Baking our own bread and circuses
This past week has been the anniversary of the "Battle in Seattle" anti-WTO protests. There are posters about this around town, with a slogan along the lines of "Because the power of the people can't be stopped". It's right that the protests should be commemorated: they were even of some global significance, and certainly a huge deal locally. They would be a huge deal today, and by all accounts Seattle felt much less like a big city back in 1999.
But I can't help but sneer at that slogan. The protests were a complete and utter failure. I don't even want to get into whether they were right [though for whatever it's worth, I'm a lot more pro-WTO than most people whose politics are otherwise like mine], but what did they achieve? The WTO still exists, and the only thing undermining its importance is the US's habit of ignoring it and striking bilateral trade deals with individual countries - not only unrelated to the protests, but almost certainly not what the protesters set out to achieve. It still has regular meetings; they just have to spend a lot more money on security. So all this supposed "power of the people" has actually achieved is to make major world summits a damn sight more inconvenient for their host cities, and cancel Seattle's new year celebrations for that year.
Surely it would be more appropriate to commemorate the protests with sober, introspective events that consider why the power of the people is so easily ignored, and what can be done about that, instead of this complacent, smug pretense that they were in any meaningful way a demonstration of power?
But I can't help but sneer at that slogan. The protests were a complete and utter failure. I don't even want to get into whether they were right [though for whatever it's worth, I'm a lot more pro-WTO than most people whose politics are otherwise like mine], but what did they achieve? The WTO still exists, and the only thing undermining its importance is the US's habit of ignoring it and striking bilateral trade deals with individual countries - not only unrelated to the protests, but almost certainly not what the protesters set out to achieve. It still has regular meetings; they just have to spend a lot more money on security. So all this supposed "power of the people" has actually achieved is to make major world summits a damn sight more inconvenient for their host cities, and cancel Seattle's new year celebrations for that year.
Surely it would be more appropriate to commemorate the protests with sober, introspective events that consider why the power of the people is so easily ignored, and what can be done about that, instead of this complacent, smug pretense that they were in any meaningful way a demonstration of power?