Can Globalization Succeed? by Dena Freeman

Author:Dena Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

This led to anti-IMF protests in numerous countries in the developing world. During the 1980s and 1990s, there were general strikes in Peru, Bolivia and India, food riots in Morocco, Brazil and Haiti, and huge demonstrations in dozens of other countries from Argentina to Paraguay, Malawi to Zambia, Jordan to Tunisia. In each case, tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of people came out onto the streets in indignation. Protesters were angry at the price rises of basic essentials, particularly bread and fuel, and also outraged that the IMF could force their governments to make these changes.

As globalization began to affect the lives of more and more people in the developing countries, social movements began to emerge as peasants, women, indigenous groups, landless farmers and others started to organize in order to resist. One of these movements, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, a grassroots movement of impoverished indigenous people from the Mexican Chiapas, saw that the problems they were facing were not just caused by the particular policies of the Mexican government, but were also due to the evolving global system. And they realized that the problems faced by many social movements around the world were caused by these same global dynamics. In 1996, using the newly emerging technology of email, its activists reached out to similar movements in other countries and invited them to an international meeting. Over 6,000 people from more than 40 countries attended, including groups such as the Karnataka State Farmers Union from India, which had been struggling against foreign agri-business TNCs, the U’wa indigenous people of Colombia who were resisting foreign oil companies from drilling in their ancestral homeland, and the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil, who were calling for land reform and redistribution. This meeting led to the formation of one of the first global protest networks: Peoples Global Action (PGA).

Social movements are purposeful, organized groups working to promote social change. They are a form of informal, non-institutional, civilian-based collective action, which often emerges in response to situations of inequality, oppression or injustice.

As these groups began to conclude that increasing economic globalization was the cause of many of their problems, they started to organize a series of protests against the international institutions that seemed to run the global economy.

In 1999 the Direct Action Network, a North American network linked to the PGA, coordinated a number of huge demonstrations against the World Trade Organization. As the WTO met in Seattle to discuss further integration of the world’s economies through reductions in trade barriers and other neoliberal economic measures, some 40,000 protestors took to the streets to demonstrate against these activities. They demanded a globalization that would benefit everyone on the planet, not just the wealthy elite.

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