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The WTO and the
Global War System
Susan George
Mark Ritchie
Alice Slater
Steven Staples
November 28, 1999
Hildebrand Hall, Plymouth Congregational Church
Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.
Forum proceedings edited by Estelle Taylor
Northwest Disarmament Coalition
End the Arms Race
Abolition 2000 Working Group on Corporate Issues
International Network on Disarmament and Globalization
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The WTO and the Global War System was organized by American and
Canadian peace groups as part of civil society activities
surrounding the Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade
Organization in Seattle in November, 1999.
The forum examined the links between economic globalization, the
WTO and militarism. It looked at how the WTO's promotion of
economic globalization undermines security, creates conflict and
promotes militarism.
There were four speakers at the forum. Susan George opened the
forum by discussing how the current economic system is creating
economic and social strife around the world. Mark Ritchie then
discussed the history of the Bretton Woods institutions and their
original purpose to promote peace. Alice Slater discussed how
nuclear weapons are defending American corporate interests, and
how the U.S. Space Command envisions the militarization of space
to defend American "interests and investments." And Steven Staples
closed the afternoon by discussing how the WTO promotes war
economies by protecting military spending and the arms industry.
He also offered case studies showing how corporations have been
able to use WTO rules and dispute panels to block peace-building
economic strategies of peace activists.
The organizers wish to thank GRACE (working on behalf of Abolition
2000) for its financial support, which helped to make this forum a
success.
Susan George:
The Corporate Utopian Dream
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is one of the instruments of
globalization and globalization is clearly led by corporations.
Transnational corporations are gaining enormous power in the world
today, but they can't make the rules by themselves: they need to
have instruments to make those rules for them. One of the
instruments they use is the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The
IMF has pried open the markets of the indebted countries in the
South and in the East and has forced those countries to "liberate"
their capital accounts so that capital can flow in and out at
will, has forced them to concentrate on export crops, has forced
them to privatize everything in sight and leave everything open to
international investment.
Now the biggest rule-writer the corporations have is the WTO. The
WTO is really writing a constitution to facilitate the affairs of
transnational corporations and allow them to globalize as they see
fit, in a world that will be organized of, by, and for
corporations. It's the corporations' utopian dream.
Globalization itself does three things. One, it pushes money from
the bottom to the top. Wealth moves upwards, towards those who
already have wealth. All over the place inequalities are growing
and wealth is moving towards the top. Two, globalization moves
power from the bottom to the top, and concentrates it in the hands
of very few people. In particular, it concentrates it at the
international level where there's no democracy and no way for
citizens to get a handle on what is happening. Three,
globalization is creating a myriad of losers. It is creating a
slice of people who are not useful to the global economy either as
producers or consumers. We're creating through globalization a
three-track society in which there will be the exploiters, the
exploited and the outcasts, the people who are not even worth
exploiting. This is clearly a scenario for tremendous instability.
Between 1990 and the end of 1996 there were ninety-eight major
wars -- over-whelmingly civil wars, not inter-country ones -- and
the Peace Research Institute in Oslo has found that these
conflicts share the following characteristics. One, they take
place chiefly in poor countries where agriculture is still the
main contributor to the GDP. Two, the environmental factors most
frequently associated with civil conflict are land degradation,
low fresh water availability per capita and high population
density, in that order. Three, a particularly strong correlation
exists between high external debt and the incidence of civil war.
Four, falling export income from primary commodities is closely
associated with the outbreak of civil war. Five, a history of
vigorous IMF intervention is also positively linked with all forms
of political and armed conflict.
Characteristics of War
It's easy to see how globalization and global institutions such as
the IMF and the WTO reinforce virtually every single one of those
factors. Let's look at just a couple of those factors. One, wars
take place in poor countries chiefly dependent on agriculture. If
the WTO gets its way with the proposed international agricultural
agreement, it will result in cheap grain flooding poor countries,
destroying what is left of food security. That will mean the ruin
of hundreds of thousands of small farmers and their expulsion from
the system -- more losers and more outcasts. Two, land degradation
and low fresh water availability are associated with war. Well,
the wars of the future and the wars of today are already wars
about water. They are wars between countries and inside societies
where the control of this scarce resource is absolutely vital.
Just think of it: a wonderful resource, indispensable, can't do
without it, and one that you can control if you are a major
transnational. People have got to have it and if you've got a
monopoly on it, then isn't that a pretty picture for profit?
Globalization is creating a three-track
society in which there will be the exploiters,
the exploited and the outcasts, the people who
are not even worth exploiting.
Upheavals and Protests
In this three-track society that globalization is creating, of
course there are going to be protests. People are not going to
take their marginalization and their status as outcasts lying
down. It is clear that there are going to be more and more
upheavals. The rich in the U.S. have shown that they have a
consciousness of this. Wealthy Americans have already moved into
30,000 gated and guarded enclaves and demand for more is high. As
well, government arms purchases also reveal an understanding of
this threat of upheaval. Countries are not buying as much heavy
equipment as they used to; what they're buying are light arms.
They've switched from heavy external combat equipment like tanks
and planes to less expensive infantry weapons, helicopters and
riot control gear because it's those types of equipment that are
important now to use against increasingly restive peoples. As
well, the WTO is trying to organize what it calls trade
facilitation and harmonization. Translated, that means there will
be fewer controls at the border, which means that it will be
easier to ship arms and poison.
The following is a quotation from the man who used to be charged
with thinking about future warfare for the Pentagon. The quotation
shows the similar objectives of the military and the WTO. He says:
"The de facto role of the U.S. armed forces will be to keep the
world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault."
'Keeping the world safe for our economy' sounds a lot like the
WTO's talk of facilitating things, and 'open to our cultural
assault' sounds rather like the WTO's intellectual property
agreement, allowing companies to copyright things identically all
over the world. But, there's another sentence in the quotation. He
says, "The de facto role of the U.S. armed forces will be to keep
the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault.
To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing."
Susan George is the Associate Director of the Transnational
Institute. Her latest book is The Lugano Report: on Preserving
Capitalism in the 21st Century. Her website is
www.tni.org/george/.
Mark Ritchie:
Peace and International Systems
It's a mistake to think globalization is new or economic
globalization recent. If you really want to study the broad issue
of globalization and militarism, by far the best example is the
one closest to home: the colonization of this continent as part of
the global economic system 500 years ago. The colonization of this
continent was to be a lynch pin in a global economic system that
had existed for a long time. This chunk of the global economic
system was built on warfare, violence and death connected to the
state. Yet today at this forum we are focusing on more recent
instruments of globalization and militarism, like the World Trade
Organization (WTO).
History of the Bretton Woods Institutions
It's quite ironic: the WTO is an institution that is part of a
long history of post-Second World War institutions that were
created in an attempt to prevent another world war. The First
World War was a commercial war between the trading powers. It was
a war over trade without rules, an attempt to secure markets, raw
materials and labour. John Maynard Keynes, when he quit the
negotiations over the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First
World War, spoke about this question of how to prevent war. He
said the treaty, which would lead to continued impoverishment in
Europe, would simply be the root of poverty, of crisis and then of
another world war.
Coming out of the experience of both wars, Keynes and other great
thinkers and leaders of this century knew that they had to find a
way to prevent another world war, since we were beginning to
unleash weaponry that could in fact eliminate life on the planet.
They knew that economic crisis was the seedbed of fascism,
intolerance, bigotry and also belligerency in the international
arena and was the fundamental cause of war. It has been clear for
a long time to many people that if you want peace you have to
struggle for justice -- justice in the economic arena as well as
in the political and social arenas.
So these thinkers gathered about 50 years ago in Bretton Woods,
New Hampshire to talk about how to avoid a collapse in the
economic system that would lead to conditions of war. At Bretton
Woods, there were people who were peace oriented, globally
oriented and cooperation oriented. They were trying to find out
how to find rules for the international economy that could avoid
the kind of crisis that created the world wars. But there were
also people at Bretton Woods who wanted to see how the U.S. could
turn its post-war industrial stability to its advantage by
creating rules that put the United States in control of a global
economic crisis.
The institutions were created to be
instruments of peace. But they didn't stay
that way.
The Bretton Woods system had three components. One was called the
bank for reconstruction, what we now call the World Bank. It was
created to reconstruct Europe and also to some extent to
reconstruct the Third World. The second component was the
International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF was originally set up
to prevent currency devaluation, though today its main business is
forcing currency devaluation. In setting up the IMF, people knew
they needed to have a mechanism to keep countries from devaluing
their currencies and undercutting other countries. The third
Bretton Woods component, to be created a couple of years later,
was the International Trade Organization. People knew they needed
rules of trade to stop the unregulated global trade that helps
create war. In the original drafting of those rules of trade,
there were rules against dumping, rules to stop global monopolies
and ways to attack anti-competitive global business practices of
corporations. There were many good rules, actually, but the United
States Senate refused to support the International Trade
Organization. All that passed through the Senate was one little
component of the trade rules: the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT), which became the WTO in 1995.
Instruments of Injustice
Those post-war global institutions were created to be instruments
of peace and to bring the rule of law to global commerce. But they
didn't stay that way. At about the same time these institutions
were created, we were faced with the McCarthy Era, or "the Red
Scare." The progressive, internationally minded people within the
Bretton Woods institutions were driven out by red-baiting or were
fired. The end result was that these institutions became only
shells of what they were intended to be by their founders. Over
the years things have gone from bad to worse, with many believing
today that these institutions are the main instruments of
injustice on the planet. The protestors on the streets here in
Seattle represent a very broad consensus in this country and
around the world that these institutions have to be eliminated or
radically reformed.
There are many arguments for having global institutions. If people
are impoverished, governments come under pressure and war is the
outcome. This tendency can be seen again and again in human
history. Look at Iraq. Iraq depends on oil prices for its income.
In the early '90s, the oil-producing countries were over-producing
oil and driving its price down. Iraq was getting desperate, but
had no international body to which it could appeal. Iraq's
desperation and strain eventually led to actions that led to war.
It stands to reason that if you don't have something like an
international organization with some rules and mechanisms for
handling global problems, you're going to face increasing
situations of war and disaster. However, the global institutions
that were created to help sort out and handle these problems have
in fact become institutions creating the conditions for war.
So, what do we do? It is not enough to just say that these
institutions are bad so they should be closed down. Activists must
really study what's going on in the global arena in order to know
how to deal with the problems of these institutions. This kind of
study will lead activists to the single most important
international movement: the peace movement. Nobody else has ever
written a treaty like the land mine treaty and then had it
adopted. What an incredible accomplishment! We can study this
accomplishment and look at the various tools this movement used to
put together the global effort to make the treaty happen, and
apply those tools to the globalization movement.
The need for global governance is a necessary
topic for us in confronting globalization.
Making Linkages Between Movements
There are linkages between the movements for human rights and for
justice against slavery and genocide. The anti-slavery movement
was one of the earliest kinds of global social movements and it
led to the movement to stop the genocide in the region we today
call Congo. That movement also gave birth to the 50-year struggle
to put international human rights into a declaration of the UN. We
need to promote these linkages between these movements as a basis
for beginning to understand how we go forward in this economic
arena. If we don't, we're going to have more wars about raw
materials. You cannot increase the human population in a world of
finite resources and not have more wars, unless you find the
social and political basis for handling the allocation of
resources and dealing with the problem that the allocation
creates.
Learning from the Peace Movement
If you study the peace movement's ability to work globally, one of
the things you find is that the peace movement was always clearly
in opposition to the governmental pursuit of war. The peace
movement built a global movement around saying that what the
governments were pursuing was wrong and had to be stopped. The
peace movement helps us to realize that national governments are
not the only legitimate actor in the question of global
governance. If we want peace on this planet, we mustn't ask the
governments to give us peace, we must make peace. If we're going
to have global governance, it's going to have to be the civil
society of the planet that provides the legitimization of that
process. National governments are not a legitimate basis for
constructing a global governance that's going to solve the
economic problems creating threats of war. We now have come to
understand that the need for global governance is a necessary
topic for us in confronting globalization.
The peace movement says that we have to have global governance. We
have to stop these wars. We have to stop this exploitation. We
have to stop this destruction of the environment. We have to stop
thinking that national governments are the only, or the single, or
even the most important building block of that global governance.
Global governance must start with the will of the people brought
out in public movements in coordination, in cooperation and in
collaboration on a global basis. The peace movement needs to bring
its wisdom and experience of global organizing into the
globalization movement so that the globalization movement can move
from being a force of opposition to being a force for creating the
real conditions for peace.
Mark Ritchie is the president of the Institute for Agriculture and
Trade Policy (www.iatp.org) and a board member of the
International Forum on Globalization (www.ifg.org). He serves as
the co-chair of the International Forum on Food and Agriculture
and Sustainable America.
Alice Slater:
The Big Guns Behind the Global War Machine
Despite the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War
ten years ago, there are still more than 36,000 nuclear weapons on
our planet -- 12,000 in the U.S., 23,000 in Russia (with about
5,000 bombs in those countries poised at hair-trigger alert, ready
to fire in minutes), hundreds of bombs in the U.K., France, China
and Israel, and something less than that number in India and
Pakistan.
In 1970 the countries of the world negotiated the
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in which the then-five nuclear
weapons states -- the U.S., Russia, the U.K., France and China --
would give up their nuclear weapons in return for a promise from
the remaining 181 nations not to acquire them. India refused to
agree to this arrangement, arguing that it was discriminatory and
that the better course would be to negotiate for the abolition of
nuclear weapons. Pakistan and Israel, following India's lead, also
refused to sign. The NPT required that there be a review and
extension conference 25 years later, so in 1995 the countries
convened. To the dismay of NGOs gathered there, five nuclear
powers and their allies coerced the rest of the world to get the
NPT extended indefinitely and unconditionally.
Abolition 2000
At this point, the Abolition 2000 network was born. Appalled at
the lack of commitment to nuclear disarmament, more than
sixty-five citizens' organizations from around the globe drafted
the Abolition Statement, which called for immediate negotiations
on a treaty to ban the bomb (just as the world has done for
chemical and biological weapons), to be completed by 2000.
Abolition 2000 also recognized the inextricable link between
nuclear weapons and nuclear power and called in its statement for
the creation of an International Sustainable Energy Agency, just
as there is now an International Atomic Energy Agency enshrined in
Article IV of the NPT which recognizes an "inalienable right" to
the peaceful uses of atomic energy. The Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty recognizes this inextricable link, which is why it requires
the 44 countries that have nuclear reactors to ratify the treaty
before it can enter into force. The drafters of this treaty
understood that every nuclear power plant is a bomb factory.
Abolition 2000 has worked on several other global peace issues.
The group participated in a global action through its e-mail
network to support a boycott of French wine and cheese when France
resumed what was to be a series of eight nuclear tests under the
fragile coral atoll of Mururowa in the South Pacific. France
aborted its test series after enormous grassroots pressure at the
sixth test. Abolition 2000 went to Tahiti for its annual meeting
in 1997 and adopted the Moorea Declaration recognizing the
enormous suffering of indigenous peoples from the colonialism of
the nuclear age. Every nuclear test site is on indigenous land and
the costs to life and health to those downwind of the sites have
been grossly unacceptable.
Lockheed Martin has played a key role in the
tragic deterioration of U.S.-Russia relations
that is empowering the rusty Cold Warriors in
Congress to increase the military budget.
Along with indigenous peoples, we are all "downwinders." The
fallout from atmospheric testing, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island,
the mining, milling and manufacture of nuclear weapons and nuclear
power have created more than 4,500 contaminated sites in the U.S.
alone, which may take seventy-five years and cost as much as $1
trillion to clean up. For toxic plutonium, which remains lethal
for over 250,000 years, "clean up" is the wrong expression. At
best, we can only attempt to manage and contain the poisons from
seeping into the air and groundwater, contributing to a rising
cancer epidemic, increased mutations, genetic damage and other
plagues of the nuclear age.
Incredible as it seems, we continue with our nuclear programs. In
return for a promise from the U.S. weapons labs to support the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a promise they reneged on, the
Clinton administration promised the "Dr. Strangeloves" a
$4.6-billion program over the next ten years called Stockpile
Stewardship, which is enabling the labs to design new nuclear
weapons in computer-simulated virtual reality with the help of
so-called "sub-critical" tests. Americans have conducted eight
tests since President Clinton signed the test ban in 1996. In
these tests, plutonium is shattered in tunnels 1,000 feet below
the desert floor without causing a chain reaction, which Clinton
says don't count as nuclear tests.
Nuclear Programs Driven by Corporations
These programs feeding the global war machines are driven by
corporations like Lockheed Martin -- which manages Sandia National
Lab, the engineering adjunct to Los Alamos -- and General
Electric, a leading developer of nuclear technology.
Lockheed Martin has played a key role in the tragic deterioration
of U.S.-Russian relations, which has empowered the rusty Cold
Warriors in Congress to increase this year's military budget by
$17 billion more than the Pentagon requested. The Bush
administration promised Gorbachev that if Russia did not oppose
the admission of a reunified Germany into NATO when the Berlin
Wall crumbled ten years ago, the U.S. would not expand NATO. Yet
the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO lobbied furiously on the Hill to
disregard our pledge to Russia. The committee was chaired by the
vice-president of Lockheed Martin, working successfully to expand
its lethal market to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
NATO's 50th Anniversary Summit last April was hosted by corporate
sponsors, including Boeing and Raytheon, who paid up to $250,000
each to mingle and peddle their deadly wares to the nineteen
Foreign Ministers in attendance.
At a meeting with U.S. arms control negotiators in August, Russia
proposed that each country agree to cut its supply of long-range
nuclear bombs from 5,000 to 1,500. The Russian offer could give us
the opportunity to make a full accounting of all warheads and
provide for early dealerting of bombs poised at hair-trigger
readiness, which would considerably ratchet down the nuclear
danger to our planet. Were the U.S. to follow through on this
generous Russian proposal, we would have an extraordinary
opportunity to bring all the nuclear weapons states to the
negotiating table for a treaty to ban the bomb. However, the U.S.
hasn't taken Russia up on its offer. Its response has been
appalling. Seeking to squeeze the final bitter cup of humiliation
from Russia -- which is still smarting from the expansion of NATO
up to the Russian border, the continued unilateral bombing of Iraq
without United Nations' approval, and the unauthorized NATO
bombing of Yugoslavia without Security Council sanction -- the
Clinton administration persists in demanding that Russia yield to
the U.S.'s corporate-driven scheme to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty and move full speed ahead with "Son of Star Wars."
The Star Wars lobby drives American plans to
dominate space and "protect U.S. interests and
investments."
Son of Star Wars
The same merchants of death who drove through the provocative
expansion of NATO are driving the Star Wars revival, which is
unashamedly proclaimed as the ultimate protector of U.S. corporate
interests. The U.S. Space Command's report, Vision for 2020,
trumpets, "U.S. Space Command dominating the space dimensions of
military operations to protect U.S. interests and investments.
Integrating Space Forces into war-fighting capabilities across the
full spectrum of conflict." Vision For 2020 compares the U.S.
effort to control space with the effort centuries ago when nations
built navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests by
ruling the oceans.
General Joseph Ashy, former commander-in-chief of the U.S. Space
Command, has said: "It's politically sensitive, but it's going to
happen. Some people don't want to hear this, and it sure isn't in
vogue, but, absolutely, we're going to fight in space. We're going
to fight from space and we're going to fight into space. We will
engage terrestrial targets someday -- ships, airplanes, land
targets -- from space ... That's why the U.S. has development
programs in directed energy and hit-to-kill mechanisms."
The Star Wars lobby has been led by companies like Lockheed
Martin, Raytheon, Boeing and TRW who are dividing up billions of
dollars in contracts, connected in no small part to the $23
million US they spent lobbying and $4 million US in campaign
contributions in 1997 and 1998. The executive summary of the Space
Command's long-range plan has a long list of acknowledgements to
commercial industry, including forty-eight companies that are
helping it to "dominate the military uses of space to protect U.S.
interests and investments."
The nuclear sword of Damocles and the plans afoot to dominate
space are the seldom-mentioned enforcers of globalization. Help us
rid the world of the big guns which are the ultimate enforcers of
WTO decisions, and remember Dwight Eisenhower's message: "Every
gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and
are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in
arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its
labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its
children."
Alice Slater is a director of the Global Resource Action Center
for the Environment (GRACE) and an anti-nuclear activist with
Abolition 2000. You can join Abolition 2000 at
www.abolition2000.org
Steven Staples:
The WTO and War: Making the Connection
I want to talk about the emergence of what I call the
military-corporate complex. To begin, I'd like to revisit Dwight
Eisenhower's famous warning to the people of the United States in
his last speech as President in 1961. Eisenhower told citizens to
beware of the growing influence and power of the "the
military-industrial complex," the collusion between the military
and defence contractors to subvert the democratic process. This
term has become a part of the lexicon of the peace movement in the
second half of the 20th century. However, today we need to
reconsider our understanding of the military-industrial complex.
The end of the Cold War and the advent of globalization have
transformed Eisenhower's military-industrial complex into a new
beast -- the military-corporate complex.
In Eisenhower's world, the nation-state ruled over its economy,
and defence companies were largely bound within national borders.
But globalization has created a new relationship between
governments and corporations. The movement toward a single global
economy has given rise to huge corporations whose wealth and power
now exceed those of nation-states, and whose interests transcend
national borders.
Weapons Corporations Go Global
Former nationally oriented weapons corporations such as Boeing,
General Motors and British Aerospace are now transnational
corporations that roam the world in search of higher government
subsidies, favourable tax incentives, lower wages, weak labour
standards and merger opportunities in order to create even more
powerful transnational corporations. In the last five years, there
has been an unprecedented round of mergers in the weapons
industry. Boeing swallowed up McDonnell Douglas to create the
world's largest manufacturer of military aircraft. British
Aerospace swallowed Marconi. Other European weapons corporations
merged to create the world's largest maker of missiles, Mantra BAe
Dynamics, whose revenue is expected to reach $3 billion a year,
surpassing even that of U.S. powerhouse Raytheon.
The Pentagon has been watching these mergers with nervousness, as
it sees its influence slipping away with each merger. Finally
admitting it can no longer resist transatlantic mergers of its
client corporations, the Pentagon recently announced that British
Aerospace, Europe's largest weapons corporation, will be accorded
national treatment -- treated just like an American company -- and
integrated into Fortress North America.
The evolving power imbalance between governments and corporations,
not just in the weapons industry but in all industries, is
becoming well understood by many progressive economists and social
activists. International free trade agreements such as those in
the World Trade Organization (WTO) play a key role in what has
become popularly known as "corporate rule," which works to usurp
democracy. Maude Barlow, National Chair of the Council of
Canadians, says corporations have spent the last fifty years
fighting communism. Now they are fighting democracy itself. The
World Trade Organization has become the architect of the new
global economy and corporate rule. It is striking down government
laws and programs around the world that conflict with corporate
interests but are vital for peace. Environmental protection,
cultural and social programs, health and safety standards, and
other programs which create just and peaceful societies are all
under attack.
If governments want to play a role in the
economy -- creating jobs, high-tech research
or regional development -- the safe way to do
that is through the military.
While all of these government programs are being sacrificed on the
altar of the new economy, one sacred cow remains: the
military-corporate complex.
The WTO is based on the premise that the only legitimate role for
governments is to provide for a military to protect the interests
of the nation and a police force to ensure order within. And so
while social and environmental policies are constantly under
attack, the war industry is protected through the "security
exception" in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
Article XXI of the GATT, the principal agreement of the WTO,
allows governments free reign for actions taken for national
security interests. It states that a country can't be stopped from
taking any action "it considers necessary for the protection of
its essential security interests ... relating to the traffic in
arms, ammunition and implements of war and such traffic in other
goods and materials as is carried on directly for the purpose of
supplying a military establishment (or) taken in time of war or
other emergency in international relations." This clause is the
most powerful exception in the WTO. It actually allows a
government to define its own "essential security interests," a
definition that can't be questioned by WTO dispute panels.
Globalization Spurs Military Spending
Because the security exception shields the war industry from
challenges by the WTO, it actually spurs government military
spending since only military spending is free from challenges.
Governments must use the military to promote jobs, new emerging
industries, or high-tech manufacturing.
Let's take a recent example. In 1999, a WTO dispute panel ruled
against Canada and its Technology Partnerships Canada (TPC)
program -- a program which subsidizes the aerospace and defence
industry. The program was being used by Bombardier Aerospace to
build and export regional passenger jets. The WTO ruled the
non-military subsidies were unfair, and struck them down earlier
this year.
To appreciate what this decision means, you need to understand
that TPC used to be the Defence Industry Productivity Program. The
program was Canada's flag-ship industrial program and handed out
billions of dollars to Canadian arms manufacturers for years. In
1995 it was renamed TPC, and several non-military categories were
added to the fund. It's those non-military programs that are
vulnerable to challenges by the WTO.
In this new global economy that favours the
military, peace activists are losing their
ability to work for peace and human rights.
The lesson from this is that if governments want to play a role in
the economy -- creating jobs, regional development or high-tech
research -- the safe way to do it is through the military. This
lesson has not been lost on some of the so-called emerging
economies, such as South Africa. South Africa is currently
undergoing a huge arms-buying spree. It is buying billions of
dollars worth of helicopters, aircraft, ships and even submarines
from European weapons corporations. The government has negotiated
an agreement that the corporations will move some of their
production for these contracts to South Africa, creating
short-term jobs and investment.
South Africa is about to make the same mistake North America did:
it is creating new military projects that will become dependent on
constant government spending, drawing money away from essential
social programs. When the current weapons orders have been filled
and the government funding dries up, jobs at the weapons
corporations will then depend on corporations finding new
customers for their weapons, driving the arms trade and
potentially causing a whole new arms race in the region.
To a certain degree, I can understand what the South African
government is trying to do. It needs jobs and the transfer of
technology and knowledge. As a member of the WTO, the only safe
way to do this is through military programs. If these were not
military programs, the deals would never be allowed, given WTO
laws on performance requirements and government procurement.
Globalization Hinders Peace Work
In this new global economy that favours the military, peace
activists are losing their ability to work for peace and human
rights. A recent law concerning Burma illustrates how peace
activists are losing the ability to work for peace and human
rights. Amnesty International has consistently criticized Burma's
military government for its terrible human rights record. Burma is
ruled by a military junta that refuses to relinquish power to
Burma's legitimately elected leader, Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu
Kyi, who is under house arrest. Trade unions have listed Burma as
one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a union
organizer.
In 1996, peace activists succeeded in having Massachusetts and 20
other U.S. municipalities and counties pass laws preventing
government contracts from being issued to companies doing business
with Burma, in order to put pressure on the military rulers. This
legislation was similar to the laws many governments passed in the
1980s to support the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
But, thanks to the WTO, the law was challenged. Both the European
Union and Japan challenged Massachusetts' law as a violation of
the WTO's Agreement on Government Procurement, on the grounds that
Burma and companies that did business with Burma were being
unfairly discriminated against. Before the WTO could convene a
dispute panel to review the arguments, a U.S. corporate lobby
group -- supported by the E.U. and Japan -- stepped in and sued
Massachusetts in domestic courts, under the pretext that the state
had exceeded its authority. The corporate lobby group won its case
and the court overturned the law and all similar laws in the U.S..
Massachusetts is appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court.
The hidden fist that keeps the world safe for
corporations is the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Army
and Marines.
The lesson here is clear. If activists are actually able to secure
laws that can challenge the military-corporate complex, they will
face the entire weight of transnational corporations and the WTO.
Clearly, as citizens who support peace and social justice, we have
to confront the corporate agenda of the WTO. The stakes are
enormous. If the WTO is allowed to continue, military spending
will rise worldwide, as it already has in the U.S., Canada, and
other industrialized countries. There will be greater nuclear
proliferation as countries try to bomb their way into the world's
power elite, as India has done. There will be greater economic
strife, as there has been in Asia. And we will lose even the
limited ability that we have now as citizens to promote peace.
Transnational corporations need the power of the military behind
them to enforce their domination. New York Times columnist Thomas
L. Friedman put it well when he said that behind the hidden hand
of the market is a hidden fist. McDonalds needs McDonnell Douglas,
the maker of the F-15 warplane. And the hidden fist that keeps the
world safe for corporations is the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Army and
Marines.
While I'm a pessimist about tomorrow, I am an optimist about the
day after. There are three things that we need to do, beginning
right now. Firstly, the peace movement must educate itself and
others about the relationship between militarism and
globalization. We need to encourage our writers and researchers to
investigate the military-corporate complex, and to provide
activists with the information they need. Secondly, we cannot
treat the arms industry and military spending as separate issues.
We have to deal with globalization as a whole, recognizing that
the international corporate agenda is itself a form of warfare
against peace, human rights and democracy. Thirdly, we need to
develop our own positive alternatives to economic globalization
and the WTO.
Steven Staples is Chair of the International Network on
Disarmament and Globalization (www.indg.org).
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