CURRENT EVENTS UPDATE

By WALTER KIRN

Maybe part of the problem is the word. Globalization. It has a sinister ring. The term brings up a futuristic vision of vast economic processes steamrollering their way across the earth, leveling forests, languages and customs without regard for puny individuals. Globalization: right or wrong, it sounds unstoppable.

Which may be one reason so many people of so many different persuasions have sworn to stop it. The word itself throws down a challenge. The first mass uprising to meet that challenge took place last year in Seattle, when 40,000 protesters from across the ideological map surrounded, shouted down and roundly embarrassed the assembled representatives of the World Trade Organization. In Seattle—a city whose name has since become a political rallying cry akin to “Chicago in 1968”—environmentalists, union members, human-rights crusaders and old-school populists locked their arms around a spinning globe and, at least for a moment, slowed it down.

They tried to do it again in Washington. Their target: a meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, two great institutions of global finance and, say critics, corporate dominion over the planet’s poor and disfranchised. When the organizations met a year ago, about two dozen protesters showed up—barely enough to block a single limo. But mindful of Seattle’s violence, D.C. cops last week shut down the demonstrators’ “convergence” point (a warehouse) and came out in force. This time, they faced not dozens but thousands of demonstrators on the barricades, all joined by a feeling that the new world order is really a slick new version of the old one, ruled by Big Money and Big Government. On Saturday night alone, police arrested nearly 600 anti-globalists for “parading without a permit.” Thanks in large part to the Internet, which has allowed them to cement their bonds, air their grievances and swell their ranks, the activists have got their acts together, the clout of old-fashioned labor welded to the cybersavvy of campus radicals.

But what’s the opposite of globalization? Socialism? Isolationism? Vegetarianism? The answer is all three things, and many more. The radical-chic outfit of the season is a coat of many colors. If you trained a license plate-reading surveillance satellite on Washington last week (or better yet, swept low in a black helicopter), you would have seen bumper stickers, signs and buttons promoting animal rights, organic farming and Pat Buchanan for President.

What you’d have had to look very hard to see in Washington was anyone resembling a leader. Because there isn’t one, in the usual sense. No Abbie Hoffman. No Pat Robertson. Sure, Ralph Nader is wandering around, and so is satirical filmmaker Michael Moore, but they’re not calling the shots or giving marching orders. The Mobilization for Global Justice isn’t a top-down affair. Like the Internet itself, and unlike the coalition’s corporate enemies, the antiglobalist movement is a body that manages to survive, and even thrive, without a head.

The Web breeds a sense of togetherness too, and togetherness is important to these activists, so many of whom have spent the last few decades of market capitalism feeling more than a little isolated. “From my perspective, and I came out of the ’60s,” says Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, “Seattle was the first time where you saw multigeneration, multiclass and multi-issue in the streets together.” Pope remembers marchers hugging each other and a moment when a group of young radicals gave a clenched-fist salute to several construction workers, who responded in kind.

The antiglobalists prove that you don’t have to agree on what you’re for to know what you’re against. And one thing they’re against, it seems, is agreement itself. Too monolithic, too uniform, too global. The protesters prefer debate, diversity. They’d like to teach the world to sing in off-key counterpoint. To their minds, the IMF and the World Bank are tyrannical choirmasters with steel batons and a tin ear for cultural differences. They finance mammoth industrial projects that sweep up hundreds of workers from the countryside, decimating small farms and villages while swelling urban slums. They bottle up small streams into huge lakes contained behind gigantic dams. And they steer the contracts for the dams’ construction to American and European companies.

“It all ties back to economic injustice,” says Kelly Vaughan, 20, a senior at Chicago’s DePaul University, who marvels at how the movement has drawn in youthful nonconformists of every stripe. Keith Mann, an adjunct professor of history and sociology at DePaul, agrees that all the antiglobalist roads seem to converge on a single point. “The students feel they are of the same ilk, but they’re not sure why,” he says. “In an age of diffuse power, this is something students can grab onto.”

Time, April 24, 2000

Questions
1. Why did protesters target the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund?
2. What role does the Internet play in the antiglobalization movement?

TIME CLASSROOM