Make the WTO Transparent

It looks like globalization will need a better running mate than Bill Clinton. As the Seattle shambles showed, the Clinton administration has persuaded scarcely anyone beyond Wall Street (which needed little convincing) that globalization is some kind of Santa Claus.

The president has been clever at grabbing the middle ground on so many issues (and pushing everyone who disagrees to the marginal extreme) that much of the color has gone out of politics; major issues get Cuisinarted into mush. The activists and the protesters, mad as hell, aren’t going to take that anymore. These days, trying to globalize them is to mobilize them: The internationalization of national economies has given those who wish to stay rooted in the present, if not mired in the past, a gift: a huge cause. For them, at least, Christmas--in the form of the scary globalization target--came early.

And this is a gift that will keep on giving. It’s a way of getting back at Microsoft and Boeing without actually taking a stand against cheaper computers or air travel. But there is self-defeating potential in the revolt against globalization, which has every chance of raising wages worldwide and advancing helpful technologies. Consider the obvious case of biotechnology. It’s hard to imagine any of the well-off thousands who demonstrated in Seattle’s streets going to bed hungry or malnourished, as about 800 million people on this planet do. Biotech is “an example of something new in the world, something that offers great promise” in alleviating hunger and disease, said Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Richard Fisher, in an interview in Seattle with Richard Feinberg, a UC San Diego Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies professor. “But by stressing only the negative, we shortchange what is the dramatic human potential of biotechnology . . . We are not quite sure what people are afraid of.”

It’s understandable that Clinton administration officials were shaken by the protests in Seattle. The streets were filled with the kinds of liberal activists who not long ago might have praised to the skies almost any world government idea, however foggy or mild. Without the support of conservative American businessmen, where would the World Trade Organization be? But these were the very people who a generation ago might have been denouncing the WTO as a communist conspiracy.

Asia reacted, in general, with a sort of knowing surmise, believing that Washington has been heading for a fall for a long time. Opined the Times of India: “Given the aggressive manner in which the host country, the United States, sought to determine the WTO agenda, the collapse which eventually occurred was perhaps inevitable. Why bother about what the world wants or thinks when it is only the big who really count?” Asian irritation originally rose when the world’s richest nation began bad-mouthing the Asian economic miracle, as if it had been some kind of mirage, and when the West began claiming that the shock outflow of Western short-term capital had played no substantial part in Asia’s economic woes of the past two years.

That made Asian leaders see the need to come together. They noticed how American leaders, including current Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and especially his predecessor, Robert Rubin, would so often speak about the need for Asian economies to open their books and let everyone see what the true balance sheets looked like. This is called national transparency--and there’s a huge argument for it. Yet until very recently, American leaders did little to assure the world that the decisions made by new international bodies like the WTO would be equally transparent.

“Trade hypocrisy may be a thing of the past,” writes the Japan Times in Tokyo. Why is secrecy OK for WTO but not for anyone else? Who’s hiding what? “The Seattle failure appears to herald an increase in disputes,” concludes the Korea Times, “particularly between rich and poor countries over trade issues in the coming century.”

Not surprisingly, Asia, like Europe, which has its European Union, is now focused more on regionalism than internationalism. In fact, the weekend before the Seattle disaster, there was a bit of a tiny thriller in Manila, at least as far as the ordinarily unremarkable get-togethers of the Assn. of South East Asian Nations tend to go. On this occasion, the region’s Asian leaders, meeting at an ASEAN summit that for the first time included nonmembers China, Japan and South Korea, talked more warmly and animatedly than ever about forming a common market--maybe someday even a regional currency union. Sure, talk is cheap, but these 13 countries constitute a potential rival to Europe and even, some day, America. They represent 40% of the world’s population and a collective gross domestic product of $7.75 trillion.

The meaning of Seattle for Asia is that Asia needs to get not just its regional trade act together, but its political one as well. With the WTO now a mess, regional organizations like ASEAN are more vital than ever. If there is a silver lining for Asia in the Seattle cloud, it is this: The recognition that Asia needs to look more inward than outward for answers.