Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2000, volume 18, pages 1^ 13

DOI:10.1068/d1801ed

Guest editorials

Global Seattle
When the people of the USA wake up
There's going to be a hell of a row,
I can feel it starting now.

from ``By The People'' Dick Gaughan

Back in the late 1970s when the first whiffs of globalization reached the nostrils of the
US media, the CBS network began introducing their nightly news shows with an image
of a rotating globe. This represented a certain cosmopolitanism at the end of the first
phase of the so-called cold war but it was simultaneously pretentious and portentous
insofar as the American Empire could not yet claim the global reach this image
suggested but it would. Thoroughly symptomatic of US pretense (and geographical
ignorance), the globe on the CBS opening segment was rotating the wrong way. If once
the sun never set on the British Empire, in CBS's American Empire the sun rose in the
west and set in the east. It took the honchos at CBS a while to figure out that their
globalism was back to front.
No such casual geographical ignorance plagues today's CNN. Their millennium
bash of New Year's Eve 1999 came across like a rolling fireworks show for global
neoliberalism. It began with Pacific Island exotica (new age inflected) and rolled ever
westward: Auckland, Tokyo, and Sydney turned, then Beijing and Calcutta, Cairo and
Bethlehem (not a global city but an obligatory genuflect to the calendrical Christianity
that caused the `millennium'. Then came the European crescendoMoscow and
Madrid, the Eiffel Tower, and the Thames. Europe still rules the new millennium, it
seems. After an Atlantic hiatusReykjavik and the Cape Verde Islands were not
invited to intrude on this geographic godsend for advertisersa second crescendo in
the New World: Rio de Janeiro went in beachfront Brazilian fashion then Times
Square, Mexico City's Zocalo and San Francisco, Vancouver and Alaska. All without
terrorism or Y2K-chaos. For celebrants in Europe, Africa, and Asia, at least those with
access to morning television, the celebrations of Honolulu must have seemed like a bad
breakfast hangover: could this extravaganza still be going on?
But the obscene party for feel-good globalization was already fading long before
the televisual millennial bash. The `Battle in Seattle' from November 29 to December 2
1999 marked a stunning denunciation of capitalist globalism, all the more resonant
because it seemed to ring a spirited death-knell for a century of unprecedented global
brutality. An estimated 60 000 people journeyed to the hometown of Microsoft, Boeing,
Starbucks, and Bill Gatesaka world's richest man (WRM)to demonstrate against
the World Trade Organization (WTO), whose self-satisfied political and economic
leaders (aka the ruling class) had billed their meeting as a celebratory `Millennium
Round' of world trade talks. But the party was disrupted by workers and environmentalists, feminists and indigenous activists, unionists and welfare advocates, and
many more besides who streamed in from all around the world. They argued forcefully
that the neoliberalism of the WTO's agenda for free-trade would wreak havoc on
workers, social policies, and the environment. ``The rich and powerful set the rules
and the rules, not surprisingly, favor the rich and powerful'' (Tabb, 2000). The Millennium Round was eventually abandoned in ruin. Just as impressive as the protests
themselves, the limited and apologetic coverage by CNN and other telemedia was

Guest editorials

upstaged by the Internet which effected an almost instantaneous globalization of the

Seattle events: news of the protests, images of police assaults, tear gas attacks, targeted
corporate symbols, the WTO in shambles. The carnivalesque atmosphere of this abrupt
rejection of free-trade globalism is perhaps best expressed in the slogan of one placard:
``Teamsters and Turtles. Together at last!''
Seattle is already widely perceived as an ideological turning point. The corporate
globalization rhetoric of the late 1980s and 1990s never went unchallenged, but its
sponsors did enjoy some success in passing globalization off as a natural result of
economic evolution, free trade as the essence of democracy and human rights. Seattle
wrote the obituary for that self-serving fiction. It was aided and abetted by simultaneous protests in various cities around the world, including London, Bombay, Paris,
and Geneva. Striking students at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
(UNAM) bombarded the US embassy in Mexico City a few days later in sympathy
with the Seattle protest.
After Seattle, free trade, globalization, and neoliberalism are unmasked as social
and political projects with decisive agendas, masquerading as economic inevitabilities.
Several papers in this issue of Society and Space concern the question of globalization,
and although all were in press before Seattle, they share the critical emphasis on the
political and social as much as the economic makeup of global change.
The WTO was only established in 1995 but its political and institutional roots
spring from the formative period of the mid-1940s when postwar reconstruction and
the cry for a lasting peace were ideological midwives to a raft of institutions that would
frame American globalism. Bretton Woods gave us the International Monetary Fund
and World Bank in 1944, the United Nations followed in 1945, and the 1947 trade
agreement gave us GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). An international trade organization was meant to administer GATT, and despite a clear sense
by the Truman government that such a body was virtually a puppet for US global
interests``all are equal but some are more equal than others''a retrenching cold
war Congress confused internationalism with communism and rejected the international trade organization.
The WTO, stillborn at the zenith of the American Century, was resuscitated in time
to watch the demise. The neoliberal extravaganza of globalism was in trouble before
Seattle, and the first signs may well have been economic. The international economic
crisis of autumn 1997 which engulfed Asia was not an anomaly but a direct consequence of global deregulation and so-called free trade. From its inception in Thailand,
it engulfed East and Southeast Asia, and it so ominously threatened the world economy that Western economists geographically challenged as a condition of their
professional identitywere reduced to the medico-racist language of `contagion' as a
means of naturalizing the gathering crisis. By early 1998 the crisis had rolled over to
Latin America with Brazil on the edge of bankruptcy and Mexico again vulnerable; a
few months later Eastern Europe went critical and Russia actually defaulted. Here was
a rather different kind of rolling global fireworks show courtesy of neoliberalism.
The political geography of neoliberalism was already inherent in the economics. On
the one hand, the 1997 ^ 98 crisis provoked the toppling of one of the world's most
vicious dictators, Indonesia's Suharto, who until the very end was supported by Western bankers and political leaders. On the other hand, the WTO implicitly recognized its
own political vulnerability with the choice of Singapore for their prior 1996 meeting.
The highly repressive government of this small city state could be relied on to stifle any
public opposition. Seattle was to be a `coming out', literally, but instead it was Seattle's
turn to repress, and repress they did. When marshal law was declared not only were
twenty blocks of the central city closed to the public, but the possession of cell phones

Guest editorials

and gas masks in central Seattle was summarily declared illegal. Self-defense against a
marauding police force was now a crime.
Within the WTO itself, the lines of political fracture are deepest on labor and
environmental standards. The European and North American delegations were able
to pose as generally sympathetic, presenting the leaders of low labor-cost economies as
the obstacles to a kinder, gentler globalism, but the realities of this division are more
complicated. On the one hand, workers, unions, and environmental movements in
many places are struggling to defend and extend significant regulation of wages,
work conditions, and environmental despoliation forced by decades of struggle: new
minimum WTO standards could well be used cynically to undercut existing national
laws already detested by capitalist leaders. Precisely this scenario underwrote the
symbolic importance of turtles in Seattle: US regulation of tuna fishing and imports,
forced by environmentalists in an effort to minimize the collateral killing of turtles, was
challenged as an unfair restraint on free trade, and the US government has used this
challenge to try and bypass environmental legislation. The same argument applies to
wages and working conditions. Are global minimum standards intended to raise the
conditions of the most exploited or to intensify the exploitation of better paid workers?
What would prevent global standards, instituted according to the best intentions, from
being turned into their opposite?
Seattle protesters were deeply spit on these issues, but perhaps it is the question
that is wrong. Putting it this way barely gets us beyond the threat of protectionism. The
main question may be this: who gets to decide what the new global standards look like?
The conservativeand I would say naiveanswer embodies the demand that workers,
environmentalists, and social activists should be allowed to `sit at the table'. But insofar
as the WTO is an international club for national rulers, token table sitters will be
irrelevant; incessant sitting at tables leads to hemorrhoids not social change. That is
why the demand to ``close down the WTO'' rang out so loudly from Seattle. There
absolutely have to be decent social, environmental, and work standards in the global
economy, but only a fool would trust an organization devoted to trade and managed by
the profit-taking beneficiaries of that trade to implement them.
One of the myriad demands in Seattle was for a global minimum wage. Now there
is a globalization project we could get behind! But not uncritically. A minimum wage
per se is not the solution: while the WTO could well instigate significant environmental
legislation that might even mollify the Sierra Clubindeed I think this is likelyno
one could expect that they would set a global minimum wage at Scandinavian levels.
Rather, the appropriation of the power to set a decent minimum wage would be a
much more laudable goal. The radical alternative to the WTO, therefore, is not to
advocate some reform of the most avaricious elements of the world's capitalist classes.
Rather, the fundamental issue is how we are going to construct a wholly different,
popular internationalism that does away with class-exclusionary institutions like the
WTO. The question of abolishing the wage system per se logically follows.
This raises a second point about political differences within the WTO. Delegates
and delegations from Asia, Latin America, and Africa got off quite lightly in the
protests. There seemed to be a broad sense that they were the victims of `Western'
global power. There is no doubt that North American and European governments used
labor and environmental issues as a weapon against the vast majority in poorer and
less powerful nations, but it would be wrong to present the leaders of these countries as
victims, they are every bit as cynical as the Northern colleagues in the WTO. While
`Third World' leaders opposed labor and environmental standards as an unfair, imperial imposition by the wealthiest `countries' on the poor, it is just as evident that these
leaders represent their own ruling classes whose keenest interest lies in cheapening

Guest editorials

exportable commodities by heightening the exploitation of both labor and soil. Not
least of the victories in Seattle was that it exposed the fracturing of the WTO not as a
fight between `countries', but as a geographically rooted squabble among the world's
ruling classes. In the 1980s and 1990s, cultural studies has supposedly made us all much
more savvy about `representation': it has never been more vital, then, that we penetrate
the combined liberal moralism and spatial fetishism that still implicitly treats Asian
and African leaders as representatives of the victimized poor. Rather, they are the
poorer relations of the global capitalist class, and not always poorer either, if usually
less powerful.
In terms of oppositional politics, the battle in Seattle also expressed a dramatic
shift in the political geographic vision of US unions, and this too has largely escaped
precise analysis. Under AFL ^ CIO sponsorship and/or invitation, union members
attended from many countries, including South Africa, Mexico, Malaysia, South
Korea, Canada, China, France, the United Kingdom, and various Carribean countries.
The protest was a highly international affair and this time US unions helped make it
so. A strong protectionist sentiment still operates among many union leaders and
members, but in Seattle it was largely displaced by the recognition that workers and
unions had to forge an alternative globalism. Protectionism under globalization is
death. This expressed a whole new realism from the `Buy American' campaigns of the
1970s, and a profound shift even since the NAFTA struggles in the mid-1990s. Whereas
internationalists were a clear if salient minority in labor's anti-NAFTA struggles in
1994, in Seattle they were the majority. The political importance of this shift, buttressed
by a broad-based resurgence of activist organizing in many US unions, is hard to
overestimate.
Seattle provoked the clearest sense in many years that so-called `national' interests
are decaying and are highly divided according to class and gender, race and ethnicity,
and according to people's highly differentiated relations to nature. Just weeks before
the battle in Seattle UNICEF published research demonstrating that the transition to
free markets disproportionately affects women, leaving them significantly worse off
(Olson, 1999). A quite unintended consequence of globalization, therefore, is that, as
national economic boundaries become more porous, ideologies of national interest
become commensurately more transparent. And yet at the same time, national defensiveness is for less powerful nations a vital means of defense against the predations of
`globalization'. As geographers have been arguing for some time, so-called globalization makes geography more not less important. Seattle reminds us that we have
the opportunity to change global geographies even as we are still trying to discern
their shape.
After Seattle, anyone not previously convinced knows that globalization is
first and foremost a political contest. And it is a contest in which `we' have now
gained an unprecedented political lever. Settle provides a first glimpse of a resurgent
political internationalism that aspires to a quite different global reality than that
promised or rather threatened by the WTO. But our oppositional political
vision is still quite inchoate. The extent to which it becomes cemented in history as
a symbolic turning point depends very much on whether the political momentum
of Seattle is sustained and that in turn will depend on organization. The strength of
the Seattle protest its internationalism, resoluteness, and breadth also harbors
its central weakness insofar as the convergence of such an eclectic political grouping
is not dependable without a sharpened political focus and enhanced organizational
power.

Guest editorials

Seattle was about getting the world to spin the right way. Whether it becomes a
sustainable global movement with the power to remake the worldglobal Seattle
remains to be seen. The honchos at the WTO will not be convinced of their geographical malfeasance as easily as the CBS executives. But the immediate post-Seattle
momentum is high. The first serious test of the new millennium comes in the second
week of April 2000 when the annual joint meeting of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund takes place in the belly of the beast: Washington, DC.
See you there.
Neil Smith
References
Olson E, 1999, ``Free markets leave women worse off ,Unicef says'' New York Times 23 September
Tabb W K, 2000,``The World Trade Organization? Stop world take over'' Monthly Review 51(8) 3 ^ 4

The battles in Seattle: microgeographies of resistance and the challenge of building

alternative futures
``[W]hat is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital.
When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the
progress of capital, you will merely have given it the complete freedom of action.
So long as you let the relation of wage labor exist, it does not matter how favourable the conditions under which the exchange of commodities takes place, there
will always be a class which will exploit and a class which will be exploited. It is
really difficult to understand the claim of the free-traders who imagine that the
more advantageous application of capital will abolish the antagonism between
industrial capitalists and wage workers. On the contrary, the only result will be
that the antagonism of these two classes will stand out more sharply. Do not allow
yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not
the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to
crush the worker.''
Karl Marx (1848)
``We are winning/don't forget''

Graffiti from Seattle, 30 November 1999

Since 30 November 1999, many left writers have celebrated the `events of Seattle',
especially the closing of the first day of the World Trade Organization's (WTO's) Third
Ministerial and the nascent `Teamster ^ turtle alliance' which opposes neoliberal
`free trade'. But before we draw any simple conclusions from these brief anti-WTO
successesespecially the conclusion that ``we are winning'', inscribed along Pike Street
during the melee of 30 Novemberwe should ask: what strategies were adopted in
Seattle? Precisely where, and to what political effects? And, in what senses can the
mobilization in Seattle (and the aftermath) be considered successful?
In attempting to answer these questions, we find it useful to unpack the events
through an analysis that pays close attention to sociospatial aspects of the different
strategies employed in Seattleas well as to the implicit and explicit geography of
alliance building which became manifest there. Although the strategies of labor and
representatives of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), direct action participants,
and Third World delegates overlapped in space and time, they reflected different, and
sometimes competing, ways of attending to the political struggle against the WTO and
`corporate globalization'.(1)
(1)

The heterogeneity of protesters in Seattle produced a mixed set of slogans, but this phrase often
served as a shorthand for ``what we oppose''.

Guest editorials

We therefore offer a quick reading of the microgeographies of resistance in order to

understand the contingencies and limitations of these strategies as means to building
alternative futures, limiting ourselves to the events taking place in downtown Seattle
between 30 November and 2 December 1999. In brief, we suggest that three different
spaces of resistance to the WTO could be distinguished within Seattle. In each space
different groups mobilized around particular strategies and claims. Consequently, there
was not one `battle in Seattle': there were (at least) three battles, and thus three Seattles.
In appealing to this `trifurcation' of spatial strategies, our intention is not to
essentialize or concretize resistance into neat divisions, nor to commit sectarian
surgery by identifying difference for its own sake. Rather, as partisan scholars and
participants in the events in question, we are interested in critically assessing the
success of Seattle in order to identify tensions and contradictions between these
spatial-strategic assemblageswhich must be addressed as part of the construction
of a broad-based political movement capable of seriously challenging and providing an
alternative to the hegemony of global capitalism.
Outside: turtles and Teamsters, together at last?

``WTO: FIX IT or NIX IT!''

Text of an AFL ^ CIO sign, 30 November 1999

On the morning of 30 November, tens of thousands of peoplerepresenting an

impressive array of international unions, and environmental and agricultural NGOs
gathered for a `People's Rally' at Memorial Stadium, about one mile northwest of
Seattle's CBD. They listened to a host of speeches that criticized the WTO for its
lack of transparency and democratic principles.(2) The four-hour rally was followed
by a `People's March' towards downtown. These acts, intended to show the solidarity of
labor, environmental, and farmer voices, constituted the signature political expression
of a broad `Teamster ^ turtle alliance', organized under the first sociospatial strategy.
The very fact that labor, environmental, and farming groups were capable of marching
together was rightly celebrated as an important breakthrough in progressive organizing. Specifically, the discourses mobilizing this coalition reflected growth of a
broader vision of struggle on questions of nationalism, labor ^ environment linkages,
and democracy.
Notwithstanding these positive effects, the approach of this Teamster ^ turtle alliance
was marked by some notable limitationssymbolized by its spatial concentration
outside of the CBD, and its distancing both from the Ministerial itself and from other
forms of resistance in Seattle. The great majority of these marchers never reached the
areas of the CBD where rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper spray were being used
to drive protesters away from the convention center. Organized AFL ^ CIO parade
marshals attempted, with considerable success, to steer all of the People's Marchers
away from downtown by linking arms in a line at the corner of 4th Avenue and Pine
Street. This separation, negotiated with the state by labor and environmental NGOs,
enabled the coalition to avoid `mixing' with more radical downtown protests. But by
agreeing to a division of the physical space of resistance, labor and environmental
groups also solidified a political and ideological distancing from the downtown crowd,
thereby losing their capacity to supportand build face-to-face alliances withthose
protesters who adopted a more confrontational position. Any hope of the sort of mass
mobilization and shutdown witnessed in the Seattle general strike of 1919 died at the
bargaining table before the protest began, when the space of resistance was carved into
divisions.
(2)

The speeches were made by labor and NGO leaders from the USA, Canada, and a handful
of developing countries, including South Africa (COSATU), Mexico, the Philippines, and India,
among others.

Guest editorials

There were other ways in which the Teamster ^ turtle alliance failed to overcome
physical and political separation in Seattle. We take seriously criticisms from the
developing world that US-based farmer, environmental, and labor arguments against
the WTO often legitimize export subsidies, protectionist measures, and antidemocratic
negotiation tactics by First World countries. Consider, for example, the fact that the
Clinton administration (and presidential candidate Al Gore) cynically attempted to
buy labor support with an opportunistic pronouncement against child labor. While
the AFL ^ CIO leadership leaped at the opportunity to declare this pronouncement
a victory for labor, the measure is a cheap one (who could be officially in favor of
`child labor'?), at best ineffectual (how can countries with weak labor unions and
capital-friendly states be expected to impose it successfully?), and at worst a crude
protectionist instrument for OECD governments. Significantly, it is not clear that most
labor activists and unionists from developing countries would actually have supported
such a measurehad they been consulted. As one such activist told one of us a few
years ago, imposing child labor prohibitions in contexts where there are many poor
rural families who need their children to work and where governments do not provide
adequate education or opportunity for economic advancement is counterproductive.
What are needed first and foremost are measures to improve livelihood chances
something a ban on child labor by itself does nothing to facilitate. The politics of this
issue speak to divisions within US labor on the subject of free trade, and specifically
what Fair Trade should look like. It would be cynical and wrong to blame organized
labor for the destruction and division that corporate globalizationchampioned by
the WTOhas wreaked on workers the world over. But at the same time, Seattle
showed again the need for greater solidarity among labor groups the world over on
the subject of trade, a potential that is limited every day that US labor remains
beholden to center-right Democrats.
Differences between First World and developing country labor organizations are
only one aspect of the conflicted geography of anti-WTO labor politics. Impressive
mobilization by the Canadian labor movement, and particularly by the British Columbia Federation of Labor, highlighted pervasive differences in labor's fortunes as a
political force across the US ^ Canada border. For the Tuesday rally and march, about
forty busloads of labor (perhaps we should say laboUr, eh?) activisits made the trip
from Vancouver, BC. They formed a vocal and visible block in the stadium and along
the route. Political differences between Canadian and US labor notwithstanding (for
example, the softwood lumber dispute), the presence of these activists pointed to
enduring territorial differences in labor fortunes and political cultures the world over.
Whereas overall union density in the USA has fallen to 11%, in Canada it remains
high; in BC, union density is a relatively robust 35% of the workforce. Two of us are
recent transplants to BC, and have been duly impressed with both labor's voice and its
audience. Higher union density, a commitment to speaking on a broad range of social
justice issues, and representation by a major political party (the New Democratic
Party) create a markedly different political culture and discourse. In Seattle, Canuck
labor served as a reminder that such territorial differences persist even within OECD
nationseven after assaults on the welfare state and, specifically, on protections
for workers (including union rights) throughout the industrialized world. This brings
home the fact that, contrary to neoliberal rhetoric propagated by a corporate mass
media, the US `model' is not the only model for nation-states to follow as part of
the development of international trading regimes. Strong protections for labor rights
and the environment can be compatible with robust macroeconomic performance and
with freer trade, if such interests are represented in the social regulation of international trade.

Guest editorials

In this context, it is important to note that Seattle bore witness to important

inroads in closing the distance between labor and environmental groups. People and
nature share in being treated as nothing more than life-support systems for commodities by global capital and, to this point, by the WTO. Place-based embeddedness is the
basis of what Karl Polanyi (1944) identified as the underlying fictitiousness of labor
and nature as commodities, a tension leading to political conflict during the last round
of world trade liberalization. If Seattle is any indication, such opposition is again on
the rise. Mobilization around `the organic' under the Teamster ^ turtle alliance represented a step forward in attempts to bring social justice and environmental issues into
coalitional embrace, but it is also clear that there is still much to be done in this
respect. The challenge on the environment front is to strengthen commitment to
environmental protections as a social justice issue. Failure to develop a sufficiently
humanistic environmental movement divides environmental NGOs from labor groups
in the North, and from social justice and environmental groups in the South.
Thus, one of the remaining challenges for the Teamster ^ turtle alliance is to resolve
how social justice and environmental concerns may be represented in the social
regulation of international trade and, specifically, how groups speaking in these interests are disposed toward the WTO itself as a body capable of being reformed. One of
the differences creating space between the Teamster ^ turtle alliance and other spaces of
protest in Seattle was what might most charitably be called an ambivalence about the
WTO itself. More cynically, it appeared at times that leaders of many of the progressive organizations seemed narrowly focused on `getting there' (that is, to the table)by
maintaining a respectable distance from trouble. Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange
epitomized this stance: having earlier breached the security of the Ministerial to deliver
a few uninvited sentences to the delegates, she then turned her organization to providing support for transnational capital and the Seattle police as the latter `rioted' against
direct action groups in the CBD. Benjamin told the corporate media, ``Here we are
protecting Nike, McDonalds, and the GAP and all the while I'm thinking, `Where are
the police?' These anarchists should have been arrested'' (New York Times, 1 December
1999). By remaining outside of the main spaces of direct confrontation, the tactics of
the Teamster ^ turtle alliance betrayed a willingness to gain access by trading solidarity
with organizations that oppose the existence of the WTO and consider it unreformable.
As we discuss below, however, there is a convincing case to be made, and one that is
being made by other voices of dissent, that the WTO is in fact ill-equipped and poorly
suited to dealing with exactly the issues the Teamster ^ turtle allianceand many other
groupsseek to address.
Direct action: getting the goods?

``Jam the WTO''

Graffiti from the anti-WTO direct action demonstrators,

30 November 1999

A second spatial ^ strategic approach at work in Seattle was that of the Direct
Action Network (DAN).(3) This network, organized in a radically democratic, nonhierarchical fashion, attracted protesters who were less interested in reforming the WTO
than in shutting down the Ministerial by taking action within the CBD. The DAN's
major strategy, spelled out on the Internet months before enactment, was to prevent the
WTO conference from opening by stopping the flow of delegates into the conference
center and closing down major roads in downtown Seattle. This plan was organized
through the affinity groups by spatially dividing downtown Seattle into thirteen areas,
(3)

The Direct Action Network is a network of local grassroots groups from Los Angeles to
Vancouver, formed in early 1999 to mobilize communities for resistance to the WTO and
to organize large-scale street theater and mass nonviolent direct action at the WTO Ministerial.

Guest editorials

each area in effect a slice radiating out from the conference center. On the morning of
30 November, two concurrent streams of people emerged from Steinbreck Park and
Seattle Central Community College; these met at the Paramount Theatre, across from
the Washington Convention Center. Demonstrating impressive discipline and adept use
of cellular communications, the DAN closed off roughly twenty blocks of traffic in
less than one hour; most delegates were unable to enter the conference center. This
`nonviolent' act was enabled by placing bodies directly in the way of delegates.
As is well documented, the DAN soon faced what some alternative media began
calling a ``police riot''. In the face of repeated police attempts to clear blocks using a
variety of `nonlethal' weapons, the DAN responded by performing a diverse array of
public acts of resistance`locking down' in intersections, breaking windows, arguing
with police, taking pictures, burning trash, writing graffiti, dancing, performing street
theaterin celebratory and defensive fashion. Some of these tactics were seen as
`violent' by the mass of people in downtown Seattle, producing chants of ``no violence'',
``shame'', and some physical confrontations between young window-smashers and the
``peace police''.(4) The corporate media focus was directed extensively (and at first
exclusively) towards playing up the `violence' of the DAN demonstrators, so that media
efforts quickly became complicit in police efforts at establishing a geography of fear
in the CBD through confrontation with the DAN activists.
While successful at delaying the beginning of the Ministerial, direct action strategies
were also marked by clear limitations. Attempts to close the conference projected in
some sense an ambivalent message. Without a clearly defined critique of the WTO and
a movement through which to articulate the success of the direct action, the DAN won
an important symbolic victory with no clear direction to follow. The question ``where do
we go from here?'' drifted through the crowd on Tuesday night even as direct actors were
driven from downtown Seattle by the police. That same question was repeated on the
cover of most left magazines in January 2000. The absence from the DAN's rhetoric of
a well-articulated alternative to `corporate globalization' made it all the easier for the
corporate media to declare spuriously that the `losers' in Seattle were the poor in developing countries, who they characterized as victims of the US left (The Economist,
11 ^ 17 December 1999). This perception was and is in some sense exacerbated by the
overwhelming concentration of DAN activists from western cities of Canada and the
USA, suggesting real problems in the ability of this group to speak to broader concerns
vis-a-vis globalization, and to extend their tactics and rhetoric toward global solidarity
against `corporate globalization'. A clear challenge for the direct action approach is to
`jump scales' and contribute to the construction of alternative futures.
Despite the lack of an agenda for `globalization from below', by taking a confrontational approach to authoritarian attempts to control dissent and to the WTO's complete lack of democratic representation, the DAN succeeded in raising critical issues
that need to be addressed in the aftermath of Seattle. These issues have strong microgeographic dimensions themselves, inasmuch as they speak to the privatization of
public space and to the elevation of property rights (a form of spatial exclusion) above
democratic rights. Window-smashing and other forms of `vandalism' served as one of
a set of tactics aimed at marking spaces of resistance. Similarly, other emphatically
public strategies employed by the DAN street theater, filling urban space with bodies,
writing graffitiarticulated a critique of and resistance to the privatization of public
space. The need for such resistance was clearly demonstrated by the instant creation of
a corporate space in the heart of downtown around the conference center, and was
made more pressing when Seattle mayor Paul Schell closed the entire downtown to
(4) The term ``peace police'' comes from the anarchist Black Bloc, which released a statement
criticizing those who stood in the way of window-smashing.

10

Guest editorials

all forms of meaningful resistance on Tuesday at 5pm, declaring a state of emergency,

and suspending civil rights for the remainder of the week.
In this context, what characterized most public discussion of direct action (at least
in the US and Canadian media) was a concern about the direct action tactics themselves, and a particular tendency to label these tactics as violent and dangerous.
But if the petty destruction of corporate property (most of it symbolic icons such
as the Nike logo) really constituted `violence' (an insidious discursive slip), then the
`violence' was apparently necessary, given the apparent impossibility of resistance
in the contemporary space economy. As one demonstrator shouted to a television
camera, ``This is what democracy looks like!'' Moreover, while window-smashing might
be tactically criticized, the direct action crowd effectively endorsed other space-taking,
property-threatening acts, such as street-dancing, fire-burning, and writing graffiti.
What is at stake in the negotiation of these public acts? Nothing less than the right
to express dissent. Thus, DAN tactics highlighted the erosion of democratic rights,
and the perverse fascination in the corporate media with property over and above
issues of democracy.
Sadly, such authoritarian responses to the spaces of dissent have a history,
not least in Seattle and environs. Two useful points of comparison here are the
events surrounding the Everett massacre of 1916 and the 1919 general strike in Seattle,
both surrounding the free speech movement and Wobbly (5) organizing campaigns in the
Northwest. In the aftermath of the massacre, the US Industrial Relations Commission
offered the following sober and apparently prescient reflection on state-sponsored
violence against citizens in the service of capital:
``In some cases this suppression of free speech seems to have been the result of sheer
brutality and wanton mischief, but in the majority of cases it undoubtedly is the
result of a belief by the police or their superiors that they were `supporting and
defending the Government' by such invasion of personal rights. There could be
no greater error. Such action strikes at the very foundation of government. It is
axiomatic that a government which can be maintained only by the suppression of
criticism should not be maintained. Furthermore, it is the lesson of history that
attempts to suppress ideas result only in their more rapid propagation'' (cited in
Smith, 1965, page 115).
With respect to the latter, efforts of the corporate media notwithstanding, we can only
hope this is the case.
Inside the conference center

``[I]nside the Convention centre there is a state of emergency which has escaped
media attention.''
Aileen Kwa of the NGO, Focus of the Global South,
30 November 1999

A third site of resistance, within the WTO Ministerial itself, is marked by a certain
irony: while it has received the least media attention of any of these strategic areas,
it may have produced the most significant resistance to the trade agenda pushed by the
US government. Moreover, it was only at this site that there was a large and sustained
developing country presence, which constituted in fact the core of the successful
opposition.
Inside the conference, developing country delegates bridled at the duplicity of the
United States and other OECD countries in arguing for tariff reduction by developing
countries while insisting on maintaining subsidies for their own farmers and monopoly
patents on genetic material obtained from Third World resources. According to the
(5)

Industrial Workers of the World.

Guest editorials

11

Director of Focus on the Global South, Walden Bello, who attended the Ministerial,
these substantive conflicts intersected with disagreements over decisionmaking powers
and resulted in demands for greater openness within the WTO:
``While few developing country delegations shared the priority placed on environmental and workers' rights by the thousands of demonstrators that had converged
on this city, the show of anger on the streets emboldened many Third World
country delegates to resist the non-transparent methods by which the US and
European Union have traditionally tried to push their trade objectives. `Transparency' was the demand that linked many delegates inside and the protesters outside''
(Focus on Trade number 42, 3 December 1999).
Third World trade delegates in fact demanded greater democracy in the WTO,
challenging the secretive Green Room meetings in which leading powers such as the
OECD representatives negotiate the desired outcomes before presenting them to the
Ministerial as a whole for ratification by `consensus'. Rebelling against this coercive
method of `consensus' building, Third World trade delegates indicated their unwillingness to be cowed into ratifying agreements crafted without their participation. Not
surprisingly, this demand for more transparency in the WTO negotiation process
prevented the OECD countries (and the USA in particular) from unilaterally achieving
their goals, and consequently no overarching, new trade agreement was reached.
Yet, the success of Third World trade delegates in blocking the extension of an
imperial vision of `free trade', should not obscure the real differences between groups
within the developing countriessymbolized in part by the very issue of who from
the Third World was present inside the Ministerial. It is doubtful, for example, that
most Third World trade ministers would have rejected any and every WTO agreement,
given the commitment of the classes they represent to expanded participation in the
process of `corporate globalization'. Yet among many Third World NGOs, a small
number of them represented inside the Ministerial, the sentiment has been voiced
that any comprehensive trade agreement of the sort mandated by the WTO is precisely
what should be rejected.
Beyond this, many Third World governments and some Third World NGOssuch
as the Third World Network and Focus on the Global Southoppose bringing labor
and environmental considerations into WTO deliberations. For example, Third World
trade delegates opposed the development of a WTO working group on labor, probably
for the most part out of general opposition to labor standards which would diminish
their trade prospects. Third World NGOs have concurred in this opposition to a WTO
working group on labor, but not because of general opposition to labor protection.
Rather, the NGO's argument is that the WTO is not an organization equipped to deal
adequately with labor regulation, or with environmental regulation for that matter.
Some Third World trade representatives and many NGOs instead favor addressing
labor standards through the International Labor Organization (ILO), environmental
standards through various appropriate United Nations agencies, and other trade-related
issues through organizations such as the UN Conference on Trade and Development,
which will be meeting during February in Bangkok.
But the positions taken in Seattle by these various Third World trade representatives and high-profile international NGOs leave in question what positions would be
favored by the huge and heterogeneous groups of Third World labor, peasant, and
environmental organizationsorganizations which were largely absent from Seattle
and which cannot be assumed to have been represented by the Third World NGOs
in attendance. Would a broader coalition of agricultural, labor, and environmental
organizations from developing countries systematically support alternatives such as
working for regulation through UN agencies such as the ILO? Or will they prioritize

12

Guest editorials

other approaches (for example, transnational, union-to-union networking) in order to

generate improved international regulation? Moreover, might they find through such
strategies bases for collaboration with agricultural, labor, and environmental activists
in the First World? These questions point to some of the lacunae created by the
specific presences and absences inside the WTO Ministerial.
Conclusions

This microgeographic analysis could go much further. But already we can highlight
several conclusions to which such an approach leads us. First, false triumphalism
is counterproductive to mass mobilizing. While celebrating success is certainly
understandable given the left's current position, to treat Seattle as a `victory' threatens
to distort our sense of political possibilities and of the work that must still be done.
Seattle was not a victoryand neither is the struggle a game, to be definitively won
or lost. Seattle was a crucial moment in a broad, ongoing struggle, and should be seen
as a part of a process, not as an end.
Second, the different spaces and strategies of resistance in Seattle were clearly
in tension, albeit a productive tension. For example, even though the Third World
delegates did not share the DAN agenda, the disturbance produced by the protests
created a space for the possibility of a serious challenge to the Green Room process.
And what if the AFL ^ CIO or more member unions had decided to march downtown,
bridging microgeographic barriers, and at the same time jumping scales to a broader
international coalition?
Third, the different spaces of resistance in Seattle were not generally available to
the majority of the world's people, who are denied the mobility necessary for participation in such `high politics'. WTO opponents will not be fooled or rebuffed by
hypocritical corporate media recourse to the claim that opposing neoliberal `free trade'
will hurt the world's poor; but these opponents do need to take seriously the fact that
the voices and interests of the world's most marginalized are not automatically or
necessarily well expressed in the agendas of First World activists, nor in those of the
relatively privileged NGOs of the Third World able to express themselves in Seattle.
This points more generally to the need for a coalitional message of mass appeal,
requiring both rhetorical distinction and clarity, but also requiring reference to
material and positional commonalities that speak to the direct interests of people
(not capital) the world over. Such needs are clear in the areas of both labor and
environment, but also in the arena of democratic rights. The assertion that resistance
in Seattle was democracy helps to normalize dissent (thereby challenging nations of
faces pressed against the glass), but in a very real sense, normalization must be
accompanied by greater mobilization and inclusion, in both the global North and
South. This highlights how much scale jumping remains to be done.
Finally, Seattle helped deliver a message of hope. What became more transparent
through the expression of dissent and reaction to it is that the entire process of constructing a liberal trading regime, including the WTO, has been politically orchestrated
by the world's elite, much like so many critical developments in the construction of
global capitalismnot least the `freeing' of labor, the commodification of nature, and
the `naturalization' of markets. This knowledge helps make the process contestable.
After the Asian economic crisis and now Seattle, there are indications that discourses
on globalization, trade, development, and the WTO are slightly more open than they
used to be. The intersecting strategies of the heterogeneous WTO opposition have
contributed to this shift. But, this opportunity must be seized. Moreover, there is no
assurance that future resistance assemblages will be similarly productive. In order to
provide the substantive intellectual and moral leadershiphegemony in Gramsci's

Guest editorials

13

senseto build a broad-based global movement, we need to assess critically the effects
of different strategies and link the lessons with preparations for ongoing struggles.
Joel Wainwright, Department of Geography, University of Minnesota
Scott Prudham, Jim Glassman, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia
References
Polanyi K, 1944 The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, Boston, MA)
Smith W C, 1965 The Everett Massacre: A History of the Class Struggle in the Lumber Industry
facsimile reproduction, The Shorey Book Store, Seattle, WA

 2000 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain