WTO writes Seattle and critics out of it's history

In the press packets that the WTO hands out to all journalists accredited to cover the 5th Ministerial in Cancun they have several important documents. First a press packet of briefing notes which goes in to the status and issues related to current negotiations and then they have a 100 page primer on ‘Understanding the WTO.’

The documents are interesting read if you want to understand the perspective of the WTO. Especially in what they say, how qualifiers have been tacked on, and for what is not said. Most interesting is that the 20 page introduction and history of the WTO/GATT doesn’t mention the 3rd Ministerial in Seattle once. Beyond that they even have virtually erased the whole year of 1999 from their memory. Reading their documents you would think that perhaps nothing happened then. They just go from the end of the Uruguay Round in 1994 which created the WTO to the Doha round. With Doha they launched the ‘Development Round’ of the WTO but they never even admit that at least a rhetorical shift in priorities took place. When the Doha meetings took place there were many press conferences about erasing the memory of Seattle, it seems that it’s been erased from the official history as well.

They explain how the Uruguay Round, ‘86 to ‘94, was difficult, but that through a series of meetings of the “Quad” (USA, European Union, Japan and Canada) everything was worked out. The Quad was able to save the meetings and create the WTO even though it took twice as long as expected. The WTO indicates that many third world countries joined GATT (which became the WTO in 1995) during that period, but apparently they weren’t important enough to participate in the negotiations. Although not mentioned in the official history, many third world countries regard the Uruguay round as not including any of their voices at the negotiating table.

After the WTO was founded in 1995, there was a time when they negotiated single issue trade agreements in things telecoms, financial services, intellectual property, government procurement, etc… But they didn’t have enough power to force countries to buckle under. Some trade agreements such as those of Maritime Services failed for this reason. This drove them to push to create a new ‘trade round.’ The advantage of a trade round is principally political, in that the negotiators can use ‘trade-off’s’ which the rest of us know as bribes, to pressure countries in to agreements. The WTO documents claim that Development Rounds give more advantage to third world countries because they might be better off than one on one bilateral treaties, but they don’t mention that countries can walk away from those bilateral treaties easily while walking away from the WTO and facing the repercussions from that are much more difficult.

The WTO’s Goals

Reading how the WTO describes itself, it’s clearly an attempt to push a hardline neo-liberal agenda. At the same time there is a unwritten subtext which goes through out their documents. Everything is written as a struggle between what they really want to say, and how they have to qualify it given criticism that they can’t even publicly acknowledge is there.

For example at the very beginning of the ‘Understanding the WTO document’ they say:

“Although negotiated and signed by governments, the goal [ of the WTO ] is to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business, while allowing for governments to meet social and environmental objectives. The system’s overriding purpose is to help trade flow as freely as possible—so long as there are no undesirable side-effects.”

It is clear what they want to say, that the WTO is by governments in the service of multinationals and business. My guess is that they wrote it the first time without the two caveats of “while allowing governments to meet social and environmental objects” and “so long as there are no undesirable side-effects.” They don’t want to put that in there, but it’s as close that the WTO is willing to get to acknowledge it’s critics in it’s own documents. They are trying to spin themselves as a pro-developing countries / pro-poor organization, yet they say their primary purpose is in the service of powerful industries.

Governments are allowed to try and include exceptions which protect their society and environment, but those are only as secondary issues which hold back the march toward a global economic system which is ‘freer.’

Perhaps most interesting is that while environmental and ‘social’ concerns do get raised, the issues of workers rights, protecting living wage jobs, and unionized workforces gets no such lip-service. The documents says that protectionism, ie preserving domestic jobs and industry “ultimately leads to bloated, inefficient producers supplying consumers with outdated, unattractive products.” Then it goes on to say that the protectionists are screwed anyway because “in the end, factories close and jobs are lost despite the protection and subsidies.” The WTO thinks of environmental and ‘consumer protection’ are really just charades saying that protectionists hide behind such things as “environmental preservation or consumer protection as an excuse to protect [domestic] producers.” The implication being that labor never has any legitimate argument against free trade. Environmental protections are used defend the undefendable protection of jobs and wages.

This has scary implications. First it is clear they are trying to split the environmental / social movements from the Labor movement. They are saying Labor activists are never making a legitimate demand when they call for the protection of jobs and wages. The implication is that Unions should have no right to exist, that the international trade system should be setup and used to break Unions. They don’t even try and hide the argument that Globalization is a race to the bottom in terms of wages. They say “a country may have enjoyed an advantage because of lower labour costs… could also become uncompetitive… as it’s economy develops.” In other words, it’s ok to loose jobs because the country will magically move on to new more developed industries as it climbs up the development ladder. The US being the dominant economic power should be a great example of everybody gets when they reach the ‘top’. The largest employer in the USA is Manpower Inc a temp agency which farms workers out with little security or benefits to non-union low wage jobs. With the destruction of the traditional workforce people are forced in to a more ‘flexible’ environment where they are force to shape their lives to the ‘flexible’ needs of multinational corporations.

The WTO document goes on to say:

One of the objectives that governments bring to the WTO negotiations is to prevent such a self-defeating and destructive drift in to protectionism.”

What they don’t say is that every country which has experienced real economic development, as opposed to just growth, has done it by protecting and nurturing their local economies. This is particularly true of the ‘Asian Tigers’ which the US gave tremendous aid to and allowed to develop domestic industries in the name of the struggle against communism from the 50’s through the 80’s.

Beyond protectionism there is the fact that the WTO is not a level playing field, but rather build upon power politics. Countries which used to be colonial and imperial powers have transitioned themselves to being power brokers within the WTO. Most of the time they don’t have to send troops in to open up a countries economy to privatization and ‘investment’, although that is what happened in Iraq. Today they can simply threaten the country with economic collapse to bring about a forced consensus.

The WTO is a body by which the economically powerful interests manipulate governments to increase their own power. They work through governments but today the multinational corporations and financial markets call the real shots. Where there is conflict, it is because one group of powerful face off against another. This is the case with Agricultural Subsidies where multinational ag companies with production based in the first world face off against multinational ag companies which control third world production. Both sides use images of small farmers, but the only reason the debate is on the table is because there are rich and powerful forces backing both sides.

The WTO documents don’t appear to even mention NGO’s or the industry lobby groups which have such a large effect on negotiations. The latter are clearly laid out as the beneficiaries, as i quoted above, but in terms of the WTO, the Non-Governmental Organizations, NGO’s are almost nonexistent. Perhaps written out of the history like the failed attempt to launch the Seattle Round of trade negotiations. Despite pages and pages of text about transparency, openness, and accountability the WTO can’t even mention the glaring problems that permeate it’s every action.

If the WTO can’t even give a straight telling of it’s own history then how can we expect it to give a fair deal do developing countries, the environment, and labor movements?