GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS ★^1081destruction of forests by lumber companies, and sea turtles threatened by
unrestricted ocean fishing. Protesters drew attention to the depletion of ozone
in the atmosphere, which shields the earth from harmful solar radiation. The
heightened use of aerosol sprays and refrigerants containing damaging chem-
icals had caused a large hole in the ozone layer. A handful of self- proclaimed
anarchists embarked on a window- breaking spree at local stores. The police
sealed off the downtown and made hundreds of arrests, and the WTO gather-
ing disbanded.
Once a center of labor radicalism, the Seattle area in 1999 was best known
as the home of Microsoft, developer of the Windows operating system used in
most of the world’s computers. The company’s worldwide reach symbolized
globalization, the process by which people, investment, goods, information, and
culture increasingly flowed across national boundaries. Globalization has been
called “the concept of the 1990s.” During that decade, the media resounded with
announcements that a new era in human history had opened, with a borderless
economy and a “global civilization” that would soon replace traditional cultures.
Globalization, of course, was hardly a new phenomenon. The internation-
alization of commerce and culture and the reshuffling of the world’s peoples
had been going on since the explorations of the fifteenth century. But the scale
and scope of late- twentieth- century globalization was unprecedented. Thanks
to satellites and the Internet, information and popular culture flowed instanta-
neously to every corner of the world. Manufacturers and financial institutions
scoured the world for profitable investment opportunities.
Perhaps most important, the collapse of communism between 1989 and 1991
opened the entire world to the spread of market capitalism and to the idea that
government should interfere as little as possible with economic activity. Amer-
ican politicians and social commentators increasingly criticized the regulation
of wages and working conditions, assistance to the less fortunate, and environ-
mental protections as burdens on international competitiveness. During the
1990s, presidents Bush, a Republican, and Clinton, a Democrat, both spoke of
an American mission to create a single global free market as the path to rising
living standards, the spread of democracy, and greater worldwide freedom.
The media called the loose coalition of groups who organized the Seattle
protests the “antiglobalization” movement. In fact, they challenged not glo-
balization itself but its social consequences. Globalization, the demonstra-
tors claimed, accelerated the worldwide creation of wealth but widened gaps
between rich and poor countries and between haves and have- nots within
societies. Decisions affecting the day- to- day lives of millions of people were
made by institutions— the World Trade Organization, International Monetary
Fund, World Bank, and multinational corporations— that operated without
any democratic input. Demonstrators demanded not an end to global trade
and capital flows, but the establishment of international standards for wages,
What forces drove the economic resurgence of the 1990s?