Collapse in Cancun?

Time for another “Globollocks Watch piece, surveying Doug Henwood‘s piece in The Nation, which appears to have been taken by some among the neoliberal axis as evidence of a climbdown by a once-proud supporter of the Seattle rioters

Full disclosure: Although DH and I have never met, we’ve corresponded for quite a while and I consider him a mate. For this reason, I’ve decided that integrity requires me to be extra harsh in applying the patent Crooked Timber “Globollocks Scale”. I repeat my earlier point that the Globollocks ratings apply to individual pieces, not to entire ouevres and certainly not to people. The purpose of the scale is at least partly to point out how difficult it is for anyone, no matter how solid their command of the issues, to write anything short about neoliberal policy which doesn’t end up materially oversimplifying. Since I’ve never knowingly lit a candle while cursing the darkness was an option, don’t expect me to subject any of my own work to this scale any time soon.

I award “Collapse in Cancun” 8 Globollocks points and 2 cliche points. The breakdown is as follows:

Globollocks points:

Mention of Korea “without qualification” — 3 points. This is probably harsh – as I say, I’m intentionally erring on the side of harshness – as there are a lot of nuances to the analysis. However, the central point this was meant to pick up is that Korea owes a lot of its success to ignoring the WTO agenda, and in the opinion of the judges, this point was not made. To be honest, 3 points seems a bit much for this, so I might rejig the scores a bit.

A single sentence in the final paragraph – “The most troubled part of the world is Africa, a continent that is substantially underrepresented in global trade and capital flows” – picked up two points; one for “reference to capital flows in abstract without reference to actual capital flows” and one for “general equivocation between trade and capital flows”. I tend to operate a harsh standard on this, because I do think it’s terribly important that trade and capital issues be kept distinct. By rights, at least one of these points should be won back for getting the reason for the collapse of the talks (the G22 refusal to accept discussion of the Singapore issues), but I didn’t make any provision for that.

I awarded 2 points for “argues back and forth between general statements about trade and specific statements about currently live negotiations” (out of a possible 4); I discuss this in more detail below, because it’s the crux of my disagreement with Doug on this one.

And a final 1 point for “mentions farm subsidies in an article without mentioning textile subsidies”. This could also be seen as a fundamentally misdesigned criterion, since the original point of it was to pick up closet Europhobia. However, I went ahead and awarded it anyway, partly to demonstrate scrupulous fairness, and partly because there seems to be a pretty straightforward equivocation in the paragraph on Korea between arable farming (which is probably a silly thing to do on high, cold inhospitable land) and livestock farming (which is not necessarily such a silly thing to do in such an area; consider Welsh lamb).

Cliche points:

Both of these enormously unfair in the context of DH’s entire work, but as I say above, these points are awarded on a piece-by-piece basis because you never know what kind of use will be made of something once it’s cast on the waters. One point for “the antiglobalisation movement is better at saying what it’s against than what it’s for”, and one for “is it OK to put a Brazilian steelworker out of work to preserve an American job?”, which looks too much like a species of “keeping poor countries poor” to avoid the points.

Judges’ comments: An exceptionally harsh score under the circumstances. If I were to reduce the tariff on Korea to equal “unqualified mention of India/China” at 1 point, and allow one of the capital/goods equivocation points to be won back for getting the point right elsewhere, that would take the score to 5 Globollocks points.

Assessment

Doug does have a valid point here; it’s just that I disagree with it, or more specifically, I disagree with the wisdom of expressing it in this way. The WTO is much less virulent than the IMF or World Bank. I personally don’t take the egalitarianism of its “one-country-one-vote” convention particularly seriously, but there is room for differing opinions here too. As I indicated above, the crux of the matter for me is whether it’s possible to be in favour of free-trade in the current environment without, to coin a phrase, objectively being on the side of the whole neoliberal bill of goods.

The thing is, nobody in their right mind who understood the issues could be against free trade in goods, in principle and in good faith. I simply can’t think of any legimitate reasons why one might be against “free trade”. The trouble is, as I mentioned earlier, nobody seems to be interested in free trade at the moment. Although I don’t doubt that there are a lot of sincere and well-meaning people who support the neoliberal cause, there are also a lot of the other kind; people who are only interested in things like the extrajudicial enforcement of patents and copyrights, and in gaining treaty protection for their overseas investment strategies. Neither of these have anything to do with the interests of developing countries, and it looks very much to me as if the Evil wing of the neoliberal movement is firmly in the driving seat. (If you doubt this, consider how quickly TRIPS was passed, compared to farm subsidy and textile tariff reforms).

This makes it a lot more difficult to know what to do. Are the neoliberal institutions (broadly, the IMF, World Bank and WTO) so far gone that the only thing to be done is to campaign for their destruction, or can something be salvaged from them? There’s surprisingly little disagreement on this question when it comes to the IMF and World Bank; pretty much everyone to the left of Joseph Stiglitz or to the right of George Bush agrees that they’ve never done any good that couldn’t be done without them at much lower cost. (I’ve always liked Jude Wanniski’s advice that you could dispense with the CIA and just follow the general rule of thumb that any country where the IMF has put a program in place will have a significant anti-American movement within five years of signing). But the WTO is a much more ambiguous call. Doug (I think, after talking to Jagdish Bhagwati) is apparently of the opinion that it’s potentially an arena in which something worthwhile could be achieved.

It’s a judgement call; I’m less sure after the Cancun/Singapore debacle that there’s anything worth keeping there myself, but I could be wrong. But the reason I’m worried about the uses to which this piece is already being put is that, whether or not we want to keep the WTO, we should always, always, make sure that the bastards can smell the grapeshot while they’re holding their meetings.

The history seems plain to me; the TRIPS draft on the table in Seattle would have made it illegal for South Africa and Brazil to provide generic AIDS drugs to their populations, this draft would most likely have passed if the Seattle talks hadn’t collapsed, and the fact that the Seattle talks collapsed allowed the developing countries to develop a negotiating strategy that resulted in a much better deal. Ergo, the Seattle rioters can be thanked by a grateful world for breaking up the Seattle round of talks. I don’t necessarily condone every brick that was thrown in Seattle, nor do I necessarily agree with the agenda of everyone at the protests. But I think it can be established beyond doubt that the presence of the protestors at every WTO round has an entirely salutary effect on the debate, because it emboldens the developing countries and makes the developed negotiators nervous. It’s true that a lot of anti-WTO rhetoric is the most fearful AntiGlobollocks, and also true that the WTO cops a lot of flak from ill-informed people which should more rightly be directed at the IMF and WB. But the importance of the protestors is not so much what they say as the fact that they’re there. What we need is a WTO that’s effective enough to stop the US and EU from abandoning it in favour of a divide-and-conquer strategy of bilateral deals, but not cocky enough to push the Singapore agenda. And I’m, for the moment, not convinced that the pendulum’s swung so far that the protestors aren’t still a progressive force.