FTAA Ship Runs Aground, But Party Goes On
By Tom Hayden
AlterNet
Sunday 30 November 2003
At the Miami FTAA summit last week, a festive cruise ship full of trade
ministers and lobbyists ran aground for several hours on its voyage to a
plush island resort. Eventually the ship was salvaged and the partying
continued, much to the relief of the host committee.
It may have been symbolic of the week's events.
A huge but empty trade agreement – widely described as "FTAA Lite" – was
all the US could achieve after being buffeted for weeks by rising fair
trade winds. But the jolly ship of neo-liberalism was salvaged in Miami
rather than torpedoed, receiving life support from its most formidable
critic, Brazil, and causing confusing challenges for the global justice
movement in its wake.
Fair trade leader Lori Wallach, her voice nearly broken, summed up the
dilemma at a rally at Miami's Bayfront Park last Wednesday. "The good
news
is that the US-Bush expansion of NAFTA has been pushed back and
derailed.
The bad news is that the boneheads and their client governments are
still
on their mission. We can't let this happen. This is an avoidable
disaster.
We are stuck with NAFTA and the WTO, but this one is avoidable. We've
got
to go back and do the hardest work, electing people who represent us."
Global Exchange co-founder Medea Benjamin also emphasized a positive
spin
as well. "These trade ministers went away hungry. The agreement was a
buffet with no nutrients." Then, shifting to another metaphor used by
critics, she added that, "The FTAA train left the station, but the
boxcars
were empty."
Several questions remain to be sorted out: the content of the agreement
itself, whether it can be revived, and why Latin American countries
unanimously supported further negotiations, seeming to ignore or
marginalize social movements in their own countries.
Empty Boxcars
As veteran New York Times trade correspondent Elizabeth Becker wrote
before Miami, the US agenda was "to avoid another debacle" like Cancun,
where the September WTO meeting was derailed by a new bloc of countries
including Brazil, India, China and South Africa, demanding greater
access
to US markets especially for their agricultural products.
The Bush Administration resisted any reductions in its protectionist
agricultural tariffs (and steel tariffs as well), a gesture to its
critical electoral support in the farm belt. For example, Gov. Jeb
Bush's
citrus growers would have gone ballistic at any reductions of their 28.7
cents-per-gallon tariff against Brazil's imported orange juice. (NYT,
Oct.
28) While yielding nothing on tariffs, the US and the European Union
demanded greater privatization and deregulation for their corporate
investors, an agenda that was shunned by Brazil and its allies. To the
ire
of the US, the Cancun meeting collapsed abruptly, and shudders traveled
through the corporate and political worlds.
Showing that markets are really a function of politics, the US was
determined to assure a diplomatic "victory" for its trade agenda in
Miami.
To fail again would be comparable with the US debacle in Iraq going into
an election year in which voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South
Carolina
(for starters) are so angry that the Democratic presidential candidates
are being forced to talk about "fair trade" after a decade of liberal
fantasies about NAFTA and the WTO.
The scaling back to "FTAA Lite" was a "severe disappointment" to US
corporate lobbies, according to the Financial Times. The "opt out"
provision, by which countries could pick and choose which rules to
follow,
was a "cop out," business lobbyists told the Miami Herald. The New York
Times editorial board condemned the Bush Administration's "shocking"
betrayal of the editors' apparent dream of a "more muscular trade deal."
(Ever since Lori Wallach dubbed the FTAA "NAFTA on steroids," the drug
analogies keep popping up.)
Indeed, the 350-page draft agreement includes 5,000 bracketed items –
policies drafted by staff for which there is no consensus so far. The
ministers left it untouched. Instead, they spent their first morning
listening to irrelevent reports by United Nations agencies, then to
droning testimony from inter-American labor ministers. Finally, about
mid-afternoon Thursday, US trade representative Robert Zoellick offered
the low-key suggestion that the meeing should finish one day early since
many ministers seemed to want to leave.
The 350-page draft remained unopened. If anyone had insisted on debate
or
consensus, the FTAA would have collapsed. As one observer said of the
bizarre scene "it was so fragile it could come apart on any detail.
Everyone was scared shitless of putting new issues on the table."
When the Venezuelan delegate raised the question of how the FTAA would
reach its January 2005 deadline, the US and Brazilian co-chairs became
visibly upset. The meeting then adjourned, some 30 hours ahead of
schedule.
So the US avoided an election year embarrassment. But it also was
reacting
to a new Latin America. Events ranging from the Zapatista insurgency to
the elections of progressive nationalists in Brazil and Argentina, to
the
recent overthrow of the Bolivian government are reflections of a hot
current of anger running through the continent against neo-liberal
policies. Instead of the North American colossus swallowing Latin
America,
there is an indigestible populist nationalism that will not be bullied
or
bought.
The US may prefer in the short-run to focus on bilateral trade
agreements
with "several compliant nations," but the state is set for a serious
showdown with Brazil, Argentina and other nationalisms rising to the
surface.
Is Brazil Reversing Course?
There was euphoria last year when Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and the
Workers Party came to power in Brazil. It was the most significant
electoral triumph for the Latin American left after three decades of
military dictatorships. Lula campaigned against the FTAA as an
"annexation" of Latin America by the US.
Now the Brazilian government co-chairs the FTAA with the United States,
and was the key player in keeping the negotiations alive in Miami. Only
weeks ago, the US was condemning Brazil for being a spoiler in Cancun
and
threatening a coalition of "can do" nations against the "won't do" bloc.
Yet there was Robert Zoellick cooing in Miami alongside his Brazilian
counter-part, left-wing foreign minister Celso Amorim. The Brazilian had
chosen a word in English – "enabling" – to describe the agreement to
keep
the talks alive, and Zoellick couldn't agree more. "It's a great word,"
he
chipped in.
One unofficial Brazilian insider explained that, "We were counting on
resistance from the US to the Brazilian proposal, but they decided to
accept it. This puts our social movements in a difficult position,
because
Brazil will accept the FTAA "model" even if it does not include all the
issues, and the FTAA official schedule also. So our campaign will have
to
make difficult decisions soon."
Hearing this evaluation, I was reminded of a conversation with another
Brazilian nearly one year ago amidst the jubilation over Lula's victory
at
the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre. "Brazil does not want an
ideological confrontation with the United States," referring to Cuba and
Venezuela. What then of Lula's denunciations of FTAA on the campaign
trail? "We will negotiate and hope the FTAA will eventually go away."
Lula's government has proved disappointing to the left already. The 1.5
million member landless movement is demanding he deliver on promises of
land reform. (see NYT, July 27). Lula's government has reversed its
promise not to allow the planting of genetically modified crops, giving
in
to Monsanto. (NYT, Sept. 28). Lula is planning pipelines and dams in the
Amazon, enraging Brazil's environmentalists. (NYT, Nov. 22. WSJ, Oct.11)
It is too early, and perhaps inappropriate, for the global justice
movement to pass judgement on Lula's government, but his strategy seems
to
arise from his historic experiences as a tough union negotiator, which
alternated from strikes to compromises to victories. His civil service
is
thoroughly trained in assessing Brazil's national interest amidst the
world balance of power. His formidable political team includes longtime
underground strategists turned diplomats.
The Brazilians are well aware that their electoral triumph was helped
hugely by $30 billion in loans from the IMF (which represents the Bush
Administration), which critics on the left questioned at the time. But
Lula also knows that the politics of debt are double-edged: Citigroup,
Fleet Boston, J.P.Morgan Chase and General Motors badly needed the
roll-over for their Brazilian investments as well.
Lula has made a priority of building a strategic alliance to balance the
US and the EU within the trade negotiations. Brazil led the creation of
the "G-22" at Cancun to offset the wealthy G-7 bloc. He has proposed
cuts
in global armaments spending to feed the hungry. Brazilian negotiators
have cultivated China's vast soybean market as an alternative to the US
and Europe. And with his closest ally, President Nestor Kirchner of
Argentina, he has drafted a "Buenos Aires Consensus" to challenge the
"Washington Consensus" of privatization and deregulation. The joint
declaration with Argentina, stressing jobs and fair trade instead of
profits alone, is as close to an "ideological confrontation" as Lula has
come.
Perhaps Lula's strategy will cause the FTAA to implode from within
eventually, without Brazil taking the retaliatory blame. But it is
equally
likely that Brazil and the US will pursue an ultimate deal along the
lines
of a labor-management negotiation, with the hemisphere under an expanded
US corporate dominion. The labor-management model under capitalism may
improve export industries in the developing world but leaves democracy
in
a weakened state and non-governmental advocates at the margins.
Lula and Kirchner at this point represent competing nationalisms –
representing their national business interests as well as labor
interests
– against those of the United States and Europe in a single system of
global capitalism, not a separate trading bloc based on an alternative
economic system. To the extent that they are socialists, they are market
socialists, which raises understandable concerns among socialists
without
power.
Hardline global justice activists have seen this process unfolding in
South Africa. There the international financial barons retreated under
heavy pressure from their long-standing support of apartheid. They were
forced to be supportive of Nelson Mandela's release from Robben Island
and
the electoral transition of the African National Congress to political
power in 1994.
In turn, the ANC government immediately adopted neo-liberal economic
policies, turned its back on promises of wealth redistribution,
privatized
its mining industry and utilities, and left behind many of its
once-ardent
supporters in the black townships. Within a decade, a new stage of
struggle was being opened in South Africa by workers and communities
calling themselves "the poors," who faced displacement, wage cuts,
unemployment, and water and electricity shut-offs amidst the rise of a
new
black oligarchy.
Both "new South Africa" and "new Brazil" contain business classes long
submerged under apartheid or military dictatorship. Their form of
nationalism, while far preferable to direct oppression, does not
automatically include a class sympathy with their own dispossessed, and
so
the national liberation phase unfolds into new class and community
alliances. The global justice activists who participated in the
anti-apartheid or anti-imperial movements suddenly find themselves in a
quandary. Can they be in solidarity with the Brazilian government
against
US agricultural monopolies but also on the side of the landless movement
against Lula's inadequate land reform? In solidarity with black South
Africans seeking to end white privilege while also standing with "the
poors" against unaffordable rents and rates?
A similar dilemma confronts US activists around the 2004 election. The
defeat of George Bush is a near-universal desire, but with whom? A
Democratic Party that invented NAFTA? Candidates who blow with the trade
winds? Is steadfast opposition in the streets the only choice? Are
writers
like Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky essentially correct in diagnosing
politics as a dead-end? Or is a strategy based on the streets in danger
of
being trapped in a cul-de-sac while the real fights occur inside the
negotiating arenas? Should the global justice movement look favorably
on a
fair trade alliance with potential nominees like Howard Dean or Dick
Gephart?
These are not easily answered questions. What is clear is that the US is
being forced to retreat, at least for the election year, from its
once-triumphal unilateralism in both Iraq and Latin America. Like the
Miami negotiations, victory and defeat become harder to distinguish, and
that is a great difficulty for a movement built on principled
opposition.
