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Quebec: Another Victory for Globalization

© Jackson Murphy

Seattle was the coming out party for the anti-globalization movement and saw protestors outline a series of problems that they had with agreements like the WTO and NAFTA. Globalization may have lost the ‘Battle in Seattle’ but it is certainly winning the war.

The world paid little attention to these protests-only to say that there was a lot of tear gas and destruction on the news hour. The protestors claim that these agreements are not democratic and will erode labor and environmental standards.

But something has changed in the last year and a half. The anti-globalization movement is winning a set of victories that it should be happy about-predictably they are not. It would take the fun out of trashing a city if people actually listened wouldn’t it?

For example, the WTO ruled in favor of France’s right to block the Canadian export of products containing asbestos. The argument that every time there is a dispute between the environment and trade that the environment loses does not hold any weight. There has been a growing accommodation of environmental concerns.

But if the protestors admitted that the governments were starting to come around and address their concerns they would not get 30, 000 people out to throw rocks at police and break windows-trashing cities like Seattle and Quebec. They wouldn’t get to protest what they really disliked-Capitalism.

Politicians ignore the people at their peril-they are a strange breed looking at issues for the inherent polling impact of going green or the effect this will have on future elections. In Quebec this past weekend, the politicians demonstrated that they have learned something.

They have learned that releasing the documents of the Summit of the America’s and especially those of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is a huge step to answer the calls that the negotiations need to be more transparent.

They have learned that by including more non-governmental organizations and members of civil society that they can have their cake and eat it too. In a dramatic turn of events, the anti-globalization protestors are now the ones who should be called undemocratic.

They have learned to address key concepts of environmental concerns and democracy instead of just trade. What some critics call a sham, the summit’s ‘democracy clause’ suggests that there would be punishment for those nations who fail to remain democratic.

Not that the protestors took notice or will admit it. They were too busy being tear-gassed, being hit with rubber bullets, and water cannons to hear much of anything other than their tired anti-globalization rhetoric.