[stop-imf] Mallaby: Movement off the Streets

[Robert Weissman]

Movement off the Streets
Sebastian Mallaby
Washington Post

Monday, April 26, 2004; Page A23

Last year a cool young Parisienne called Sabine Herold led protests
against the French culture of protest, and a long-haired Swedish
anarchist called Johan Norberg wrote a bestseller defending capitalism.
Since then, it's been tempting to trumpet the decline of the
anti-globalization movement.

If the young and the hip now go to the barricades to protest against
French strikers, perhaps they'll stop railing against
"corporate-dominated globalization"? Last week's tame demonstrations
against the World Bank/IMF spring meetings seemed to encourage that
hope. On Wednesday an "unhappy birthday" party to mark the 60th
anniversary of the two institutions attracted barely 50 people (not
counting the bored reporters); and Saturday's demonstrations involved
just 2,000 to 3,000 people, a fraction of the 20,000 who descended on
Washington during the spring meetings of 2000.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Londoners are preparing
for the annual May Day holiday, which has become an occasion for
anarchists to smash windows. Next weekend, no window-smashing is
expected. The Mayday Collective has canceled its annual demonstration,
and its few remaining comrades plan a picnic instead.

Yet it would be wrong to write off the globophobes. For one thing, their
movement goes in phases. It loomed large 10 years ago, when the 50th
anniversary of the World Bank and IMF was marked by a carnival of street
protest at the institutions' annual meetings in Madrid. It then went
quiet for a few years, and by 1999 it seemed to have fizzled; but it
roared back to life at the end of that year in Seattle. Now the movement
has entered another quiet phase, because the Iraq war has made supposed
"corporate oppression" seem secondary. Sooner or later, it will bubble
up again.

But the other reason to keep worrying is that the critics of
globalization fight on two levels, street protests being only the most
visible of them. The critics also pursue their struggle through the
various panels and committees that have been set up to placate them. And
lately the committee comrades have been doing rather well.

The template for this form of struggle is a body called the World
Commission on Dams. Scarred by successive waves of protest, the World
Bank created this outfit to forge a consensus on dam-building: How you
can do it while minimizing environmental and social costs? In the hope
of drawing its fiercest critics into a new consensus, the bank gave them
a seat at the table. But the radicals understood that the bank's desire
to include them gave them an effective veto, and they used it to ensure
a report so loaded with requirements as to constitute a virtual ban. A
dam in Laos would be expected to build in as many safety measures as a
dam in Sweden. This was like telling the Laotians that they could not
ride in motorized vehicles until they could afford brand-new Volvos with
passenger-side airbags.

The dams commission reported in 2000. That year, buffeted by
anti-globalization protests, the bank announced another similar
initiative called the Extractive Industries Review. Again, the aim was
to forge a consensus on how mining or oil projects could be done so as
to promote development; again, radical nongovernmental organizations
were given a seat at the table. The head of the review panel issued a
final report three months ago. His verdict: The bank should get out of
oil and coal projects completely, because hydrocarbons contribute to
global warming.

There's a reasonable case to be made against oil projects in poor
countries, which tend to stoke corruption. But a blanket withdrawal on
environmental grounds is preposterous. The burden of coping with global
warming should be shared globally, not lumped on the world's poorest
countries. But, having commissioned the review panel, the bank is in a
quandary. If it rejects the recommendations, it will put itself in a
worse public-relations position than it would have been in if it had
never dreamed up the review.

You get a sense of this quandary by checking out the panel's Web site.
International parliamentarians, half a dozen Nobel laureates, and NGOs
from all over the world have written to the bank's president, James
Wolfensohn, demanding that he implement the panel's recommendations in
full. But if Wolfensohn does that, he will be assailed in poor countries
for hypocrisy. Why should gas-guzzling northern protesters tell the
bank's poor clients not to produce oil or coal?

So don't be fooled by the relative calm in Washington over the weekend.
The real struggle between capitalism and its critics is going on
elsewhere, and the winner isn't clear yet. The World Bank promises to
respond formally to the Extractive Industries Review in six weeks or so.