Did the 1999 protests against the World Trade organization in Seattle make a difference? After all, the WTO still exists and continues its push for the corporate-driven free trade agenda that was on the table 10 years ago. Now, especially in light of Wall Street’s evident political and financial clout, it’s easy to forget just what the world looked like in 1999. As I attended talks and workshops commemorating the Battle of Seattle, I was reminded of how much has changed. Here are a few of the lasting impacts of those protests.

1. Changed the story on free trade

Prior to Seattle, there was a widespread pubic perception in the U.S. that free trade was a good thing. Good for America. Good for poor countries. Everyone would get richer as goods and services became integrated into a single global market. Momentum was on the side of the free-traders and few politicians or journalists dared to speak against it. Seattle changed that story. As protesters put their bodies on the line, a clueless press, surprised by the size and passion of the crowds, began to see there was another, much darker side to free trade. Journalists’ articles on free trade became more balanced—pro and con, politicians got braver in expressing dissent, and the public learned a new story about the effects of free trade.

2. Stalled the WTO

Not only was the WTO unable to reach agreement in Seattle in 1999, but every time it has met in the intervening 10 years it has been unable to move its agenda forward. Many feel this is because delegates—particularly from developing countries—who had been steamrolled by the U.S. and its allies became emboldened to speak up for their own countries’ interests. As the WTO meets this week in Geneva, many experts feel there is little chance they will reach agreement this time, either.

3. Defeated the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas

Once NAFTA had passed in 1993, trade officials assumed the next step was to expand the free trade area to cover all of North and South America with a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. Cities were vying to host the FTAA secretariat and planners were laying out expanded transportation systems to bring massive amounts of goods from South America to the U.S. and Canada. But when trade negotiators met in Quebec in 2001 and again in Miami in 2003, they encountered massive protests and many delegates voiced their opposition. No agreement was reached, and there is currently no expectation of reviving the effort.

More reflections on the 10th anniversary of Seattle WTO protests:
Walden Bello
Mark Engler
Anuradha Mittal
Sarah van Gelder
Rebecca Solnit
David Korten
David Solnit
Dispatches from the 1999 event:
YES! Magazine archive

4. Inspired the World Social Forum

As the world watched the progressive social movements from all over the world come together in Seattle, imaginative strategists saw the possibilities for holding multi-movement events that were not protests but rather gatherings to bring forward a positive agenda. And so was born the World Social Forum, first held in Brazil in January 2001, just 14 months after Seattle. It’s success spawned yearly World Social Forums, attracting over 100,000 people, as well as regional and national social forums, including in the United States in 2007, with another U.S. Social Forum planned for June 2010 in Detroit.

5. Gave birth to the Independent Media Center—indymedia.org

A group of activists wanted to ensure frontline coverage of the Seattle protests by people who understood what it was about—something the mainstream news could not be counted upon to do. So they created the Independent Media Center, which enabled online reporting from people close to the action. Soon indymedia centers spread across the world, providing unprecedented close-ups of protests to this day.

6. Seeded the idea of green jobs

As the “teamsters and turtles” marched in the street, environmentalists and labor leaders began to see the power of joining their movements in campaigns for living wage jobs that would help the environment. That alliance, and the tireless work of Van Jones and the Ella Baker Center, and subsequently Green for All, built the momentum for green jobs until the term became a household word and a common part of state and federal legislation.

7. Reignited the idea of people power

The specter of people in the streets stalling the agenda of an organization backed by the most powerful corporations in the world reignited efforts to both protest and to create new institutions everywhere. It helped bring over 10 million people into the streets to protest the U.S. invasion of Iraq and thousands of towns to hold “350” demonstrations on climate change this last October. The chant “This is what democracy looks like,” born of a phrase Van Jones once said to a group of policemen and turned into a chant by the Art and Revolution folks in Seattle, rings to this day as people continue to work for a just and sustainable world.

Fran Korten wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Fran is the publisher of YES! Magazine.

Interested? See more reflections on the legacy of the WTO demonstrations.

Ten years ago this fall, Kevin Danaher, the bareheaded, white-goateed co-director of Global Exchange was making the rounds to student groups, encouraging young people to take part in upcoming protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO). He had worked up a theatrical pitch:

"How many people here were at Woodstock?" he would ask, and, with his own hand raised, look over his audiences.

"Only me, eh? Well that's too bad for you. But if you want to be part of something equally important and historic, you get your ass to Seattle."

Before the fact, and amid an era of celebration for corporate globalization, this prediction of the event's magnitude seemed exaggerated at best. Afterward, not so much. The protests—a massive grassroots effort by unions, environmentalists, organic farmers, solidarity activists, and diverse community groups—made headlines around the world. They marked the beginning of a new phase of popular mobilization around issues of corporate power and international trade. They even inspired a 2008 film dramatization, Battle In Seattle, which featured Hollywood stars Woody Harrelson, Michele Rodriguez, Charlize Theron, and Andre 3000.

But, in the long run, did the protests promote meaningful change?

In assessing any single historical incident, this question is a difficult one. Generally speaking, the response of many Americans is to dismiss protests out of hand—arguing that demonstrators are just blowing off steam and won’t make a difference. But if any case can be held as a counter-example, Seattle is it.

The 1999 mobilization against the WTO has never been free from criticism. As Andre 3000’s character in the movie quips, even the label “Battle in Seattle” makes the protests sound less like a serious political event and more “like a Monster Truck show.” While the demonstrations were still playing out and police were busy arresting some 600 people, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman issued his now-famous edict stating that deluded activists were just “flat-earth advocates… looking for their 1960s fix.”  (Comparisons to Woodstock might not have helped with the latter charge.) In 2008, an article in the Seattle Weekly dismissively asked, “Remind me again what those demonstrations against the WTO actually accomplished?”

While cynicism comes cheap, those concerned about global poverty, sweatshop labor, outsourced jobs, and threats to the environment can witness remarkable changes on the international scene. Today, , sister institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have been knocked from their once-imposing pedestals, and the ideology of neoliberal corporate globalization is under intense fire, with mainstream economists defecting from its ranks and entire regions such as Latin America in outright revolt. As global justice advocates have long argued, the forces that created these changes “did not start in Seattle.” Yet few trade observers would deny that the week of protest late in the last millennium marked a critical turning point.

What Happened in Seattle?

During and after the demonstrations, the mainstream media was largely focused on the smashed windows of Starbucks and Niketown—property destruction carried out by a small minority of protesters. In the past two decades, the editorial boards of major U.S. newspapers have been more dogged than even many pro-corporate legislators in pushing the “free trade” agenda. Yet, remarkably, acknowledgment of the WTO protests’ impact on globalization politics could be found even in their pages. Shortly after the event, a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times read, "On the tear-gas shrouded streets of Seattle, the unruly forces of democracy collided with the elite world of trade policy. And when the meeting ended in failure... the elitists had lost and [the] debate was changed forever."

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On November 30 (N30), thousands of protesters blocked WTO delegates from reaching the meeting. Author Paul Hawken was among them.

Seattle was supposed to be a moment of crowning achievement for corporate globalization. Big-business sponsors of the Seattle Ministerial (donors of $75,000 or more included Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Weyerhaeuser, Boeing and GM) invested millions to make it a showcase of “New Economy” grandeur. Any student of public relations could see that the debacle they experienced instead could hardly be less desirable for advancing their agenda.

Rarely do protesters have the satisfaction of achieving their immediate goals, especially when their stated aims are as grandiose as shutting down a major trade meeting. Yet the direct action in Seattle did just that on its first day, with activists chained around the conference center forcing the WTO to cancel its opening ceremonies.

By the end of the week, negotiations had collapsed altogether. Trade representatives from the global South, emboldened by the push from civil society, launched their own revolt from within the conference. In a statement from the Organization of African Unity ministers railed against “being marginalized and generally excluded on issues of vital importance for our peoples and their future.”

The demands of the developing countries’ governments were not always the same as those of the outside protesters. However, the diverse forces agreed on some key points. Expressing his disgust for how the WTO negotiations had been conducted, Sir Shridath Ramphal, the chief Caribbean negotiator, argued, “This should not be a game about enhancing corporate profits. This should not be a time when big countries, strong countries, the world's wealthiest countries, are setting about a process designed to enrich themselves.”

Given that less powerful countries had typically been bullied into compliance at trade ministerials, this was highly unusual stuff. Yet it would become increasingly normal. Seattle launched a series of setbacks for the WTO and, to this day, the institution has yet to recover. Efforts to expand the reach of the WTO have repeatedly failed. The overtly unilateralist Bush White House was even less effective than the “cooperative” Clinton administration at getting its way in negotiations, and the Obama administration has yet to change things.

In 2008 analyst dubbed the current round of WTO talks the “Dracula Round” because it lives in an undead state. No matter how many times elites try to revive the round, it seems destined to suffer a new death. Other agreements, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which aimed to extend NAFTA throughout the hemisphere, and which drew protests in places like Quebec City and Miami, have since been abandoned altogether.

“We Care Too”

The altered fate of the WTO and other “free trade” deals is itself very significant. But this is only one part of a wider series of transformations that the global justice protests of the Seattle era helped to usher in. The Seattle protests launched thousands of conversations about what type of global society we want to live in. While they have often been depicted as mindless rioters, activists were able to push their message through. A poll published in Business Week in late December 1999 showed that 52 percent of respondents were sympathetic with the protesters, compared with 39 percent who were not. Seventy-two percent agreed that the United States should “strengthen labor, environmental, and endangered species protection standards” in international treaties, while only 21 percent disagreed.

A wave of increased sympathy and awareness dramatically changed the climate for long-time campaigners. People who had been quietly laboring in obscurity for years suddenly found themselves in the midst of a huge surge of popular energy, resources, and legitimacy. Obviously, the majority of Americans did not drop everything to become trade experts. But an impressive number, especially on college campuses and in union halls, did take time to learn more—about sweatshops and corporate power, about global access to water and the need for local food systems, about the connection between job loss at home and exploitation abroad.

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With the protests that took place in the wake of Seattle, finance ministers who had grown accustomed to meeting in secretive sessions behind closed doors were suddenly forced to defend their positions before the public. Often, official spokespeople hardly offered a defense of WTO, IMF, and World Bank policies at all. Instead they spent most of their time trying to convince audiences that they, too, cared about poverty. In particular, the elites who gather annually in the Swiss Alps for the exclusive World Economic Forum became obsessed with branding themselves as defenders of the world’s poor. The Washington Post noted of the 2002 Forum, “The titles of workshops read like headlines from the Nation: ‘Understanding Global Anger,’ ‘Bridging the Digital Divide,’ and ‘The Politics of Apology.’”

Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank who was purged after he outspokenly criticized the IMF, perhaps most clearly described the remarkable shift in elite discussion that has taken place since global justice protests first captured the media spotlight. In a 2006 book, he wrote:

I have been going to the annual meetings [in Davos, Switzerland] for many years, and had always heard globalization spoken of with great enthusiasm. What was fascinating… was the speed at which views had shifted [by 2004]…. This change is emblematic of the massive change in thinking about globalization that has taken place in the last five years all around the world. In the 1990s, the discussion at Davos had been about the virtues of opening international markets. By the early years of the millennium, it centered on poverty reduction, human rights, and the need for fairer trade arrangements.

More reflections on the 10th anniversary of Seattle WTO protests:
Walden Bello
Sarah van Gelder
Fran Korten
Rebecca Solnit
David Korten
Anuradha Mittal
David Solnit
Dispatches from the 1999 event:
YES! Magazine archive

Changing Policy

Of course, much of the shift at Davos was just talk. But the wider political changes go far beyond rhetoric. Specific elements of the neoliberal “Washington Consensus,” such as prying open countries’ capital markets, fell into disrepute amid widespread criticism. As Stiglitz noted in 2006, “Even the IMF now agrees that capital market liberalization has contributed neither to growth nor to stability.” That was well before the start of the current economic crisis, which has gone much further in discrediting market fundamentalist policies.

Grassroots activity translated into concrete change on other levels as well. Even some critics of the global justice movement have noted that activists have scored a number of significant policy victories. In a September 2000 editorial entitled “Angry and Effective,” The Economist reported that the movement

has changed things—and not just the cocktail schedule for the upcoming meetings. Protests... succeeded in scuttling the OECD's planned Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1998; then came the greater victory in Seattle, where the hoped-for launch of global trade talks was aborted... The activists have also raised the profile of "backlash" issues—notably, labor and environmental conditions in trade, and debt relief for the poorest countries. This has dramatically increased the influence of mainstream NGOs, such as the World Wide Fund for Nature and Oxfam. Such groups have traditionally had some say (albeit less than they would have wished) in policymaking. Assaulted by unruly protesters, firms and governments are suddenly eager to do business with the respectable face of dissent.

Various combinations of "respectable" negotiators and "unruly" dissidents forced shifts on a wide range of issues. It is not glamorous work to trace the issue-by-issue changes that activists have eked out—whether it’s compelling multinational pharmaceutical companies to drop intellectual property lawsuits against African governments seeking to provide affordable AIDS drugs for their citizens, or creating a congressional ban on World Bank loans that impose user fees on basic health care and education for the poor, or persuading administrators at more than 140 colleges to make their institutions take part in the anti-sweatshop Worker’s Rights Consortium. Yet these changes affect many lives.

Take just one demand: debt relief. For decades, countries whose people suffer tremendous deprivation have been forced to send billions of dollars to Washington in payment for past debts—many of which were accumulated by dictators overthrown years ago. Debt relief advocates were among the thousands who joined the Seattle mobilization, and they saw their cause quickly gain mainstream respectability in the altered climate that followed. In 2005, the world’s wealthiest countries agreed to a breakthrough debt cancellation agreement that, while imperfect, shifted roughly $1 billion per year in resources back to the global South.

In early 2007, Imani Countess, national coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee Africa Program, noted that the impact of the deal has been profound:

In Ghana, the money saved is being used for basic infrastructure, including rural feeder roads, as well as increased expenditure on education and health care.

In Burundi, elimination of school fees in 2005 allowed an additional 300,000 children to enroll.

In Zambia, since March 31, 2006, free basic health care has been provided for all [along with] a pledge to recruit 800 medical personnel and slightly over 4,000 teachers.

In Cameroon, [the government made] a pledge to recruit some 30,000 new teachers by the year 2015 and to construct some 1,000 health facilities within the next six years.

 “They won the verbal and policy battle,” said Gary Hufbauer, a “pro-globalization” economist at the Institute for International Economics in 2002, speaking of the groups that have organized major globalization protests. “They did shift policy. Are they happy that they shifted it enough? No, they're not ever going to be totally happy, because they're always pushing."

A Crisis of Legitimacy

In its review of Battle in Seattle, the Hollywood industry publication Variety noted that “the post-9/11 war on terror did a great deal to bury [the] momentum” of the global justice movement. This idea has become a well-worn trope; however, it is only partially true. In the wake of 9/11, activists did shift attention to opposing the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. But, especially in the global South, protesters combined a condemnation of U.S. militarism with a critique of “Washington Consensus” economic policies. In the post-Seattle era, these polices faced a crisis of legitimacy throughout much of the world.

Privatization, deregulation, and corporate market access have failed to reduce inequality or create sustained growth in developing countries. This led an increasing number of mainstream economists, Stiglitz most prominent among them, to question some of the most cherished tenets of neoliberal “free trade” economics. Not only are the intellectual foundations of neoliberal doctrine under assault, the supposed beneficiaries of these economic prescriptions have been walking away. Throughout Latin America, waves of popular opposition to Washington Consensus policies have forced conservative governments from power. In election after election since the turn of the millennium, the people have put left-of-center leaders in office.

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More recently, similar disaffection has reached the United States. Last year, as the current economic crisis was escalating, we were afforded the rare sight of Sen. John McCain blasting “Wall Street greed” and accusing financiers of “[treating] the American economy like a casino.” Meanwhile, then-candidate Barack Obama decried the removal of government oversight on markets and the doctrine of trickle-down prosperity as “an economic philosophy that has completely failed.” In each case, their words might have been plucked from Seattle’s teach-ins and protest signs.

With Obama now in the White House, there is an ongoing need to compel him and others in power to transform campaign-trail rhetoric into a real rejection of corporate globalization. The White House has been ambivalent about whether it will promote new “free trade” agreements. And the WTO, while bruised and battered, has not been eliminated entirely. Because its original mandate is still intact, the institution has considerable power in dictating the terms of economic development in parts of the world. Opposing this will require continued grassroots pressure.

On a broader level, huge challenges of global poverty, inequality, militarism, and environmental degradation remain. Few, if any, participants in the 1999 mobilization believed that a single demonstration would eliminate these problems in one tidy swoop. But the coming fight will be easier if the spirit that drove the Seattle protests animates a new surge of citizen activism in the Obama era.

Mark Engler wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Mark is a writer based in New York City, a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books). He can be reached via DemocracyUprising.com.

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Official history is an accretion of acceptable versions. Before those arise there are great ruptures when the world actually changes and no one yet is in control of the meaning of what has happened or what kind of a future it will lead to—and perhaps these two things are the same thing.

In these great pauses, much is possible, including a change of mind on a broad scale. September 11 was one such occasion, and in the days before the Bush Administration framed the act by a little-known group as the opening overture of a war, a remarkable contemplative stillness blanketed much of the country. The meaning was up for grabs, and even after the war on Afghanistan began, people continued buying quantities of books on Islam and the Middle East, talking among themselves, and thinking for themselves about foreign policy, violence, and civil society.

November 30, 1999, a positive image to which 9/11 was the negative, was also one of those ruptures—the other half of the arrival of the millenium. No one, not even the organizers, anticipated that activists would so successfully disrupt the WTO ministerial or that the success would become a huge story around the world, magnifying its impact. The event brought consciousness of corporate globalization and the arguments against it to much of the previously clueless Global North. 

Before Seattle, the WTO had seemed indestructible, its agenda of taking over the world and creating the most powerful monolithic institution in history inevitable. Four years after, when the WTO talks collapsed at Cancún, the organization was crippled, and it is now—as no one anticipated, though many dreamed—essentially disabled with no signs of possible recovery. What happened in Seattle mattered. “On the tear gas-shrouded streets of Seattle,” reported the Los Angeles Times, “the unruly forces of democracy collided with the elite world of trade policy. And when the meeting ended in failure on Friday, the elitists had lost and the debate had changed forever.” So had the world. 

My belief is that those who characterize us as violent correctly perceive us as a threat. But to acknowledge us as a threat to the status quo is to acknowledge many dangerous things: that there is a status quo, rather than a natural order, that it is vulnerable, and that action in the streets can change it. Framed this way, activists are historical players who matter and whose danger may coexist with their legitimacy, even their heroism. To acknowledge this is also dangerous. Thus the threat has to be relocated from the legitimate arena of political and cultural change to the illegitimate realm of “lawlessness” and violence. Once this is done, activists are merely criminals, petty or otherwise, and their threat is part of the status quo.

More reflections on the 10th anniversary of Seattle WTO protests:
Walden Bello
Anuradha Mittal
Fran Korten
Sarah van Gelder
David Korten
David Solnit
Dispatches from the 1999 event:
YES! Magazine archive

From the Boston Tea Party perpetrators to Civil Rights activists, the people who have made our world through direct action have been treated as dangerous, foolish, unrealistic, malcontented, unreasonable, and criminal in their time, even if they are revered when their radical acts are at a safe distance. The myth of activist violence is a way of concealing and dismissing real power. And maybe it’s also a measure of that power, if a frustrating, damaging one.

We won the battle with the WTO, and though corporate globalization is a many-headed hydra, quite a few more of those heads have been chopped off, much of the world has been educated, and huge swaths of it have been radicalized—in 1999 no one, for example, foresaw Bolivia’s future or the death of the Free Trade Area of the Americas. And it turns out that ten thousand unarmed people in the streets can circumvent the juggernaut of the former most powerful institution in the world. Nonviolently. We have power. But we need to use that power to see that the truth is told and that history serves the truth, and justice.

This article was adapted for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions, from Rebecca Solnit's essay in The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, from AK Press. Rebecca is an activist, historian and writer who lives in San Francisco. Her twelfth book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, came out this fall.

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Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, U.S. President George H. W. Bush, and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (standing, left to right) at the NAFTA initialing ceremony in October, 1992.

Photo courtesy of the George Busg Presidential Library and Museum

In 1993, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was up for a vote in Congress, Dave and I were fresh back from working for 15 years in Southeast Asia. There we had seen the disastrous effects that global trade pushed by powerful corporations has on people and the environment. Now we were apoplectic that the U.S. could be considering enhancing the power of those same forces right in our own country.

So we did something we had never done before. We wrote a letter (yes, snail mail) to every single person for whom we had a personal address—old friends from grade school, American colleagues we had worked with in other countries, parents of our children’s friends, our plumber. Everyone! We stuffed envelopes late into the night. In the letter, we pleaded with them to urge their congressional representatives to vote against NAFTA. We explained that this agreement was designed to benefit big corporations, could override U.S. environmental and worker protections, and run a lot of small businesses into the ground on both sides of the border. We got a lot of responses from our friends who thanked us for writing. Many said they had no idea that NAFTA was particularly important. Some had never heard of it. A few commented it sounded like some kind of cleaning agent.

More reflections on the 10th anniversary of Seattle WTO protests:
Walden Bello
Anuradha Mittal
Sarah van Gelder
Rebecca Solnit
David Korten
David Solnit
Dispatches from the 1999 event:
YES! Magazine archive

We were in agony when NAFTA passed, and even more so a year later when Congress voted for the U.S. to join the World Trade Organization. It felt like the ultimate triumph of corporate power over the needs and rights of human beings. What we did not foresee at that moment was the power of the people.

So in late 1999, when the thousands marched and courageous young people did their lock-downs, we were horrified by the violent response of the police, but exultant at the evidence that America had awakened. The tide had turned. At last, a significant number of Americans knew what many in the developing world had known for years: free trade agreements are not just esoteric rules about what goods can cross borders. They are about who rules—corporations or people.

Fran Korten wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Fran is executive director of the Positive Future Network, publisher of YES! Magazine.

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It is now generally accepted that globalization has been a failure in terms of delivering on its triple promise of lifting countries from stagnation, eliminating poverty, and reducing inequality. The current deep global downturn, which is rooted in corporate-driven globalization and financial liberalization and the ideology of neoliberalism that legitimized them, has driven the last nail into the coffin of globalization.

But things were very different over a decade ago. I still remember the note of triumphalism surrounding the first ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Singapore in November 1996. There, we were told by representatives of the U.S. and other developed countries that corporate-driven globalization was inevitable, that it was the wave of the future, and that the sole remaining task was to make the policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the WTO more “coherent” in order to more swiftly get to the neoliberal utopia of an integrated global economy.

Protesters of the World Trade Organization's ministerial meeting filled the streets of downtown Seattle in 1999.
See more images from the protests.

(c) Photo by Kevin Sharp.

Indeed, the momentum of globalization seemed to sweep everything in front of it, including the truth. In the decade prior to Seattle, there were a lot of studies, including UN reports, that questioned the claim that globalization and free market policies were leading to sustained growth and prosperity. Indeed, the data showed that globalization and pro-market policies were promoting more inequality and more poverty and consolidating economic stagnation, especially in the global South. However, these figures remained “factoids” rather than facts in the eyes of academics, the press, and policymakers, who dutifully repeated the neoliberal mantra that economic liberalization promoted growth and prosperity. The orthodox view, repeated ad nauseam in the classroom, the media, and policy circles was that the critics of globalization were modern-day incarnations of Luddites, the people who smashed machines during the Industrial Revolution, or, as Thomas Friedman disdainfully branded us, believers in a flat earth.

Then came Seattle. After those tumultuous days, the press began to talk about the “dark side of globalization,” about the inequalities and poverty being created by globalization. After that, we had the spectacular defections from the camp of neoliberal globalization, such as those of the financier George Soros, the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and the star economist Jeffery Sachs. The intellectual retreat from globalization probably reached its high point over two years ago in a comprehensive report by a panel of neoclassical economists headed by Princeton’s Angus Deaton and former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff, which sternly asserted that the World Bank Research Department—the source of most assertions that globalization and trade liberalization were leading to lower rates of poverty, sustained economic growth, and less inequality—had been deliberately distorting the data and/or making unwarranted claims.

More reflections on the 10th anniversary of Seattle WTO protests:
Anuradha Mittal
Fran Korten
Sarah van Gelder
Rebecca Solnit
David Korten
David Solnit
Dispatches from the 1999 event:
YES! Magazine archive

True, neoliberalism continues to be the default discourse among many economists and technocrats. But even before the recent global financial collapse, it had already lost much of its credibility and legitimacy. What made the difference? Not so much research or debate but action. It took the anti-globalization actions of masses of people in the streets of Seattle, which interacted in synergistic fashion with the resistance of developing country representatives in the Sheraton Convention Center and a police riot, to bring about the spectacular collapse of a WTO ministerial meeting to translate factoids into facts, into truth. And the intellectual debacle inflicted on globalization by Seattle had very real consequences. Today, the Economist, the prime avatar of neoliberal globalization, admits that the “integration of the world economy is in retreat on almost every front,” and a process of “deglobalization” that it once considered unthinkable is actually unfolding.

Seattle was what the philosopher Hegel called a “world-historic event.” Its enduring lesson is that truth is not just out there, existing objectively and eternally. Truth is completed, made real, and ratified by action. In Seattle, ordinary women and men made truth real with collective action that smashed an intellectual paradigm that had served as the ideological warden of corporate control.

Walden Bello wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Walden is a member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines. He was among the protesters in the streets of Seattle during the WTO’s third ministerial meeting and has participated in parallel civil society events at all the other ministerial meetings, representing the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South. He is the author of 15 books, including Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy.

It seems like yesterday when I joined tens of thousands of others at what has come to be known as the Battle in Seattle. Thousands came from all over the country to show solidarity and outrage, and more importantly, to make change. They circled the Kingdome, demanding annulment of the Third World debt, while thousands blocked intersections, hotels, and the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. They were teachers, students, faith-based people, farmers, Longshore workers, moms and dads—and even turtles—who came from all over the country to express their disgust with corporate greed and its devastating consequences on working families, the environment, and life itself. They were tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed, but they stayed firm in the midst of it all till the front page of national papers cried out, “Talks Collapse.” The world felt the tremor of this courage and witnessed a new face of the United States.

(C) 1999 Dang Ngo/ZUMA Press. All rights reserved.

Events from November 26 to December 6, 1999, culminating in the shutdown of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial and the collapse of the trade talks, have been described many times over, been a subject of several documentaries, and even the focus of a full length feature film. To understand what transpired in Seattle, the Pentagon commissioned the Rand Corporation to produce a study, in which the movement was described as “the NGO swarm,” difficult for governments to deal with because it has no leadership or command structure and “can sting a victim to death.” Corporate public relations consultants Burson Marsteller published a “Guide to the Seattle Meltdown” to help clients like Monsanto “defend” themselves. 

The Battle in Seattle has come to hold a special place in political movements of the twenty-first century. Ten years later, efforts continue to explain and understand its true meaning. There are several factors that contributed to its unique place in history.

To me, as an activist of Indian origin, the significance of Seattle first and foremost lies in the fact that in the United States of America, a nation that is an unabashed apologist for unrestrained capitalism, young activists, trade unionists, farmers, environmentalists, and opponents of poverty, hunger, and homelessness faced off—using puppets and street theater—against corporate and government leaders and their armies of bureaucrats. Before Seattle, communities around the world had been organizing, marching, and rising up—be it the people of Madhya Pradesh fighting to hold Union Carbide accountable for the poisonous gas leaked from its factory in Bhopal, the ski-masked Mayan Indians that emerged in Chiapas to make the world listen, or the residents of shanty towns in South Africa who protested prepaid water meters as an attack on their human right to water. The mass mobilization that brought the WTO to its knees was carefully nurtured through cross-border alliances, but it was “Made in the USA.”

More reflections on the 10th anniversary of Seattle WTO protests:
Walden Bello
Sarah van Gelder
Fran Korten
Rebecca Solnit
David Korten
David Solnit
Dispatches from the 1999 event:
YES! Magazine archive

Secondly, Seattle is an example of what strategic, determined, and disciplined cross-border organizing can accomplish. Its strength came from the diversity of civil society groups, and its unity from the diverse strategies they employed. The reasons that brought people to Seattle during the WTO week were myriad, but the tens of thousands of people on the streets represented the collective force of justice, democracy, and plain decency. What has been termed as the student-turtle-Teamster-policy wonk-tree hugger-partnership made the other WTO possible—the World Turned Out in Seattle.

And lastly, the WTO has had a difficult time recovering from the blow it received in Seattle. Once described as the “jewel in the crown of multilateralism,” the WTO has come close to its demise several times since Seattle. Trade talks have stuttered and stalled and failed to move forward despite arm-twisting and blackmailing. It was only through the imposition of “war on terror” tactics following the 9/11 attacks in the US that the Doha Round of the WTO was moved; it has still to be concluded.

Doha was followed by the collapse of talks in Cancún. There, Kenyan delegates walked out of the ministerial, followed by representatives of South Korea and India. Civil society mourned Lee Kyung Hae, a South Korean farmer who took his own life to protest the WTO’s devastation of the Korean countryside. He stabbed himself at the barricades built to keep poor farmers and other protestors out of the talks. Hong Kong joined the exodus, and the WTO had to satisfy itself with a minimum package that, at best, functioned as a life support system. Since then, scared by massive mobilizations and protests and the growing confluence between delegates of the developing world and civil society, the WTO has been reduced to having mini ministerials with the hopes of hammering out a deal with a handful of its members. Its credibility as a multilateral institution has been reduced to tatters.

Reclaiming Corn and Culture
In communities throughout Mexico, farmers are replacing NAFTA's disastrous "free trade" policies with working models of “fair trade."

The plight caused by the 2008 food-price crisis was exploited by international financial institutions, with the backing of rich nations, in order to boost free-trade agendas and move the WTO talks further. However, efforts to promote the WTO as a solution to growing hunger were thwarted, and even the Economist magazine held the food crisis as the biggest threat to globalization.

In Seattle and soon after, those who heralded the end of the WTO and its free trade agenda were labeled as “anti” globalization, and called protectionists and even globophobes. The events since Seattle have proven that the international civil society that united in Seattle is for democracy, for livelihoods, for environment, and for human rights. And that’s what has made it a force to reckon with—even hailed by the New York Times, on the eve of the 2003 US war on Iraq, as the world’s other super power.

As the free trade agenda has shattered amidst the ruins of the global capitalist economy, Seattle has gained new significance. Seattle was a call to action for ordinary working people to stand up and take back their streets and their nation. It was a call to ensure that democracy is wrenched free from corporations and that it remains of the people, by the people, and for the people. Ten years later, civil society’s vigilance and mobilization efforts remain essential to ensuring that responses to the current global financial crisis promote and protect the human right of all to live in dignity and to provide social and economic justice for all.

This article was adapted for YES! Magazine from Anuradha Mittal's essay in The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, edited by David Solnit and Rebecca Solnit. Anuradha is the founder and executive director of the Oakland Institute, a leading think-tank on global social, economic, and environmental rights issues, which works with a grassroots constituency to strengthen popular struggles nationally and internationally. She is the author and editor of numerous publications, including her most recent book Voices From Africa: African Farmers & Environmentalists Speak Out Against a New Green Revolution in Africa.

But in the activist world, something very different was happening. Activists were mobilizing thousands for mass street protests. Independent media outlets were organizing to do their own reporting of events. Direct action advocates were making banners, puppets, and devices that protesters could use to lock down intersections and prevent delegates from attending the meetings. YES! executive director, Fran Korten, invited readers to come to Seattle to "greet" the WTO, and YES! ran articles explaining why.

The protests were so effective in part because there were so many independent groups doing their own planning, with loose coordination with other groups. The Teamsters and the "turtles" (the Sierra Club), Korean farmers and local farmers, students and policy wonks, churches and, yes, anarchists. 

Each day of the week had a theme of sorts. The first day, churches organized thousands to surround the stadium in the pouring rain to call for debt relief for the world's poorest countries. WTO delegates enjoyed a banquet in the warmth, while outside, drumming and poncho-clad protesters called for sharing.

More reflections on the 10th anniversary of Seattle WTO protests:
Walden Bello
Anuradha Mittal
Fran Korten
Rebecca Solnit
David Korten
David Solnit
Dispatches from the 1999 event:
YES! Magazine archive

Other days were devoted to women and development, food and agriculture, labor, and other topics. Each forum was organized by organizations from around the world and from the Seattle area who linked the issues they cared about most to the WTO and corporate globalization.

While many have discussed the direct action tactics used in Seattle, few have noted the "open source" quality of the events. The World Social Forum, which began in Brazil in 2001, adopted this powerful means of bringing divergent groups together.

One of the founders of the World Social Forum, Chico Whitaker Ferreira, told me in an interview at the European Social Forum in 2008 that the Seattle experience laid the foundation for the forum's success:

"In Seattle, we learned a very, very important thing: working by networks, not through pyramid structures, is much more efficient. The forums are always horizontal networking, because with networks, people take the responsibility.

Before 1999, nobody could imagine that so many people would go to Seattle from all over the world. It happened because of the power of horizontal networks."

The World Social Forum has a small number of principles, but within that scope, thousands of groups from the world's poorest to the world's wealthiest countries come together, hold their own conversations, make proposals and take power and responsibility for the outcomes. Coalitions are born, new understandings are reached, and millions have had the experience of being part of a global movement of civil society for a better "possible" world.

What happens when people around the world have these leaderless discussions? Can they get anything done? This has been a point of controversy in the World Social Forum movement, but one example shows what's possible. In late 2002, as the US was gearing up for war with Iraq, representatives of various peace movements gathered as part of the European Social Forum in Florence, and a discussion began about mass street demonstrations to be held around the world.

"It was not the World Social Forum that said, 'Let us go to the streets,'" Whitaker points out.

"The proposal appeared at a Social Forum in Florence. It reappeared at a forum in Brazil in 2003. Then networks, social movements, NGOs [nonprofits], and everybody worked together with one cause, one objective—and everybody was surprised. Fifty million people came out in the streets all over the world to protest the war."

No single organization or coalition could have made this happen. If such an organization existed, it would be subject to corruption and be vulnerable to counter attacks from outside and power struggles from within.

But many groupings of people—with access to structured ways to communicate and collaborate—can create a swarm that is unstoppable. That is one of the unheralded lessons of Seattle. It's a lesson we can build on as we work to stop the ravages of climate change and to build a more just and sustainable future.

Protesters block an intersection in downtown Seattle during the 1999 WTO protests.

(c) Photo by Kevin Sharp.

November 30, 2009 will mark the tenth anniversary of the historic Seattle protest against the World Trade Organization that stalled the use of multilateral trade agreements to consolidate global corporate power. This anniversary presents an extraordinary opportunity for We the People of the United States to assert our democratic right to reclaim the political power that corporations have usurped.

We face economic, social, and environmental crises that pose potentially terminal threats to the United States and to the human future. We now have perhaps the most able and visionary president in U.S. history and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate with a strong electoral mandate for serious visionary leadership to address these crises. Yet on issues from climate change, peace, trade, and economic justice to health care and financial restructuring, government action is limited to cosmetic reforms that fall hopelessly short of what we need.

As Arianna Huffington observed, lobbyists working for the interests of Wall Street CEOs, financiers and money managers who care only for personal financial gain have stripped away the most substantive provisions of every serious legislative reform initiative that has come out of the Obama administration often even before the beginning of committee hearings. Very little gets through the legislative process without their approval. The time has come for We the People to evoke the spirit of Seattle ’99 and assert our democratic sovereignty or accept responsibility for the consequences of our failure.

In the late 1990s, We the People awoke to the threat to popular democratic sovereignty and the common good posed by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Transnational corporations were using multilateral trade agreements to consolidate their global power by rewriting the rules of commerce in secret negotiations that circumvented established democratic processes. The WTO had become their favored vehicle.

In 1999, the WTO announced it would hold a meeting of trade ministers in Seattle. Labor unions, churches, environmental organizations, artists, socially responsible business leaders and others gathered in Seattle at the time of the meeting to declare their independence from the WTO. Through disciplined nonviolent direct action, they disrupted the secret negotiations in the face of a violent police riot. The citizen victory in Seattle emboldened others the world over to stand up to corporate power and global civil society was born as a potent political force.
 
Now, the WTO has announced it will hold its Seventh Ministerial Conference in Geneva beginning on November 30, 2009, ten years to the day from the citizen lock down in Seattle that stalled the WTO juggernaut. Shortly after the WTO Geneva meeting, world leaders will be meeting in Copenhagen from December 7-18, 2009 to negotiate measures to mitigate the consequences of climate change. We can assume corporate interests will be well represented in both meetings by those who care more for securing corporate profits than for resolving the crises that threaten the human future.  

It is a moment to reclaim the Spirit of Seattle '99 by creating a countervailing people’s voice for the common good so strong that it cannot be ignored. Citizen groups across the United States and around the world are mobilizing for a host of actions in late November and early December to raise public awareness and hold political decision makers accountable to the common good. These groups will be addressing a variety of issues relating to human rights, environmental sustainability, and peace.

A common thread will bind them together. In most every instance Wall Street financial institutions and their global counterparts present the primary barrier to making the rule changes essential to corrective action.

More reflections on the 10th anniversary of Seattle WTO protests:
Walden Bello
Anuradha Mittal
Fran Korten
Sarah van Gelder
Rebecca Solnit
David Solnit
Dispatches from the 1999 event:
YES! Magazine archive

In response to pressure from corporate interests, responsibility for strengthening financial regulation is being handed to the Federal Reserve, which is for all practical purposes run by the Wall Street banks it presumes to regulate. The Fed operates in secret beyond public accountability and served as a cheerleader for the excesses that brought down the global financial system. The single payer option on health care has been taken off the table. The cap and trade feature of the clean energy bill gives away eighty-five percent of carbon credits to polluters under terms that already have financial speculators salivating in anticipation of the potential for creating a new financial bubble and new derivatives scams.

So long as We the People submit to Wall Street rule, meaningful reduction of green house gases, a peace economy, economic and environmental justice, affordable health care for all, restoration of the middle class, restrictions on financial speculation, a prohibition on usury and debt slavery, food security, full-employment in family wage Green jobs, restructuring social security for long-term viability, and much else will remain ever out of reach. Economic instability, extreme inequality, financial fraud, social disintegration, and environmental collapse will define our national and global way of life. 

Seattle+10 is an opportune moment for people everywhere to speak with a unified voice to declare their independence from Wall Street rule and their shared commitment to move forward a 21st century agenda of justice, peace, and environmental sustainability for all. Follow November-December 2009 days of action developments on the Seattle+10 Group page on Wiser Earth. Sign up and join in.

David Korten

My stomach clenched the first time I heard that actor Stuart Townsend was making a mainstream movie about the 1999 shutdown of the WTO ministerial meetings, Battle in Seattle.

I was an on-the-ground organizer in Seattle, and for me and many other activists, the event was a high point in our social change work. It was a moment when organized resistance became a genuine popular uprising, successfully shutting down the opening day of the WTO meeting, taking over the downtown core of a major American city, and contributing to the collapse of negotiations that would have increased poverty, destruction, and misery around the world.

But for years, that story has been distorted. In mainstream media, the Seattle protesters have been portrayed either as violent extremists or as irrelevant “flat-earth advocates … and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix” as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it.

The story of Seattle has itself become a battleground, one where activists fight the lies and disinformation used to stoke public fears and justify repression against grassroots movements across the U.S.

Now Townsend wanted to tell our story, and I wondered if he’d do any better.

What would a multimillion-dollar Hollywood-star-studded film tell Americans about the sometimes life-or-death struggle against trade policies that threatened to wreck local economies and dismantle environmental protections the world over? Would it tell about the extraordinary power of 50,000 ordinary people in Seattle and their millions of counterparts around the world to demand a just and democratic world—or repeat media myths about riots and violence that activists had fought so long to change?

Who’s Really Rioting?

In the days after the Seattle uprising, I wrote this description:

On November 30, 1999, a public uprising shut down the World Trade Organization and took over downtown Seattle, transforming it into a festival of resistance. Tens of thousands of people joined the nonviolent direct action blockade that encircled the WTO conference site, keeping the most powerful institution on earth shut down from dawn until dusk. … Long shore workers shut down every West Coast port from Alaska to Los Angeles. Large numbers of Seattle taxi drivers went on strike. All week the firefighters union refused authorities’ requests to turn their fire hoses on people. Tens of thousands of working people and students skipped or walked out of work or school.

But, in the words of Britain’s Environment Minister, Michael Meacher, “What we hadn’t reckoned with was the Seattle Police Department, who single-handedly managed to turn a peaceful protest into a riot.” As police fought our blockades with armored cars and fired rubber, wooden, and plastic bullets, as well as tear gas, pepper spray, and concussion grenades, the corporate media looked for ways to dismiss a popular uprising as merely a few dozen people window breaking corporate chain stores. The cops and politicians also tried to use this as cover for their repression and brutality.

Activists continued to engage in nonviolent direct action throughout the week, despite a clampdown that included nearly 600 arrests, the declaration of a “state of emergency,” and suspension of the basic rights of free speech and assembly in downtown Seattle. Corporate media promoted the impression that Seattle was staged by a fringe group of extremists whose violent tactics were to be feared. Despite this, a month later a January 2000 opinion poll by Business Week found that 52 percent of Americans sympathized with the protestors at the WTO in Seattle.

Ever since, corporate media and government authorities have used distorted images of Seattle to characterize all major mobilizations in the U.S. and internationally as potential “violent riots.”

In the lead-up to mass demonstrations against the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, for instance, local police agencies produced a video that combined images of activists breaking windows with fringe-sounding quotes from some Eugene activists that were used extensively by “60 Minutes” and other corporate media outlets. Police showed the video to the Los Angeles City Council just before a vote on funding a massive police presence and new riot gear to counter the demonstrations. The Council was scared, and the funding measure passed.

One of the most troubling of the many distortions of the Seattle story is a report on the New York City Police Department’s intelligence program, which attempts to justify the widespread suspension of civil liberties, mass arrests, and unrestrained spying and harassment that took place during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. The report says that the history of activist groups “is one of extreme violence, vandalism and unlawfulness,” and it links anarchists and “direct action specialists” to “extreme violence” and “terrorism operatives.”

More recently, references to “violent riots” at the Seattle WTO have increased as nervous authorities attempt to justify the suspension of civil liberties in the face of mass mobilizations planned for the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

Several other former Seattle anti-WTO organizers also showed up during the filming to try to influence the film. I think we made some positive changes and shifted Townsend’s views a bit, but it was too late to change the film’s basic narrative.

Whose Script?

Two years ago, Stuart Townsend called me up. He had heard that I was involved in the organizing that led up to the Seattle protests.

In 1999, I had moved to Seattle for six months to help organize with the Direct Action Network, a broad umbrella group that provided a framework for thousands to coordinate resistance during the week of WTO.

I’m also an arts organizer and I worked with many other artists, groups, and activists to make the giant puppets, art, and street theater that were very present in Seattle. This was all part of an effort to find new language and new forms of resistance.

Townsend asked if I would talk to his art department about puppets. He emphasized that the film “was not taking sides,” but would tell the story through the eyes of the different people involved.

I asked to read the script and offer feedback. Townsend finally agreed just as he began filming in Vancouver, British Columbia. I pored over the script for three days in the back room of his production offices and was required to hand it back each day before I left. I circulated a summary for feedback to a group of activists I’d worked with in Seattle. I wrote up an analysis of problems we saw in the script, then met with Townsend and his assistant on the fourth day of filming.

I could tell he did not want to change the script so late in the process. A dozen of us met a few days later and organized a pressure campaign, applying tactics we often used in anti-corporate campaigns. We sent a strongly worded group letter demanding changes, called everyone we could think of connected to the film—friends of Stuart, people working on the film, and friends of friends, and we asked a couple of nonprofits not to cooperate with the film until our concerns had been heard.

We rewrote more accurate, alternative sections of the parts of the script we had problems with, but the filmmakers accepted only a handful of our revisions. Several other former Seattle anti-WTO organizers also showed up during the filming to try to influence the film. I think we made some positive changes and shifted Townsend’s views a bit, but it was too late to change the film’s basic narrative.

The Story Line

The movie follows several intertwined stories through the five days of the Seattle events.

Central characters include a low-ranking riot cop (Woody Harrelson), his pregnant wife who works in a downtown clothing outlet (Charlize Theron), a European member of Doctors Without Borders, an African trade minister, a TV news reporter and her cameraman, the mayor, the chief of police, and a handful of organizers from the Direct Action Network.

The African trade minister exposes the undemocratic internal process of the WTO, while the doctor argues against drug industry patents that leave poor countries unable to afford medicine.

An activist named Django talks about the WTO ruling against the Endangered Species Act, which overturned U.S. trade rules that required the international fishing industry to protect sea turtles.

Street action and police rioting supplemented with actual footage from Seattle bring back the intensity of the streets that week. Townsend’s docudrama plot twists make strong critical statements against corporate media and police violence. This movie can help shift the corporate media distortions of Seattle if it’s widely viewed.

At the same time, Townsend’s story also repeats some marginalizing myths and stereotypes about activists.

Let’s start with the riot cop played by Harrelson. The most three-dimensional character in the film, he has a job, a wife, and a child on the way. Meanwhile, the Direct Action Network organizers appear to have no jobs, families, or even homes. Their motivations come not from everyday grievances shared by most Americans, but from unusual personal circumstances. For instance, one of them has an axe to grind because his brother was killed in a forest protest.

Townsend also fails to grasp the real reasons for Seattle’s success. His movie implies that the activists “won” because police were caught by surprise, were too lenient, and waited too long to use violence and chemical weapons, and to make arrests.

But our actions were no surprise. As democracy researcher Paul de Armond writes in the most thorough analysis of the Seattle events to date, “The Direct Action Network and AFL-CIO plans had been trumpeted loudly, widely, and in considerable detail in the press by the organizers.”

We won because we were strategic, well organized, and part of strong local, regional, national, and international networks.

Decentralized networks are more flexible and stronger than top-down hierarchies like police agencies and city authorities, and this played to our advantage.

Many individuals and allied groups who had minimal contact with the Direct Action Network understood and supported the strategy, and participated in the action without ever attending a meeting or bothering to identify with a specific group.

My attempt to engage with Townsend’s movie helped me see how important it is for members of social movements to tell our own stories—not just about Seattle, but about all our struggles and victories—and to tell them loudly, publicly, and compellingly.

Writing a People’s History

My attempt to engage with Townsend’s movie helped me see how important it is for members of social movements to tell our own stories—not just about Seattle, but about all our struggles and victories—and to tell them loudly, publicly, and compellingly.

Widespread amnesia about the history of movements and rebellion is part of what has made grassroots organizing in the U.S. so difficult. Many activists have romanticized Seattle as a semi-spontaneous rebellion that arose as if by luck. This ignores the key strategizing, mass mobilizing, networking, education, and alliance-building that made Seattle possible. Battle in Seattle’s greatest contribution may be that it reminds us of this and spurs us to action.

More reflections on the 10th anniversary of Seattle WTO protests:
Walden Bello
Anuradha Mittal
Fran Korten
Sarah van Gelder
Rebecca Solnit
David Korten
Dispatches from the 1999 event:
YES! Magazine archive

A group of Seattle anti-WTO veterans launched the Web site RealBattleinSeattle.org, which aims to correct some of the film’s misrepresentations. “Stories are how we understand the world and thus shape the future,” explains a statement on the site. “They are part of our fight against corporate power, empire, war, and social and environmental injustice, and for the alternatives that will make a better world.”

The real Seattle reshaped the story of what is possible for millions of people around the world.

In the days before, during, and after Seattle, thousands of Indian farmers in Karnataka marched to Bangalore in a solidarity action, and over a thousand villagers from Anjar held a procession.

In 80 different French cities, 75,000 people took to the streets, and 800 miners clashed with police. In Italy, the headquarters of the National Committee for Bio-Safety was occupied. Activists took over the WTO world headquarters in Geneva.

Turkish peasants, trade unionists, and environmentalists marched on the capital of Ankara.

A street party shut down traffic in New York City’s Times Square, activists took over U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshevski’s offices, and thousands marched in the Philippines, Portugal, Pakistan, Turkey, South Korea, and across Europe, the United States, and Canada.

In the years that followed Seattle, global justice and anti-capitalist activists were re-energized as northern movements joined already thriving global south movements to push back corporate capital’s efforts to further concentrate power and wealth.

The WTO meeting in Cancun, Mexico, fell apart in 2003 because of farmer-led protests.

The same year, the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) attempted to impose corporate rule on the Western Hemisphere, but collapsed due to hemisphere-wide popular opposition.

And the WTO has become increasingly irrelevant and powerless. As I write this the WTO is trying desperately to revive itself, using the pretext of the food crisis to argue for expanding the policies that created the crisis and the accompanying widespread hunger and poverty.

As the globalized system of poverty, war, and ecological destruction seems to be teetering, perhaps the battle simply to tell our own stories and histories is as important as any in the struggle to make history.

David Solnit wrote this article as part of Purple America, the Fall 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. David is an anti-war, global justice, and arts organizer. He was a key organizer in the WTO shutdown in Seattle in 1999 and in the shutdown of San Francisco the day after Iraq was invaded in 2003. He is editor of Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World (City Lights Publishers, 2003) and co-author with Aimee Allison of Army of None: Strategies to Counter Military Recruitment, End War and Build a Better World. This article is an adaptation of a longer essay from the new book, The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle (AK Press 2008) edited by and with essays by Rebecca Solnit and David Solnit and including the original “Resist the WTO Call to Action” and 1999 Direct Action Network broadsheet. Interested?  Watch The Battle in Seattle film trailer See David Solnit on the Fine Art of Protest, and on People Power.