David Geoffrey Smith
Department of Secondary Education
University of Alberta
This paper deconstructs events leading up to the civil unrest at the recent World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in Seattle WA by examining the effects of neo-liberal social and economic reforms in Britain and New Zealand. It is suggested that the Seattle civic action is a reflection of a new kind of broadly based social consciousness on the part of citizens who are demanding greater transparency and accountability from global organizations, the operations of which deeply affect the lives of ordinary people. The road ahead may see new manifestations of anarchy and unrest as Enlightenment models of human reasoning fall away with no new forms of authority able to currently carry the day.
Witnessing Charlene Barshevsky berate delegates at one of the plenary sessions of the recent World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle was enough to send a chill down the spine of any person burdened with a sense of history. As Chief U.S. Trade Representative to the talks, and host convenor, Ms. Barshevsky chastised members for their inability to arrive at consensus on any of the major issues before them. In a menacing tone, she declared that, as program convenor, she had the right, ...and I will use that right, to alter the decision-making process to make it smaller, more efficient, more exclusive (CNN 1999). That same day, the Organization of African Unity threatened to walk out, protesting, There is no transparency in the proceedings and African countries are being marginalized and generally excluded on issues of vital importance(Morton 1999, A12).
The Seattle meeting had been proclaimed as an opportunity to plan the globalization agenda for the next millennium. Elimination of trade barriers between nations and states was identified as the top priority, to enable the free flow of goods and services in a way that would ensure the prosperity of all the world's people. Everything from biotechnology to financial services, from clothing manufacture to post-graduate education, was to be subject to negotiation under new liberalized trade rules designed to provide the least impediment to social, cultural and capital flows. The collapse of the talks, at least on their public face, may point to the essential futility of such a vision, and may also mark a fundamental turning point in the rhetoric of globalization that has been in the air for the last ten years or so.
As John Gray of the London School of Economics has pointed out, the contemporary globalization vision represented by the WTO is primarily an American inspiration, and is a remnant of the eighteenth century Enlightenment ideal of universal reason, transposed to economic theory. According to this view, reason is a universal quality, and by instilling it everywhere, or better, by uncovering it everywhere, by allowing it to flourish freely without restraint, universal concord and human happiness will be the result. In Gray's words, the United States is the world's last great Enlightenment regime (Gray 1999, 2).
Unfortunately, or fortunately, too much has happened since the eighteenth century to support this utopian dream any longer. All evidence suggests that reason cannot be ripped out of its social, cultural and political contexts, and that although reason, as the capacity to think and make sense of life, may indeed be a universal quality, people and cultures make sense in their own ways, according to the circumstances that life has laid before them. Unless this situated character of reason is acknowledged, totalitarianism can be the result, as the second last great Enlightenment regime, the Soviet Union, amply demonstrated: ownership of the technical and political means to control the manifest rules of reason comes to rule the game. Henceforth, everyone else can be labeled unreasonable, unstable, wild, underdeveloped, feminine, weak, niggardly, primitive, childish, immature, and ideological.
The mantra of globalization that has enchanted conservative economists since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher may be, instead of a celebration of enlightenment, a sign of a supernova, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a star that suddenly increases very greatly in brightness because of an explosion ejecting most of its mass. In other words, we may be witnessing, if only in its early stages, the burning out of a two hundred-year-old vision.
Look at what has happened in Britain and New Zealand since the proponents of American-style free trade engineered their social and political designs in the name of global competitiveness. The examples are instructive for Canadians, given the way the governments of Alberta and Ontario have taken them as worthy of imitation. Not only have the original political proponents of neo-liberal economics been voted out of office in both Britain and New Zealand, but they have left in their wake radically reordered societies that now bear the seeds of increased social anarchy because of intensified inequities, the loss of the middle class, and people's widespread feeling of being shut out of due political process.
In Britain, labor market mobility became one of the keynote terms of Thatcherite reform. Essentially it was a gloss to cover a plethora of reconfigurations in the relation of labor to production. To be competitive globally, companies needed to be more efficient, which meant dismantling the ability of labor unions to define the conditions of work. Work now tended to be contract-based, just-in-time, without health or pension benefits. The day of career labor with one or two firms was ended.
The instability and insecurity that these reforms inaugurated was reflected most clearly in the quality of family life, once regarded as the mainstay of a healthy British culture. A recent study by Matthew D'Ancona (1996) shows the strong connection between a deregulated labor market and family breakdown. If families have to constantly move to where the jobs are, and accept increasingly lower wages, what is disrupted is the capacity of family members to bond with one another and with members of their surrounding communities. By 1991 Britain had the highest divorce rate of any country in the European Union (EU), comparable only with the United States.
Another striking feature in Britain was the unexpected creation of a large underclass of workless people. Grey (1999, 237) cites a study in the Observer (January 10, 1997, 10) by Paul Gregg and Jonathon Wadsworth of the London School of Economics showing that from 1975 to 1994, the percentage of non-pensioner households in which not a single person was working, rose from 6.5 percent to 19.1 percent. In Britain today, about one in five households (not counting pensioners) has no active income earner. This represents a magnitude of social disenfranchisement unknown in any other EU country. One of the chief factors in the emergence of the underclass was the Thatcherite move to privatize all municipal housing, which ironically tended to create a new form of dependency culture. If you have no place to live, you have no place to prepare and nurture yourself for work. Then if you do find work, you cannot afford any available housing; so work itself becomes counter-productive.
One of the most compelling contradictions of current free-market reform is that it works to weaken all of the traditional social institutions on which it has depended in the past. In Britain, the disintegration of public education is clearly linkable to the decline of simple civility and a sense of the common good. The shift in educational policy making from pedagogically oriented thinking to market oriented thinking, driven by concern for knowledge and skills acquisition over character formation and civic responsibility, has produced an enterprise culture that is hyper-competitive and socially divisive (Morris 1994, 21).
In 1997 the Conservative Party lost to a new Labor Party that now has as its mandate the rebuilding of social-democratic values in the context of a society in which the historic institutions and policies of social democracy have been almost completely eroded. As John (1999, 22-54) has pointed out, neo-liberal, free-market globalization is essentially, deep in its inherent nature, anti-democratic, and thereby contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. If the link between politics and economics is elided, such that economic theory holds no accountability to the peoples and places in which it is enacted, social anarchy and violence can be virtually assured, as people's need for a sense of participation in the work of life-making begins to come into play.
Given that much political and economic leadership in Canada in recent years has taken its lead from the neo-liberal, free-trade globalization agenda of New Zealand (which took its cue from Margaret Thatcher), it is instructive to examine the social effects of those policies, especially now that the successive political parties that brought them into being have been thrown out of office as of November 1999.
The most profound change in moving New Zealand from a social democratic state to a state with its eyes on the new globalization agenda was to open the economy to unregulated capital flows, which in turn conferred on transnational capital an effective veto over public policy. As Jane Kelsey (1995, 5) describes it, within a period of ten years, virtually all aspects of public service had been converted to a free market model. Public hospitals were changed to commercial enterprises and compelled to compete with private suppliers of medical care. Education was restructured, with responsibility for the delivery of educational services devolved to local school boards. Schools levied fees for their services and were required to supplement their budgets by commercial activities. Entitlement to welfare benefits was severely cut. Economic and political power shifted outside the rule of the central state into a kind of privatization of power.
By 1991, almost twenty percent of the New Zealand population lived below the poverty line, and as Kelsey notes, the only areas of growth in the public sector were police, courts and prisons. This turn to a preoccupation with public security is characteristic of all societies that have ridden the free market globalization agenda since the 1980s under the guidance of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the predecessor of the WTO. According to John Grey (1999, 44), The principal cost of New Zealand's experiment has been a loss of social cohesion. Its political aftershock has been a meltdown in which the electoral system was repudiated and all the major parties have been fragmented.
In drawing attention to these examples, the point is not to launch into a nostalgic drive for a return to an earlier day. Not only is that impossible, but it ignores the fundamental changes that have taken place in the world picture, especially since the 1970s. Contemporary globalization theory came into being largely as a consequence of two factors, the computer technology revolution, which brought into being profound changes in the way business could be conducted, and, later, the end of the Cold War. By the late 1970s Euro-American firms began to move off-shore to capitalize on cheap labor in new hi-tech production plants. The Asian Miracle nations were able to produce goods more efficiently and cheaply than their American counterparts. And computers made possible the virtualization of international finance, such that national and state governments became unprecedentedly vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of money markets. There is absolutely no possibility going back to life B.C. (Before Computers).
If the demonstrations on the streets of Seattle against the WTO mean one thing, it may be that ordinary citizens have begun to declare that globalization theory needs to be publicly demystified. The calls for greater transparency in the operations of the WTO, such as that of the Organization of African Unity, speak of the way that more and more people feel that they are being excluded from decisions that will ultimately and deeply affect their lives, in terms of fundamental issues like security of place, working conditions, and the possibility of holding on to a future dream for themselves, their families, their tribe or nation.
What will be revealed through the work of demystification, however, is a sleeping giant contradiction that at present no one seems happily inclined to awaken, which is why the times are very dangerous, and why violence and anarchy may be the dominant realities of the next twenty years or so. The contradiction resides in the fact that democracy and radical free market globalization are completely incompatible entities. This has been true historically since the very beginning of the internationalization of markets in their current form in the nineteenth century. The tension within the contradiction will become even more pronounced in the Western industrialized world, because there, the illusion of the link between freedom of markets and freedom of persons has been consistently taught as common sense, even while market freedom wrought social and cultural havoc everywhere else in the world. So people in the West, and maybe especially young people, are now gradually waking up to the fact that for generations they have been lied to - lied to by their elders, by their teachers, and by their politicians. There may be no more shattering experience than the experience of betrayal, and its byproducts are rage, paranoia, the desire for vengeance, and various forms of vigilantism as individuals and groups struggle to take control of their lives after the loss of trust.
Teachers and others actively involved in public education may have an important and even unique role to play in the future as it unfolds. This role can be said to emerge straight from the heart of teaching itself. It has something to do with what seasoned, mature and successful teachers begin to understand after years of experience living and working with young people, and standing in witness to human life as it opens out in everyone's mutual presence. And that is that a good life together has certain normative requirements, certain essential necessities, without which those more cynical students will charge their failing teacher to Get a life!
What are those normative requirements? In brief, it can be claimed with some certainty that a successful classroom is a place where each student feels that indeed they have a place; a place, over time, where relationships can be trusted, where inner dreams as well as demons can be shared without ridicule by both teachers and students alike, where individual differences of color, creed and origin are seen as contributive to a shared future whose final character is not for anyone in the present to know completely, except as a foretaste, yet the quality of which will depend on how those differences are negotiated in the now of everyday experience.
The foundational ethic of those negotiations will arise from a deep awareness that the myth of the rational autonomous self, which has anchored the self identity of Western civilization for the last three hundred years or so, from Protestant individualism through Enlightenment rationalism, is indeed a myth, not a fact, and that a far more profound truth may be that there is no Self without Others, no Me without You. Instead of Descartes' private enterprise model of epistemological and ontological certainty, I think therefore I am, today it may be more appropriate to say We are, therefore I am. I am always born into a community, a tradition, and a way of life, which is always already present before me, and without which my life could not be possible. Of course I can, indeed must, work to change the conditions into which I am born, if they seem unfair, cruel, dull, lifeless, but I cannot begin without reference to them, so that it is always work with others. Without communities, individuals die, from loneliness, from an alienated relation to something larger than themselves, or from the most common disease of private enterprise culture, namely the delusion of self-enclosure.
Teachers in public education today are caught in the center of a social, political and cultural whirlwind, as broader forces contend for the right to interpret the world to the young, and it is not clear what the outcome of the contentions will be. Much of what is falling away in public education had to fall away, such as teacher dominated instruction, and the excessive specialization of teacher discourse in the name of professionalism, which only served to alienate teachers from common sense and from the ordinary people they are called to serve. The central crisis of identity for teachers today, however, and in the near future, will reside in the question of whether or not they can find a creative way through the dominant conceit of their received tradition, which is the very same conceit that drives the globalization agenda of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and which is currently destroying not just public education but the very idea of a public. And that is the conceit of Western culture's specific form of reason being translated into specific institutional forms (like the public school and the globalized financial system) in the name of universal reason.
What make the times so precarious is the increasingly recognized untenability of the Western conceit even while there is no other logic or voice that seems capable of coming forward to secure the globalizing human community as a community. But maybe that is the point, which is the need for a new kind of dialogue amongst the world's people regarding the conditions of a shared future. The logic of global competitiveness is nothing other than the logic of war,¹ and increasingly thoughtful people around the world may soon be called upon to fight it for a more common survival. In the aftermath, teacherly wisdom may have some important things to say about how to live together, better.
1. This insight was suggested to me by a remark of Ursula Franklin at a conference organized by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, on the theme, Universities in the Public Interest, held in Ottawa, Ontario, October 29-31, 1999. Franklin said in a public address, Global competitiveness is the practice of war.
CNN. 1999. Coverage of the World Trade Talks, Seattle WA, December 3rd.
D'Ancona, M. 1997. The Ties that Bind. London: Social Market Foundations.
Gray, J. 1999. False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. London: Granta Books.
Kavanagh, D., and A. Sheldon 1994. The Major Effect. London: Macmillan.
Kelsey, J. Economic Fundamentalism. London and East Haven CT: Pluto Press.
Morris, T. 1994. In The Major Effect. ed. D. Kavanagh and A. Sheldon. London and East Haven: Pluto Press.
Morton, P. 1999. Extended Trade Conference Grows 'Creatively' Tense. National Post, Saturday, December 3rd.