Global social movements and global civil society : a critical overview

Abstract

‘Is there anything more ridiculous in the news today than the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle? I doubt it.’ With this misplaced comment, Thomas Friedman opened his regular column in The New York Times on 1 December 1999. Friedman, who had just published his first global bestseller on globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, continued the column in the same manner, ridiculing the critics of globalization: ‘These anti-WTO protesters – who are a Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960s’ fix – are protesting against the wrong target with the wrong tools’. The irony of Friedman’s derision of ‘flat-earth advocates’ would become apparent only some six years later, when he published his second globalization bestseller, The World is Flat, in which he argued that because of globalization we now indeed live in a flat world, and it is good that it is so. Across that period Friedman had, without any self-reference or acknowledgement of the irony, reversed the meaning of his metaphor of the flat earth. Neither attribution works theorectically, empirically or politically, but the changing metaphorical reference and the passion with which it is used and criticized are indicative of the controversy that the early alter-globalization movements invoked. Our discussion of globalizing social movement will need to range from the eighteenth-century abolition movement to the early twenty-first-century ‘Arab Spring’, however the Battle of Seattle is a good place to begin. Seattle was a symbolic turning point in the history of globalization to the extent that is marked a transition when social movements more and more self-consciously located themselves in relation to the processes of globalization, processes that had long been part of their formation.