jan 1, 1999 - World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle

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WTO: International economic body established in 1995 through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to enforce substantial tariff and import quota reductions.


As it increased connections, globalization destabilized the established order. “Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world,” said a young President Bill Clinton in his first inaugural address in 1993. “The urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy.” For many, globalization indeed looked like an enemy (see “Thinking Like a Historian”). In late 1999, more than 50,000 protesters took to the streets of downtown Seattle, Washington. Police, armed with pepper spray and arrayed in riot gear, worked feverishly to clear the clogged streets and usher well-dressed government ministers from around the world into a conference hall. The demonstrators jeered, chanted, and waved a sea of banners. A contingent of radicals broke away from the otherwise peaceful march and smashed the storefronts of chain stores they saw as symbols of global capitalism: Starbucks, Gap, and Old Navy.

What aroused such passion in the so-called Battle of Seattle was a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a large intergovernmental economic organization that served as one of the principal advocates of unrestrained global trade. Protestors raised a question both fundamental and complicated: In whose interest was the global economy structured? Many of the Seattle activists took inspiration from the five-point “Declaration for Global Democracy,” issued by the human rights organization Global Exchange during the WTO’s Seattle meeting. “Global trade and investment,” the document demanded, “must not be ends in themselves but rather the instruments for achieving equitable and sustainable development, including protection for workers and the environment.” The WTO had been established in 1995 through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), one of the international structures that emerged following World War II. In the eyes of its opponents, the WTO put profits ahead of people — and the showdown in Seattle’s streets signaled the profound changes globalization had wrought.

In November 1999, an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people from many states and foreign nations staged a major protest at a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle. The goals of the protesters were diffuse; many feared that the trend toward a system of free (capitalist-run) trade would primarily benefit multinational corporations and would hurt both developing nations and the working classes in the industrialized world. Protests have continued at subsequent meetings of the WTO and the World Bank.

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