Mainstreaming cultural diversity in the campaign against neo-liberal globalization

Professor Jane Kelsey, University of Auckland, New Zealand and member of the Action, Research, and Education Network of Aotearoa (Arena)

Paper to the International Network for Cultural Diversity, Opatija, Croatia, October 2003

It seems extraordinary that anyone was taken by surprise when the WTO meeting in Cancun collapsed. It was obvious that the internal tensions between rich and poor countries over tactics and content, which had been brewing since the WTO was created in 1995, had reached breaking point. It was also clear that NGOs and social movements would play several important roles in Cancun. One was to support Southern governments as they demanded a genuinely pro-development approach to trade and rejected moves by the super-powers to take the WTO into even more dangerous realms.

But it was equally important to delegitimise the WTO as an institution whose rule making seeks to lock countries into a socially, culturally and politically bankrupt economic agenda. Symbolically, another failed ministerial meeting would dispel the myth that the WTO was an inevitable and irresistible forum for the global economic policymaking. Tactically, because the ‘single undertaking’ that linked agriculture, services, investment, industrials and intellectual property meant, the collapse bought time for people working on any of those campaigns.

We achieved both. Demonstrations and solidarity work on the ‘outside’ complemented the lobbying, advice and symbolic protests on the ‘inside’ of the meeting venue. ‘Outside’ the barricades were thousands of indigenous peoples and farmers groups from Mexico and their international allies in Via Campesina, representing 60 million people in 46 countries. Insisting that ‘another world is possible’, their demands centered on removal of food, agriculture, biodiversity and water from the WTO. This was a matter of life and death – as the self-sacrifice of South Korean farmer Lee Kyung-hae on the barricades brought home.

That message was beamed to the outside world. But it remained largely invisible to the ministers and lobbyists quarantined inside the luxury Hotel Zone. Their deliberations were influenced by diverse groups who had developed a sophisticated analysis of the WTO since their first meeting in Brussels in 1990. Southern NGOs such as the Third World Network and SEATINI continued to work with their governments to evaluate documents and develop counter proposals. Other members of the “Our World is Not for Sale” network, from the North and the South, combined education and strategy workshops outside the barricades with lobbying and protest action inside the conference centre.

I don’t want to imply that this represents a single coordinated anti-WTO movement. Not everyone agrees about the analysis, strategies or objectives. There are tensions between NGOs that focus more on analysis and lobbying and social movements that seek change through popular mobilization. In Cancun, this was accommodated by tactical cooperation that allowed space for difference and opportunities for reflection, debate and reassessment and kept those ‘engaging’ with the process accountable to those whose interests they purported to represent. It may prove to be a unique conjuncture, but hopefully not.

Not everyone saw it this way. Some single issue or reformist NGOs like Greenpeace and Oxfam chose largely to act alone. So did the international trade union movement, which sees itself as different – and superior. It wants a seat at the WTO table for representatives of labour alongside business and governments, not just consultation as an NGO. Their international body, the ICFTU, has traditionally taken a conservative approach of protecting workers rights while supporting globalization. That has broadened slightly under pressure from more progressive national bodies and international union federations, such as Public Services International. But their aloofness from activist networks has been self-defeating. Sadly, trade unions and workers’ issues played a marginal role in Cancun.

So how did cultural diversity permeate these activities at Cancun? There was unity and internationalism in the message from the ‘outside’. Yet it was conveyed through a rich diversity of cultures and identities as indigenous, national, regional, farmers and fishers, in both their educational forums and in their highly disciplined and symbolically powerful protests. On the ‘inside’ advocates for cultural diversity, especially from the culture sector, were largely invisible. So were cultural issues, except for one seminar co-hosted with the more ‘mainstream’ NGOs. Whereas biodiversity was integral to everyone’s understanding of the common struggle against neoliberal globalization, cultural diversity was not.

This reflects the situation in many of our home countries, and certainly my own. For many groups, the immediate and understandable priority is to stop governments from making commitments on culture in their country-specific schedules, whether in GATS or other trade in services agreements. But that approach is highly problematic:

v A narrow exceptions focus means working with the GATS paradigm that views the world solely in terms of service exporters selling commodities. There is no conceptual space to assert broader cultural imperatives within that framework.

v In any case, how do you define and identify all culture-related sectors that fall with the Central Product Classification? Beyond the obvious headings of audio-visual services and cultural services, are museums, libraries, printing, publishing, photography, translation, archives, sporting services, landscape architecture, urban planning, architecture, education, environmental research and development and more included?

v A commitment that appears innocuous may become devastating when domestic policies, new technologies or corporate strategies change. The Chileans’ carve out in their bilateral agreement with the US, for example, doesn’t extend to digital. Generic retailers like Walmart, which came under by the category of distribution services, can dominate music sales and dictate acceptable content. Foreign investment rules that allow firms to control movie theatre chains can neutralize local content rules. E-commerce provisions privilege cross-boarder suppliers like Amazon.com over local independent booksellers. And so on.

v Even if you secure a carve out today, there is no guarantee for the future. And that is too late for countries like New Zealand where culture-related services were committed back in 1994 and the question is how to pull them out.

v Finally, services are unique; similar issues arise within investment and intellectual property agreements where opting out a sector is not possible.

One alternative is a broader cultural carve out from the agreement itself. But that isn’t going to happen in a multilateral agreement like the GATS, because it would require consensus, including from the US. It might be possible in bilateral and regional agreements, as New Zealand did with Singapore in 2001. But that is largely symbolic. It doesn’t override the GATS, even between those two countries, except to the extent that the bilateral agreement contains more extensive commitments. Interpretation, including requirements that any measures do constitute a disguised trade barrier, remains subject to the trade disputes mechanism.

More importantly, carve outs do nothing to shift the philosophical ground from a neoliberal model that commodifies culture, enforces homogeneity and denies cultural self-determination to one that gives priority to cultural diversity.

My point is that so long as the agreements themselves exist, they remain a threat to the cultural sector, let alone to cultural diversity.

There are obvious allies within the cultural sector, ranging across educators, journalists, designers, architects, landscapers, tourism guides, restaurateurs, sporting organizations and more. I have been trying to encourage this in New Zealand. Many professions approach this from an industry perspective and have very limited ambivalent objectives. Those in the education sector, however, have been active since the early 1990s and are part of very effective international networks and campaigns. Others, such as landscape architects, are just beginning to explore the issues. Often important players don’t interact because they are outside existing networks – and the comfort zone. Most obvious for us is the poor linkage between cultural groups and indigenous Maori who have a very clear understanding of what is at stake, their own music and performance activities, media outlets and forums for debate and very effective strategies to pressure the government.

Practically, a sectoral approach makes sense. But it is self-limiting, practically and philosophically. If cultural diversity is seen as our right to determine how we live our lives – as self-determination – our allies are those who insist on the same in relation to water, health, sacred sites, biodiversity or food. That doesn’t necessarily mean having to work actively together. But it requires, at a minimum, sensitivity to the broader issues and a specific strategy that doesn’t undermine their position.

This may sound unrealistic. But the international networks that are now operating have tried to develop an analysis that is sourced in our understandings of what these agreements and policies mean for our own economies, jobs, communities, services, cultures and sense of identity. We can speak a similar language about this because the neoliberal template of free trade and investment rules, and the underpinning ideology, are the same. By sharing information we can leverage of each other’s examples to embarrass our governments.

Many of us began working together in 1997 during the campaign that helped sink the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) at the OECD. This was the first really international campaign. It combined loosely coordinated national campaigns that were driven by local groups with their own priorities, and international alliances across sectors, such as local government, education or environment. At strategic moments, these diverse forces came together in Paris to confront the OECD on its own ground.

The campaign against the WTO built on these networks. Today, similar strategies are replicated at the regional level with the FTAA, APEC and Cotonou, and increasingly between countries where our governments are negotiating on a bilateral level.

While the networks are international, the work remains centred in our national contexts. Let me reflect again on New Zealand. Several of us spend endless time simply finding out what the government is doing, because negotiations are treated as confidential acts of State. Analysing the legal and policy implications of existing and potential commitments requires specialist expertise, which the group I belong to, ARENA offers. Those who are affected, whether in education, culture, local government, indigenous peoples, unions or anti-privatisation campaigns, take this analysis and see how it affects them. They, in turn, translate that information into a form that makes sense to their constituencies.

Each has a different capacity and approach to pressuring the government. Some lobby ministers and officials. Others run education campaigns to build popular pressure and try to convince the media that debate on trade negotiations is not a ratings killer. Yet others engage in activism. Not everyone agrees on the analysis, goals or strategies. But we have been much more effective working together than in isolation. The local content quotas issue is especially important as it provides a concrete example of where the agreements prevent government from implementing its mandated policy. Unfortunately, it is easier to reach out with support to different sectors, than it is to get them to feed back into a more integrated national campaign.

Despite these limitations, there is now a real momentum of resistance and mounting evidence that we can influence the juggernaut of globalization, at least in the forums that seek to create binding international rules to promote the interest of major powers and their transnational corporations. The MAI campaign from 1997-98 was a turning point. The collapse of the MAI negotiations shocked the superpowers and their transnationals who believed they could dictate the rules for a global economy to serve their interests. It proved that these global agreements were neither inevitable nor irresistible.

Now two failed ministerials have severely disable the WTO. Sustained efforts are needed to keep it that way. Hopefully, attempts to revive the MAI through the WTO are dead. Because there are no trade-offs or clear deadlines, the GATS negotiations are almost paralysed and major new commitments and ‘disciplines’ seem less likely. For those of us with existing commitments, a less potent WTO may make them less effective and governments more willing to amend them.

Clearly, the focus of governments and activists is now shifting to the regional and bilateral levels, with APEC meeting this week in Bangkok and Chile next year and the FTAA ministerial in Miami in November. Africa and Caribbean countries are focusing on NEPAD and negotiations with the EU over Cotonou. In Europe you have your own issues around the EU.

The bilateral level is the perhaps the most vulnerable. Many countries have signed or are negotiating deals with the US and EU that will be more devastating than would be achieved through the WTO. It can be harder to build a critical mass of opposition, especially where one country has no effective opposition. There are no big ministerial meetings to focus on and the process can move invisibly and rapidly. In our own case, however, pressure has effectively stalled negotiations on an agreement with Hong Kong and we are collaborating with Chilean groups to challenge the proposed agreement there.

This doesn’t mean we need to resuscitate the WTO. Rather we need to strengthen international networks that allow us to intervene as effectively at this level as we have been multilaterally, building from our national base. It would be great to have activists committed to the defense of cultural diversity as central partners in those campaigns.