The issues that fuelled the anti-globalisation movement at the so-called Battle of Seattle have simply not gone away. A revival movement surfaced this past week. Call it the Battle of Hong Kong.
It was back in 1999 that delegates to the World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle were awakened to a new reality in world politics: globalisation, however defined, was anything but universally popular.
It still isn't. The Battle of Hong Kong was fuelled mainly by profound insecurity. Consider the pathos of the South Korean farmers. Hundreds stormed barricades, while others swam through icy Victoria Harbour waters in an attempt to breach the security barriers. Many hundreds were arrested.
Like farmers in France and elsewhere, many South Koreans are not convinced that globalisation is, at the end of the day, such a good thing for them: open markets and globalisation mean local job losses.
In fact, the way they see it, unaccountable institutions like the WTO threaten their very ability to survive. In South Korea now, they are frightened by efforts to pry open their domestic rice market to outside competition. Neither their national government nor the institutions of the worldwide globalisation movement seem to possess the capacity to convince them otherwise.
The South Korean farmers and their like-minded, disenfranchised allies around the world believe that under globalisation they have everything to lose. So they will riot as wantonly as they can because, at the same time, they feel they have nothing to lose.
One hitch in the logic of protests against globalisation, however, is that the target of their ire is not actually an organised movement. It is more like the weather - more a global correlation of economic and technological forces no one can control but which seems to be leaning in directions that, inevitably, will produce a new class of winners and losers. The South Korean and French farmers have made their own calculations as to which side of that equation they will wind up on.
