No Globalization without Representation: U.S. Activists and World Inequality

Early in this century, Paul Adler spent a couple of years working for Public Citizen, one of the progressive nonprofits whose fight for a more equitable and just globalization stands at the heart of this admirable and heretofore largely unknown history. Covering the era from the early 1970s until the Battle of Seattle and the aftermath of 9/11, Adler's history offers a new, if somewhat narrowly focused, periodization of the campaign to reform one salient aspect of the neoliberal order.Adler divides his history into two parts. In the late 1960s and throughout much of the 1970s, public interest progressivism was on the offensive. This was the era of Ralph Nader's greatest influence and when the energies released in the sixties civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements still motivated activists. They wanted to rejuvenate the regulatory state and revive US liberalism, relying on lobbying, lawsuits, public relations, and other insider tactics to bring about social change.By the late 1970s activists had taken on the inequalities and dysfunctionalities that came with corporate globalization, of which the Nestle boycott was a prime example. Breast milk substitutes were dangerous in poor countries, where mothers were unable to afford an adequate supply and where water was sometimes unfit. Nestle accounted for one-third of all sales, including the largest share in the Global South. Organizers declared a worldwide boycott, but Adler makes the case that it was really a few hard-charging advocates, like the socialist feminist Leah Margulies, who lobbied and cajoled their way to victory. International organizations like the UN's World Health Organization were still important, and US-based advocates could still count on support from some members of both parties in Congress, from various trade and regulatory agencies, and even from the Carter administration.Although Adler rightly calls the Nestle boycott the “granddaddy” of a series of brand-based anticorporate mobilizations, he does not follow up on this insight, especially when it comes to global sweatshop sourcing. His book neglects both the successful effort that forced Nike to monitor and publicly reveal the names of its many East Asian factories and the 1990s antisweatshop campaign against apparel manufacturers and distributors who linked their products to celebrities like Kathie Lee Gifford.In the 1970s the fair globalization advocates thought they might use multinational institutions to construct a more equitable form of corporate globalization. By the mid-1980s and throughout the 1990s, however, they were on the ideological defensive, seeking, as Adler put it, to prevent an “unacceptable present from becoming a horrifying future” (6).Historians and social scientists have devoted much ink to that fight, but Adler offers some new insights. No unity existed among the groups composing the fair globalization coalition. Some progressives saw NAFTA as the penultimate fight, others as but one stage in building a larger fair trade regime. Some environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund, the Audubon Society, and the National Wildlife Federation, came to favor NAFTA after winning a few concessions from the Clinton administration. Most important, while the AFL-CIO was adamantly opposed, it was reluctant to burn all its bridges with Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, progressive opponents of NAFTA never quite figured out how to link their work with people like Pat Buchanan and Paul Weyrich, who represented a growing constituency that fought free trade deals on explicitly xenophobic grounds, mixing racism with nationalist sentiments.Ross Perot, who won 19 percent of the vote in the 1992 presidential election, was not quite in that neo-Trumpist category, but his prominence as the most important NAFTA opponent proved disastrous for the fair globalization coalition. When he debated Vice President Al Gore on the Larry King show, his reputation as a billionaire businessman who outsourced jobs, trafficked in conspiracy theories, and opposed unions made him an easy pro-NAFTA mark, “protectionist, backward-looking, and small,” as one White House memo put it (144).Adler calls the NAFTA loss a pivot point for the fair globalization coalition. Thereafter its members knew that regardless of the party in occupancy, the White House would be opposed to virtually any effort to regulate, in a progressive fashion, the emerging neoliberal order. And backstopping that governmental power would be a highly mobilized business community, extending from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Inside-the-beltway lobbying and report-writing was not going to work.Global trade progressives scored three major victories in the late 1990s. In 1997 they blocked Fast Track legislation, which would have enhanced presidential authority to structure and pass free trade agreements; the next year they defeated the Multilateral Agreement on Investments, a proposed treaty to expand and protect capital mobility and corporate power; and in 1999 they waged the Battle of Seattle, which put forty thousand trade unionists and progressive activists on the street in a successful fight to stymie the effort by an entire cohort of nations, including the United States, to strengthen the powers and legitimize the authority of the World Trade Organization (WTO).Adler offers a fine, granular narrative analysis of the mobilization that reached its dramatic culmination in Seattle, but one could argue that the shift against neoliberal trade and investment policies within the Democratic Party was equally important. The Republican sweep in 1994 eliminated an entire cohort of southern pro-NAFTA congressmen, so that by the turn of the millennium, Bill Clinton could win but a minority of congressional Democrats to his trade program, including the crucial decision to admit China to the WTO.That revolt against free trade globalization, either on the Seattle streets or in the halls of Congress, was soon obscured by the convulsions that shook the nation after two airplanes struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It would take more than a decade for a coalition hostile to neoliberal trade to reemerge, and by the time it did, millions of jobs in manufacturing and related services had been lost. The progressive future envisioned by Bernie Sanders and his allies would be more than balanced by the crabbed insularity and racial animus Donald Trump exposed and exploited. Paul Adler's book helps explain why.