ders continued to the retrenchment operations that
they had begun during the global recession of the
1980’s and began to outsource jobs from the devel-
oped world to lower-labor-cost, third-world areas.
Second, as concern with the pace and direction of
globalization grew in the economically developed,
democratic world, a new, nonelected institutional
voice for promoting free trade was created in 1995,
the World Trade Organization (WTO). Unlike the
post-World War II, pro-free trade General Agree-
ment on Tariffs and Trade (1947-1995) that it re-
placed, the WTO possessed the ability to enforce
open trade agreements, and it almost immediately
began aggressively to pursue its free trade agenda.
Coming on the heels of the recent ratification of the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
the WTO’s activities seemed to confirm the worst
fears of environmentalists that the world’s resources
will be sacrificed in the name of corporate profits, of
unions that their members’ jobs will be lost through
outsourcing to Mexico and other developing areas,
and of grassroots advocates of democracy that yet
another area of decision-making affecting local
conditions had been given to remote, popularly un-
accountable bureaucrats.
In short order the third piece in the mobilization
of antiglobalization forces fell into place when these
diverse groups began to join up with one another in
common protests during the late 1990’s—first in
limited numbers in Geneva, where crowds gathered
in 1997 to protest at GATT’s fiftieth anniversary, and
then in tens of thousands in Seattle, where the pro-
testers so shut down the city that the five thousand
WTO delegates who had gathered there could not
make it to their meeting. Indeed, before the two days
of demonstrations ended there, the attorney gen-
eral of the United States, Janet Reno, had urged the
governor of Washington to activate the state’s Na-
tional Guard to reestablish order, and President Bill
Clinton’s aides had canceled his scheduled address
at the conference on the grounds of safety consider-
ations.940 World Trade Organization protests The Nineties in America
A protester holds a sign as he walks past Seattle police officers outside the World Trade Organization meetings in November, 1999.(AP/
Wide World Photos)