On the second anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks a forum was held outside of the 5th Ministerial meeting for the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Cancun where people from around the world explored the relationships between globalization and militarization.

Speakers at the forum included Walden Bello and Mary Lou Malig from Focus on the Global South, Ana Esther Ceceña from the University of Mexico, Steven Staples of the Polaris Institute, Pratap Chatterjee from Corpwatch, Medea Benjamin from Global Exchange/Occupation Watch.

Experiencing violent repression when they demonstrated their opposition to global trade policies, the people of the south know first hand about the relationship between globalization and militarization. They live it everyday.

Unfortunately, there is no way under the WTO rules for states to impose sanctions against countries that use violence against their citizens to enforce global trade. WTO agreements specifically disallow countries from considering how products are produced. Even products built with slave labor must be treated as any other product in the global economy.

While the Clinton Administration seemed to try and keep militarization under the surface, the current Bush Administration has shown no qualms about using armed forces to achieve global economic goals.

Globalization has not brought world peace, only more violence and war. The Bush doctrine of preemptive invasion as a tool for international policy has now created a new form of globalization – armed globalization. 

If, as the Bush junta appears to believe, the world is an international battleground then the U.S. Empire needs all of the worlds resources. To attain this end, a series of bases have been set up around the world in areas where U.S. interests appear to be at stake.

For military planners, the cold war policy of containment is over. The U.S. is now the sole country capable of maintaining the global economy. The world has been divided between those who are connected by globalization and those who aren’t. It is into these latter countries that the military is most likely to go.

Oil rich regions in South America and the Middle East as well as mineral and other resource rich regions in Africa and Southeast Asia are now ringed by U.S armed forces. In some areas, such as Iraq or the Philippines, these forces have engaged directly in military conflicts.

Article 21 of the agreement that set up the WTO provides a specific security exemption to world trade discussions. Any country can spend any amount subsidizing and building up armed forces, just so long as these activities are within the realm determined to be for security.

In this way, countries are encouraged to use military expenditures as a form of social welfare, but they cannot subsidize other industries important to their own economies, as such subsidies are considered “barriers to trade.” Military forces are then often used to oppress dissent within the country itself, not against some external enemy.

Multinational corporations based in the United States who profit significantly from arms sales include Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and Raytheon. These same corporations are also major players in the trade negotiations going on within the WTO. Often, the U.S. trade representative speaks directly for these corporations.

However, not all of the news is bad. For the first time in two years, George Bush’s popularity has fallen below 50%. While the president in a recent televised speech tried to convince the people of the U.S. that the war is being won, what people remember is the $87 billion he has asked for to continue the war, this during a time of deepening economic crisis.

For the first time, a new sector of society in the United States has started to speak out against the war in Iraq – military families. Promised that the war would be quickly concluded, the daily reports of dead and wounded soldiers is leading them to join the call to bring the troops home.

In Iraq itself, activists from the U.S. have started a new organization, Occupation Watch, (www.occupationwatch.org) where citizens are working directly on the ground to support an end to the military occupation and to lobby directly for the return of economic control to the Iraqi people themselves.

After the building of an historic anti-war movement prior to the invasion of Iraq, corporate media called the massive movement a massive failure. What they didn’t mention was that when the war happened anyway the people who were a part of the movement did not give up. They regrouped and developed new strategies to confront the imperial ambitions of the U.S.

One of the most significant results of this regrouping was an international meeting held in Jakarta, Indonesia in May of 2003. Representatives of peace groups from 27 countries converged and signed the Jakarta Peace Consensus. (www.focusweb.org)

Proposals in the document included:

Rather than being a failure, the anti-war movement has only strengthened the ties between international social justice activists who were already working together to expose and fight the costs of corporate led globalization. The movement has eroded the view that the U.S. is somehow a benign superpower and has exposed the destructive lengths to which the Bush Administration will go to extend its empire and guarantee U.S. hegemony in the global economy.

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