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In 1968, an obscure professor at the University of Toronto was projected to fame with his idea that, thanks to electronic circulation of information, the world would turn into a "global village," a notion that was especially embraced by the effervescent generation of the 60s as backing up its vision of building a world without frontiers in which we would all be connected in search of the common good and universal peace.
Three decades later, in the same Canada where Marshall McLuhan outlined a globalization in the making, anticipating the era of satellite television and the Internet, more than 20,000 demonstrators from all over the world, assuming the representation of a new and young generation, met at Quebec City to protest — several thousands of them violently — against the intention of the leaders of 34 democratic countries of the western hemisphere at the Third Summit of the Americas of taking an important step to make that globalization reality, arguing that it would damage the environment, hurt workers in poor countries, smother local cultures, undermine national sovereignties and would launch a vicious race towards the constant deterioration of labor and environmental standards.
The paradox could not have been more acute, nor the irony more sharp. And neither will go away easily.
A lot of time will have yet to go by until the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), an accord that would create the globe's largest free-trade area, where more than 783 million people produced more than $11.4 trillion in goods and services in 1999, generating about $2.7 trillion in cross-border trade, becomes a fact.
The goal of completing negotiations and sign a pact by 2005 is just that-a goal. There are still many crucial issues to be resolved, but the simple prospect that globalization is on the march is alarming for many. The Internet, invented only a decade ago, is now virtually everywhere, making suddenly possible for us to be virtually everywhere.
These are dramatic changes that do have a cost. Even though globalization does not lead to a society of winners on one side and losers on the other, as those who protest violently against it allege, it does have the effect of leaving behind some workers in industries that are non-competitive and are stagnating in their respective countries. And even though it doesn't neutralize the nation-state, it may make more difficult to defend what distinguishes one for another.
In many of the speeches by the participating chiefs of state the impact of the street demonstrations was felt. For example, U.S. president George W. Bush said he would go ahead with negotiating FTAA only if it combined "a strong commitment for the protection of the environment and the improvement of labor standards." Choosing his words carefully, he left unstated the crucial question of whether any future trade accord would require all the countries in the hemisphere to adhere to minimum standards, from the wages they pay, to allowing their unions to organize, to controlling the pollutants emitted from factories.
These are the issues around which the debate in the U.S. Congress will revolve when deciding whether the administration should be given the authorization to negotiate through the "fast track" process (now called "trade promotion", which is indispensable for negotiating treaties that can be voted up or down by Congress, but not amended)-a debate in which American environmentalists and labor unions will have a lot of weight in an alliance that has been accused of serving protectionist interests.
These crucial issues were mentioned but not really addressed in the Final Declarations signed by the 34 chiefs of state at the closing of the summit. "As agreed at the [1994] Miami Summit, free trade, without subsidies or unfair practices, along with an increasing stream of productive investments and greater economic integration, will promote regional prosperity, thus enabling the raising of the standard of living, the improvement of working conditions of people in the Americas and better protection of the environment," the document says. But later comes the acknowledgement that those are unresolved issues: "The decision to make public the preliminary draft of the FTAA Agreement is a clear demonstration of our collective commitment to transparency and to increasing and sustained communication with civil society."
The "preliminary draft," produced by a previous ministers' meeting in Buenos Aires is a virtual source of conflicts, because it is known to be full of the dissents bracketed by each country to what would be the final declaration. Those dissents, once known in detail, will help fuel what is already the biggest public relations problem FTAA faces: the growing grassroots "globalophobia" in each and every country in Latin America, that is leaving the FTAA without a constituency in the region, as opinion polls show.
While Latin American leaders have not, and will not, use any part of their political capital to sell globalization to their peoples — for example, on their return to their own countries not one of them went on television to report on the Quebec meeting and its potential benefits — their peoples have been buying from the protesters at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, and the globalization-related meetings that followed, their well-publicized argument that globalization is a U.S. stratagem to dominate trade with Latin America for its own benefit.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com