Growing Up and Getting Practical Since Seattle http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/24/weekinreview/24COHE.html September 24, 2000 MOVEMENT By ROGER COHEN PRAGUE -- With her Danish mother, her Syrian father, her French passport and her Oxford education, Annie-Christine Habbard, 31, seems every inch the global citizen equipped to succeed in a shrinking world. Yet here she is, chic in black, articulate in several tongues, at the annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, protesting the state of the globe. What she wants is more social justice, respect for human rights, a "counterpower" to high finance and, for good measure, a more equitable distribution of the spoils from a new Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline. Say "anti-globalization" and stormy images come to mind: ransackers of McDonald's restaurants in France, smashers of Seattle storefront windows. The police on every corner here, and the shuttered shops, confirm the power of such specters, and indeed some protesters say they want a repeat of Seattle. But the specter of violence can deceive. The deeper reality is more significant: that of an increasingly sophisticated, intellectually robust protest movement, mixing idealism with pragmatism, that is fast playing catch-up with the forces of multinational capital. It is time to change icons: replace the angry visage of Jose Bove, the French farmer recently imprisoned for storming a McDonald's, with the cool features and articulate aplomb of Ms. Habbard. "Ours is a new planetary citizenship, reflecting the fact that decisions have migrated from state level," Ms. Habbard, the deputy secretary general of the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights, said. "Voting for national representatives, an old expression of citizenship, achieves nothing, because they have scant power. We have to be here to fight the political battles that will ensure globalization does not continue to accentuate inequities." She is not alone. More than 350 citizens' organizations are here debt-reliefers, save-the-Earthers, human-dignity-firsters, and everything in between, representing lands from Mauritius to Mexico. Forget right and left and the stale duels of national politics: the battle of universal principles against universal capital now unfurls. It might be argued that the lines are being drawn in the wrong place. The $1.2 trillion traded daily on world money markets equals the entire lending of the World Bank over its 55 years of existence. But all that fast-moving money has no identifiable face. By contrast, the altar of market liberalization, privatization and public spending cuts is identifiable, and the protesters are sure such orthodoxy has run its course. Ms. Habbard is determined to change the world through international human-rights law where her predecessors deployed Marxist revolution or flower power. She is intensely pragmatic. She has lawyers behind her, ready to use the body of international law to compel the World Bank to avoid loans to any projects that might compromise human rights. Multinational corporations are more difficult to control, she concedes, but they are the next target. The Internet links her to other groups like Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, with their own batteries of lawyers. Nothing dreamy here: this fight to shape globalization has all the romance of a corporate takeover battle. Organizations like Attac in France, whose membership has increased in two years to 26,000, including more than 20 members of Parliament, argue for taxes on international capital flows, codes of conduct obliging multinationals to respect human rights and restraints on the activities of United States pension funds that pursue returns in Europe in ways that cut back jobs. For Bruno Jetin, a French economist, such measures are essential to "put equality and human beings back at the center of economic debate." Such ideas have a particular resonance in France, where equality is a founding principle of the republic and rapid Americanization in recent years has stirred uneasiness. But everywhere in Europe, where the state's heavy role in balancing the excesses of the market had been widely accepted, the triumph of the private sector causes some unease. One challenge before these Europeans and all the anti-globalists is to make the case that their concern for equity will not hobble growth in the developing world, as it sometimes has done on this continent. On the other hand, the intellectual ammunition of the anti-globalists has also been reinforced by the spread of poverty in places that include Eastern Europe a trend that has led James D. Wolfensohn, the World Bank president, to use some very strong language here. "Today you have 20 percent of the world controlling 80 percent of the gross domestic product," he said. "You've got a $30 trillion economy and $24 trillion of it in developed countries. The income of the top 20 is 37 times the income of the bottom 20, and it has doubled in the last decade. These inequities cannot exist. So if you are looking for systemic breakdown, I believe you have to think today in terms of social breakdown." Dramatic words. But another side to the story clearly exists. Open markets and free trade have slashed poverty in East Asia, and a few countries in Africa have also begun to respond to this recipe of economic opening. As Daniel Bachman, chief economist at The Globalist.com, an online magazine, pointed out: "Globalization can also improve conditions by forcing a race to the top." In states like Argentina, the dismantling of local oligarchies caused by open markets has had a tremendous liberating effect. In a place like Haiti, subsistence wages may be undignified, but they are better than starvation. Globalization can also be a very fertile process. Much has been made of the Americanization of the world, but cultural currents are more mixed than that, and the United States has also been Europeanized, from its coffee to its eating habits. In some areas, such as data privacy, stricter European standards seem likely to prevail, to Ameridcans' benefit. Yet the president of the World Bank warns of a social breakdown because of the very global economic system he is deemed to personify. So there is clearly a problem, and a growing one. Its nature is economic and political. Some basic statistics are not encouraging about 1.2 billion people still living on less than $1 a day, another 1.3 billion people on $2 and the diverse protests stirred by such numbers are now so vigorous that dialogue and compromise have become essential. "If we do not succeed in making clear to citizens that globalization is to their benefit, we run a big political risk," said Caio Koch-Weser, a senior German economic official. "There's a feeling in the population that nobody's in charge. People are afraid of losing jobs to the whims of multinationals. We need to bring Wall Street to Main Street." This sharpening of official concern reflects the fact that a decade of globalization has allowed a keener dissection of its characteristics. The wild denunciations of the inhuman scourge of rampaging global capital in the French author Viviane Forrestier's immensely popular "The Economic Horror" (one million copies sold worldwide, but unpublished in the United States), have given way to subtler analysis. Often this has concentrated on the way a global economy can prompt a "race to the bottom," as the cheapest labor and lowest taxes are relentlessly sought out. The net effect has been described by the German sociologist Ernest Beck as "the Brazilianization of the West" the progressive recourse to uninsured, temporary workers and the slow dismantlement of the welfare state. John D. Clark, a development specialist on leave from the World Bank, has argued that globalization was always a highly selective thing. Advocates of free trade really wanted only an unrestrained market for capital. The result has been to maximize returns on capital, while minimizing returns to labor. "The world over, gaps between rich and poor have widened as richer populations and countries raced ahead of poorer," Mr. Clark wrote recently. Many economists dispute that view. But officials seem convinced that beyond debt relief, an enormous effort must now be made to give more people the basic tools to benefit from a global economy: education, lifetime training, access to technology, encouragement for the stock ownership that alone will spread America's brand of popular capitalism, in which even blue-collar workers benefit from investing. Without such measures, the distorting effects of the wild premium placed by modern markets on talent and technology seem likely to grow, miring a third of humanity in abject poverty. The other new priority seems to be dialogue. Mr. Wolfensohn spent time Friday with non-governmental organizations including the Bolivian Episcopal Conference, the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society of the Kyrgyz Republic, and a representative of something called World Vision from Uganda. Questions ranged from corruption to control of multinationals to that Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline. The meeting, in such a setting, amounted to a first. But the evolution is natural enough: world politics, however cumbersome, for a global economy. The New York Times on the Web http://www.nytimes.com Attac discussion list The primary goal of this "e-community" is concrete: it is about gathering information for the attac.org website around articles and other documents regarding the fight against financial market dictatorship. 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