organizational center or
recognized spokesman, it is difficult to characterize the movement's
attitudes with certainty.

Speaking for Mobilization for Global Justice, Robert Weissman said: "A
lot of people who are involved in the movement against corporate
globalization are active in opposing the war. But I think there is no
exact identity between the movement and the anti-war people."

In reporting on a meeting of activists and campaigners in London, the
Bretton Woods Project, a British foundation close to the
anti-globalization movement, said the group "expressed fear that the
globalization-resistance movement built up since Seattle, Prague and
Genoa may now start to lose momentum."

"Many felt that the movement, which had been gaining a decent level of
legitimacy, may now be undermined," it said.

The report described "civil society groups and globalization
watchdogs" as not knowing how to position themselves in what was
acknowledged as a new political context. It suggested they had been
destabilized by "the general tone of global cooperation rhetoric
employed by Western leaders," and told of some campaigners who "have
decided to suspend or spike campaigns which appear to be
'anti-American.'"

In the last weeks, some of the component groups appear to have
attempted to knit together the idea that Third World poverty, when not
American imperialism, is responsible for terrorism and that,
therefore, terrorism could not be uprooted by a military response.

Mr. Cohn-Bendit described the anti-globalization activists in Europe
as being divided between backers of the "old, ultra-left ideologies
that are hiding inside" the movement, and young people who are in
favor of democratization of the market economy at a time when "the
American political class still only half understands that looking at
the world's economic imbalance is a very reasonable thing to do." "The
big weakness of the movement," Mr. Cohn-Bendit said in an interview,
"is that it counts up all the errors of American policy and turns that
into its single decoding of the world. But to say that it's the same
United States that represents freedom in the great historical moments
when security is threatened - they don't see that." On the same line,
one of the emblematic figures of the European peace movement of the
1980s, the Dutch political activist Mient Jan Farber, asked why he was
not joining anti-war demonstrators, said last weekend that terrorism
had to be combated. In a television appearance, Mr. Farber, who is a
participant in the Netherlands Inter-Church Peace Council, described
the American action in Afghanistan as defense, not revenge.

What effect this kind of argument will have on the anti-globalization
movement is far from clear. Last month, Attac sprouted a chapter in
Germany that invited Oskar Lafontaine, the former German finance
minister, to its first public meeting. Almost reflexively, speculation
followed that Mr. Lafontaine, who fell out with Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder in 1999 and left the government, might be regarding the
movement as a lever for a return to active politics in a zone without
a clear leadership figure. Still, Mr. Lafontaine was in very much the
margins for the time being.

Rather, reports from correspondents in attendance for both the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany and Le Monde in France
clearly indicated that it was focused on the American involvement in
Afghanistan.

For the conservative German newspaper, "anti-American reflexes
predominated at the convention." In parallel, the left-of-center Le
Monde gave this description of the proceedings:

"Everyone insisted that they were not anti-American and that they were
horrified by terrorism, but the long and constant repetition of the
U.S. Army's interventions in the world over the last 50 years limited
the effect of these statements while responsibility was clearly
designated: The single party responsible for what has happened to the
United States is the United States itself and the globalization it has
imposed."

This portrayal of the meeting's dominant tone enraged Bernard Cassen,
the president of Attac-France, who attended the event in Berlin.

"Since Sept. 11, there has been an attempt to say that
anti-globalization equals anti-Americanism," Mr. Cassen said from
Brazil in a telephone interview. "That's repulsive. That's using
cadavers to attack a movement."

"In fact," Mr. Cassen said, referring to the current effort to control
international financial transactions that could benefit terrorism,
"Bush was never as close to Attac as he is now. With a little effort,
maybe he could become a member."

As for a cautious American view of how the anti-globalization movement
was changing, Mr. Weissman, said, "anti-globalization has several
strands. The different strands react in their own way."

Far from being muted, Mr. Cassen said the anti-globalization movement
in Europe would be involved in major demonstrations to coincide with a
meeting Nov. 10 of the World Trade Organization and a summit gathering
on Dec. 15 of the European Union. And he played down Mr. Lafontaine's
role, or the organization's own in upcoming European elections,
saying, "The movement is hostile to personalization."

A German official, who has followed the evolution of the
anti-globalization groups, also minimized Mr. Lafontaine's prospects.

Rather, the official expected the further implantation of
anti-globalization ideology in both the extreme left and extreme
right, which he said naturally fed into anti-United States rhetoric.
In some countries susceptible to ideology and conspiracy theories, he
saw little chance the movement would die out soon.

But in Germany, he went on, where exports accounted for a significant
part of its economy, there was instinctive understanding of the
importance of free trade, which the globalization critics abhor. In
contrast, the official said, Mr. Schroeder often stressed that Germany
had to be made fit for globalization, and not try to run away from it.

Perhaps a more finely tuned gauge of the movement's political potency
was likely to appear in France, where Attac claims 30,000 members.

Before Sept. 11, it was expected that the Socialist Party campaign for
the presidency next May would make use of anti-globalization rhetoric
to coat its platform with a left-wing ideological veneer attractive to
elements of a floating electorate.

Now the movement in France is reported to be increasingly aligned with
the thinking of Jean-Pierre Chevenement, an independent presidential
candidate and one-time Socialist defense minister who quit that post
to protest France's alignment with the United States in the Gulf War.
Mr. Chevenement's campaign is one of left-wing nationalism and strong
calls for the preservation of French identity.

For Mr. Cohn-Bendit, if the globalization movement became more clearly
a political vehicle, and less obviously a transmission belt for
international public opinion, its implosion would become a risk.

With its developing role as a megaphone for opponents of the U.S.-led
anti-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan, that transformation could be
at hand.