Globalization After Seattle

The recent World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle can be called many things, but no one would call it business as usual. The opening ceremony was delayed as protesters trapped Madeleine Albright, the U.S. secretary of state, and Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, in their hotels. Environmentalists and labor union members marched to protest the poor environmental and labor record of the WTO. In a scene reminiscent of Ridley Scott's futuristic movie, Blade Runner, the Lesbian Avengers and conservative presidential-hopeful Pat Buchanan became marching partners--however briefly--against the policies of the WTO. Instead of launching a new round of talks to liberalize international trade, the WTO meeting in Seattle produced an unprecedented degree of doubts, disagreements, and dismay regarding what is commonly refered to as globalization. For one week in 1999, Jose Bove, the French farmer who gained fame for vandalizing McDonald's in France, overshadowed Bill Gates, chief executive officer of Microsoft, as the human face of globalization.

The failure of the WTO negotiations cannot be blamed on one single factor. Some of the blame must be laid on the complexity and diversity of the trade issues. The lack of transparency and the secretive manner in which international trade rules are negotiated might have been acceptable in the past, but nonstate actors such as environmental groups and labor unions decided they were no longer satisfied with waiting on the policy sidelines. With 2000 presidential elections less than a year away, U.S. domestic politics no doubt played a key role in energizing the WTO protests. The usual lack of concern for the developing world's trade interests, coupled with new issues such as genetically modified foods and the environmental impact of liberalizing the international commerce of forest and paper products, provided the ideal platform for anti-WTO rhetoric from all sides of the political spectrum and from all corners of the globe.

Whether or not the WTO meeting in Seattle is the harbinger of what global governance may look like in the twenty-first century may depend on how successfully U.S. policymakers cultivate what Joseph Nye, the dean of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, calls America's "soft power." Unlike "hard power" that is exercised through economic sanctions or military force, soft power is the ability of a country to get what it wants through cooperation rather than coercion. The United States has become so successful at using hard power in places such as the Balkans and the Persian Gulf that the public sometimes forgets that hard power is not really an option when trying to forge global consensus on international business, labor, and environmental matters. The United States remains the world's only economic and military superpower, so the tendency just to bully other countries to accept its policy agenda has unfortunately become a normal part of our diplomatic reflex. This is why many people around the world resist the inevitability of globalization since the concept is so often tied to U.S. hegemony.

Soft power is often the only diplomatic tool at the disposal of small, less powerful states that do not have the luxury of having a permanent seat on the UN Security Council nor of ranking as the most influential shareholder of the International Monetary Fund. A good example is the way small island nations have organized themselves into the Alliance of Small Island States, an effective lobbying group to promote the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which sets legally binding emissions targets for industrialized countries. Barbados, Marshall Islands, and other island states know that their policy objectives are attainable only by working together in a carefully planned alliance, an idea the United States often preaches but rarely commits to. Both dimensions of power are important expressions of U.S. foreign policy. But the ability to cultivate soft power, particularly within the framework of regional organizations such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and global policy forums such...