On a cold day in February 1999 I watched a crowd of about 100 students
gather on the steps of Healy Hall, the gothic centerpiece of the Georgetown
University campus. The students were raucous and passionate, and
campus police milled about on the edge of the crowd, just in case. As
speaker after speaker took the microphone, the crowd cheered almost
every sentence. The crowd had a moral certitude, a unity of purpose, and
while looking at a maze of astonishing complexity, saw with perfect clarity
only the black and white, the good and evil. Corporations, globalization,
the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization
(WTO) were the bad guys, ruthlessly crushing the dignity and livelihood
of workers around the world. A short time later, more than 50,000
like-minded activists had joined the students at the annual meeting of the
WTOin Seattle, and by the 2002 IMF-World Bank meeting, the crowd had
swelled to 100,000. Anti-globalization activists stymied meetings of the
bad guys in Quebec, Canada, and Genoa, Italy, as well. At the 2003 WTO
meeting in Cancun, the activists were joined by representatives from a
newly energized group of developing countries, and world trade talks
broke down across a bitter rich-poor divide. Anti-globalization activists
came from college campuses and labor unions, religious organizations and
shuttered textile mills, human rights groups and African cotton farms.
Lumped together, the activists were named the globalization “backlash.”