Resting Security On Trade May Backfire
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By Paul Harris
Since September 11, 2001 there has been a heightened world-wide concern about security issues. Countries have been roused to increase their police or military security, to crack down on dissidents, to restrict the crossing of their borders, and so on. While many of these measures may be sensible, even in the absence of any specific threat of a terrorist agenda, there is some concern that nations are failing to grasp what will provide the world with security.
Most people shared the horror of September 11 and a heightened sense of insecurity appears to be a natural and understandable outflow from that event. There have been some reactions which might seem extreme: the Cold War bomb-shelter craze revived, gas mask sales in some areas burgeoned, restricting of civil rights is commonplace in many nations, hatred against Arabs and Muslims seems to have become acceptable public policy.
But there is a sense among many that our insecurity is based on a misunderstanding of what gives us security in the first place. To be sure, threats of aggression by unfriendly forces or individuals give rise to insecurity and it is likely those threats will always be with us, making effective policing and military protection necessary. Among some citizens, though, there is a realization that personal security arises out of a sense of common security, which must include considerations of the economic, psychosocial, political, cultural, ecological factors that affect our lives.
Worldwide, many governments have accepted and promoted the notion of increased security through increased prosperity and increased wealth through trade. It seems reasonable that increased prosperity would help alleviate the most obvious concern of disenfranchised people, hunger. But there is a growing concern among many that while governments are speaking of fighting terrorism through trade, they are going to produce exactly the opposite result.
Increasingly, the nations of the world are losing relevance as they participate in the commodification of virtually everything and the signing of international trade agreements which effectively reduce or remove their power to govern. Critics say this effectively destroys democracy and that the global trading system, as epitomized by the World Trade Organization (WTO), is a major source of political, social, economic insecurity for many of the world's people. The WTO agenda has focused on “free trade” — although its critics would say it is anything but “free.” Those same critics would say that what is really required for a safe and prosperous world is “fair” trade.
Beginning at the personal level, workers world-wide are feeling increased levels of joblessness, or at least the fear of it. A primary cause can be traced to the WTO and its trade rules: they are not designed to produce jobs. In fact, the WTO has rules that limit a government's ability to create jobs. Under the WTO's Trade Related Investment Measures (TRIM), governments cannot require transnational corporations to meet job creation targets or demand that they balance imports and exports to help maintain job security. WTO rules mostly favor the interests of foreign-based corporations over domestic companies; and while it is true that transnational corporations create employment, they are not a major source of jobs. The largest 200 corporations in the world have more economic impact than about four-fifths of all humanity, yet they employ only a tiny percentage of all workers.
On a societal level, critics say the WTO is a source of political insecurity. It effectively controls the world economy and its rules are tantamount to a bill of rights and freedoms for transnational corporations. The WTO itself, meanwhile, is beyond any rules but its own. Governments are finding themselves powerless to control or effect change in their economies as basic policy decisions are made at a WTO level, far away from the local citizens who will be affected. To further restrict local autonomy, the WTO's dispute-settling mechanism gives the organization substantial power. It has the ability to strike down the local laws, policies and programs of democratically elected governments simply by declaring that a country is in violation of WTO trade rules. This gives it power that no other global institution has and raises concerns among many about the political security of citizens and governments in democratic societies.
This same unprecedented level of power gives the WTO ability to influence, or even quash, local social programming and negotiations are currently underway with the goal of making this situation even more untenable. These talks are designed to broaden the inclusion of such things as health care, water management, transportation, postal services, and a variety of services usually administered at the municipal level. If the WTO wants to thwart the social agenda of a nation, a state or province, or even a municipality, it can readily achieve it; and through association with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the WTO is working hard to force non-compliant nations to succumb to marketplace dominance. There is a growing movement of opposition to this unfettered power; as we have seen, meetings of the WTO world-wide have attracted large crowds of sometimes violence protest.
The WTO's effect on the Third World has been dramatic. Working closely with the World Bank and the IMF, the WTO is applying pressure, through “structural adjustment programs,” to force Third World countries to withdraw many basic human and social rights from their citizens and to transfer local control of resources to private corporations in exchange for badly needed food, medicine, and water.
People who work in the environmental movement are critical that WTO trade rules allow transnational corporations to escape environmental controls over processing methods and discharge. They point out that in many cases, corporations can profit with little or no regard for the health of the people where they are doing business and, indeed, the health of the planet.
An interesting exception to WTO control of local autonomy is the arms industry. Clauses in the WTO charters allow for nations to take actions for their own security and those countries that produce arms on a large scale (the United States, Great Britain, Belarus, Germany, etc.) have seized the opportunity to increase production of weaponry. Even since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the arms industry has continued apace. One reason for this is WTO rules favoring militarism and the arms race: WTO rules indicate that one of the few legitimate roles for government is the provision of military infrastructure to protect countries and police forces to ensure civil order.
It seems clear that business and the capitalist agenda are important engines to helping the world move forward. But there is a growing concern among many that it has never been true that “what's good for business is good for the country”; precisely the opposite is true. There is a growing movement which believes that business and economics have assumed too high a position in our lives; they feel that those are only secondary activities which should provide the fuel for nations to build civil societies. Instead, they say, everything else in life has taken a back seat to the thrust of the marketplace. If they are correct, the corrective measure would appear to be bringing to the table the governments, the citizens, and even the corporations of the world to negotiate a fair trade agreement. It is only in that way, say these critics, that civil societies can thrive and a sense of common security can return.
A political lobby group in Canada, the Common Front on the World Trade Organization, puts its case succinctly: “What we need to do now is to commit ourselves to fight for common security through fair trade, not corporate security through free trade.”
[Paul Harris is self-employed as a consultant providing businesses with the tools and expertise to reintegrate their sick or injured employees into the workplace. Canadian businesses can reach him at paul@working-solutions.ca. He has traveled extensively in what is usually known as "the Third World" and has an abiding interest in history, social justice, morality and, well, just about everything. Paul is also a freelance writer and can be reached at paul@escritoire.ca. He lives in Canada.]
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@ September 21, 2003