Global Social Movement ( s ) at the Crossroads : Some Observations on the Trajectory of the Anti-Corporate Globalization Movement 1

is paper examines the major structural characteristics of the anti-corporate globalization movement, its key bases and antecedents, its relationship with other global social movements (GSMs) and the key challenges it faces in the post-9/11 period. We suggest that despite the potential of the anti-corporate globalization movement to usher in major social changes, the movement faces a number of major crossroads in terms of ideology, discursive approach, and overall strategy. We argue that there has been coalescence of a good many GSMs, including the international environmental movement, under the banner of the anti-corporate globalization movement. We focus primarily on the interrelations of these two GSMs, noting that over the past decade there have been trends toward both the “environmentalization” and “de-environmentalization” of the anti-corporate globalization movement. While the defection of many mainstream environmental groups from the “Washington consensus” and the resulting environmentalization of the trade and globalization issue were critical to the “Seattle coalition,” there has been a signifi cant decline in the movement’s embrace of environmental claims and discourses, and a corresponding increase in its use of social justice discourses. One implication of our analysis is the hypothesis that while the current vitality of the anti-corporate globalization movement can be gauged by its having adopted an increasingly coherent ideological stance in which international inequality and global corporate dominance are targeted, to be successful the movement will need to coherently ideologically integrate social justice with environmental and sustainability agendas. Th e amenability of the environmental GSM to such ideological integration will have important ramifi cations for the future trajectory of the anti-corporate globalization movement. abstract

Th is paper examines the major structural characteristics of the anti-corporate globalization movement, its key bases and antecedents, its relationship with other global social movements (GSMs) and the key challenges it faces in the post-9/11 period.We suggest that despite the potential of the anti-corporate globalization movement to usher in major social changes, the movement faces a number of major crossroads in terms of ideology, discursive approach, and overall strategy.We argue that there has been coalescence of a good many GSMs, including the international environmental movement, under the banner of the anti-corporate globalization movement.We focus primarily on the interrelations of these two GSMs, noting that over the past decade there have been trends toward both the "environmentalization" and "de-environmentalization" of the anti-corporate globalization movement.While the defection of many mainstream environmental groups from the "Washington consensus" and the resulting environmentalization of the trade and globalization issue were critical to the "Seattle coalition," there has been a signifi cant decline in the movement' s embrace of environmental claims and discourses, and a corresponding increase in its use of social justice discourses.One implication of our analysis is the hypothesis that while the current vitality of the anti-corporate globalization movement can be gauged by its having adopted an increasingly coherent ideological stance in which international inequality and global corporate dominance are targeted, to be successful the movement will need to coherently ideologically integrate social justice with environmental and sustainability agendas.Th e amenability of the environmental GSM to such ideological integration will have important ramifi cations for the future trajectory of the anti-corporate globalization movement.O ne of the most distinctive aspects of late-twentieth century globalization is that many of its predominant features-especially the reinforcement of trade liberalization institutions and the growing ability of national-states and corporate capital to exercise off -shore veto of domestic social and environmental legislation-are challenged directly and aggressively by a global-scale social movement, the anti-corporate globalization movement.Previous world systems of globalization such as British global hegemony of the nineteenth century (roughly 1870-1914) involved no global-scale organizations, and no social movements aimed at curbing one or another of the processes of international integration (with the partial exception, of course, of attempts to create an international working class or socialist movement).Indeed, a growing number of social sci-entists believe that in the current era of globalization social movements must necessarily be global in their vision and scope if they are to be successful (O'Brien et al. 2000).Th e power and sway of transnational actors, particularly transnational corporations and trade liberalization institutions such as the World Trade Organization, regional trade institutions, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the g8, implies that the only possibility of eff ective challenge to these actors must involve organizations and movements that can counter the prerogatives of these globalizing institutions at the (global) scale at which these institutions operate.Indeed, many argue that the anti-corporate globalization movement is the most signifi cant left movement of the new Millennium, and is a movement that has the potential to alter the course of social change in the decades that follow (Brecher et al. 2000).
In this paper we will begin by discussing the major structural characteristics of the anti-corporate globalization movement, which we defi ne in a broad manner to include not only the participants in protests and in the confederations that have loosely coordinated these protests, but also other NGOs and groupings that consider themselves to be anti-corporate globalization and to be part of the movement.We will then comment on the recent history of the anti-corporate globalization movement.We will want to focus on two particular aspects of this movement.First, we will briefl y examine the relationships between the anti-corporate globalization movement and another important global-scale social movement, that of the international environmental movement.Second, we will take up the matter of the possible eff ects that the anti-corporate globalization movement might have on various transnational actors and institutions of globalization, and on selected nation-states.In this regard we will suggest that despite the obvious potential of this movement to usher in major social changes, the movement also faces a number of major crossroads in terms of ideology, discursive approach, and overall strategy.One implication of our analysis is the hypothesis that while the current vitality of the anti-corporate globalization movement can be gauged by its having adopted an increasingly coherent and radical ideological stance in which international-especially North-South inequality and global corporate dominance are targeted -to be successful the movement will need to have more of a coalitional character in which social-justice goals are ideologically integrated with environmental and sustainability agendas.²

BASES OF THE ANTICORPORATE GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT
Th e anti-corporate globalization movement has not been formed de novo, but has drawn many of its adherents from the groups and networks associated with previous social movements.Th e anti-corporate globalization movement is a broad coalition of smaller (anti-sweatshops, debt relief, fair trade, AIDS, etc.) and larger (human rights, organized labor, international hunger, etc.) movements and draws participants and participating organizations from a diversity of ideologies (anarchists, socialists, liberal reformists, etc.).What gives this "movement of movements" cohesion is a common critique of neo-liberal economic policies, the anti-democratic nature of international fi nancial institutions (the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank in particular) and the increasing power of transnational corporations.Participants and coalition member organizations coordinate activities primarily through electronic media, allowing for intercontinental simultaneous discussion and mobilization.Th e movement is therefore able to organize on all continents and maintain communication between very diff erent groups in very diff erent locations.Th e anti-corporate globalization movement has developed a somewhat unique organizational structure to facilitate the maintenance of such a diverse coalition across ideological and geographic space based on a commitment to non-hierarchical and consensus based decision making.Th e use of delegates from the various "affi nity groups" representing the diverse organizations, movements, and less formally organized groups of participants to form "spokes councils" where strategic and tactical decisions are made allows the movement to operate without formal leaders or a clear organizational hierarchy.Such an organizational structure ensures that all groups are able to participate in decision making, and that all voices are heard, and thus prevents schisms from developing into obstacles to coordinated action.
Th ere are a number of structural bases for the rise of the anti-corporate globalization movement other than the premise that the growing power of transnational actors "requires" global-scale movements to successfully contest these new power relations.First, while there is a general consensus among professional economists and among state offi cials in most countries of the North that there are mutual gains to be realized through comparative advantage and "freer" world trade, in reality a good many citizens of most contemporary nation-states have reservations about subjecting their countries and themselves to the vagaries of distant, unelected, and unaccountable trade regimes.Increased dependence on trade can create social benefi ts, but it also creates social losses and engenders insecurities such as the movement of jobs off shore, an increased risk of unemployment, and the loss of worker protections.
².In this paper the expression "social justice" refers specifi cally to considerations relating to distributional economic in/equality.
Frederick H. Buttel & Kenneth A. Gould 40 Global Social Movement(s) at the Crossroads 41 and a good many social scientists see much promise in the development of "global civil society."In addition to seeing that global social movements are intrinsically better positioned than nationally based movements to advance causes such as environmental protection and ensuring the conservation of protective labor legislation and social insurance programs, movement proponents and a number of social-scientifi c analysts agree that global social movements (GSMs) have been very adept at creating coalitional movement structures across (and within) national borders and new discourses.Movement opponents, by contrast, are fearful that the continuing attraction of trendy mass rallies at meetings of the WTO, the g8, World Bank, OAS and IMF will create a tidal wave of "mindless" opposition to the fragile institutions that now facilitate freer trade.⁴Many sociologists and social scientists from related disciplines are now employing the notion of GSMs nearly as often, and as casually (see McMichael, 1996), as the notion of globalization has come to be used.Generally, what these observers of global social movements have in mind is that these movements are a logical-even necessary-response to global processes such as the establishment of new regional and international "free trade" agreements, the expansion of markets, the establishment of international governmental organizations and regimes, and the growing role played by transnational corporations (see the critique by Ancelovici, 2002).GSM theorists (e.g., O'Brien et al. 2001;Cohen and Second, contemporary trade liberalization institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement have essentially been established to permit off shore veto of ostensibly protectionist environmental regulations or of the traditional measures for enhancing social security such as the welfare-state "safety net."Anti-corporate globalization discourses stress the role of the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the emerging Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and the g8 as enforcers of the rules of globalization which privilege transnational corporations and, to a considerable but lesser degree, the citizens of the nation-states that host the bulk of these corporations.Movement discourses refer to the competitive global-scale prerogative of off shore corporate veto as creating a powerful "race to the bottom" as nation-states face competitive pressures to "water down" their regulations in order to remain attractive for capital investment.Th ird, there is also a sizable share of cultural revulsion against the homogenization, "McDonaldization" (Ritzer 1993), and Americanization, which are thought to be associated with globalization.Th e rise of the anti-corporate globalization movement also seems to be related substantially to the advent of a unipolar, American-dominated world order following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the general demise of state socialism, increased U.S. military dominance, and the relative absence of a countervailing world power.
As noted earlier, while there is a good deal of public and scholarly debate about the socioeconomic and cultural impacts of trade liberalization and related institutions and practices of globalization, there is a surprising consensus on the growing role of global anti-systemic social movements such as the anti-corporate globalization movement.³Anti-corporate globalization movement proponents 3. We will generally refer to this movement as the anti-corporate globalization movement because this is the most common terminology used within the movement itself.Note, however, that there is an enormous amount of debate and contention over the most suitable terminology for describing this movement.Movement proponents tend to be most comfortable with the notion of "anti-corporate globalization movement," but even so there is considerable disagreement among movement supporters as to whether the most suitable terminology is that which pronounces the movement's radical sentiments (such as the "anti-capitalist" movement), or rather that the most desirable terminology is that which sounds more moderate and which is accordingly more likely to appeal to more moderate or casual supporters (such as the "global justice " movement).Th e movement's opponents are most likely to refer to the movement as the "anti-trade movement" suggesting, somewhat inaccurately, that anti-corporate globalization movement supporters object to international trade or globalization as a whole rather than to the pro-corporate and pro-Western rules that currently tend to govern world trade and the terms of globalization.Many movement supporters also strongly reject the "anti-globalization" label, retorting that they favor globalization in the form of globally agreed-to labor and environmental standards, while rejecting corporate globalization institutions and practices (neoliberalism, workforce "fl exibility" measures, the "race to the bottom" engendered by off shore corporate veto, and so on).Th ey often conceptualize their movement as a manifestation of "globalization from below," in contrast to a transnational, elite-dominated, "top-down" globalization regime.
⁴.In addition to the pronouncements of Th omas Friedman, perhaps the most poignant example of this is the speech of C. Fred Bersgten, a tireless supporter of trade liberalization, entitled "Th e Backlash Against Globalization," at the April 2000 Meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Tokyo, in which he said candidly that "anticorporate globalization forces are now in ascendancy."Another example is that an impressive array of corporate and governmental supporters of trade liberalization felt the need to create a process through the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, to consider whether globalization leaves some countries and groups behind, and if so what should be done about it.
Rai 2000) believe these movements can be very infl uential because dominant global actors can be vulnerable to negative public opinion and to the scrutiny by governments that is generated by public sentiments.GSMs also combine the strengths of popular NGOs (such as environmental and development-justice NGOs) in "resource mobilization" (especially in attracting foundation and other funding), and of new social movements or "identity-driven" movements in the strength of collective sentiments.Th ere is also general agreement that the master global social movements are the environmental movement, the peace/human rights movement, the women' s movement, the development-justice/hunger movement, and the anti-corporate globalization movement itself.Some observers of GSMs have tended to see the global environmental movement as the key overarching or umbrella movement, while the more recent tendency has been to assign that role to the anti-corporate globalization movement, especially in light of the fact that the goals, meaning and discourse of environmentalism varies enormously both within and between northern and southern societies (Taylor 1995;Brulle 2000;Schnaiberg and Gould 2000).
One of the basic arguments of this paper is that there has been coalescence of a good many GSMs, including the international environmental movement, under the banner of the anti-corporate globalization movement.Despite its coalitional character, the anti-corporate globalization movement has an identity and organizational structure that serves to distinguish it from other GSMs, such as the hierarchically organized environmental GSM which has its own distinct identity rooted primarily in the international conservation wing of environmentalism.We will focus primarily on the interrelations of these two GSMs by noting that over the past decade there have been trends toward both the "environmentalization" and "de-environmentalization" of the anti-corporate globalization movement.Clearly, an assessment of the current status and future role of GSMs must address the matter of the articulations between the global environmental movement and the anti-corporate globalization movement.We will suggest below that the role that environmental claims and strategies play in the anti-corporate globalization movement' s "repertoire of contention," to use Tilly' s (1978Tilly' s ( , 1986) terminology, will be critical to the movement' s future.
Th ere are several focal structural properties of the anti-corporate globalization movement.First, while we in the North almost always presume that the essence of the movement is that of periodic protests by citizen-protesters from OECD countries against institutions located in the North (such as the WTO, World Bank, IMF, or g8) or corporations headquartered in the North, the lion' s share of protests have actually occurred in the global South.⁵Protests have been particularly common in Bolivia, Argentina, Th ailand, Ecuador, India, Brazil, and Indonesia, southern activists are generally more radical and confrontational than their counterparts in the North (Smith 2002).It has been estimated, for example, that on May 1, 2000, there were anti-corporate globalization protests in about 75 cities on six continents across the world.While we acknowledge this very central point (and see Podobnik 2001, for an impressive elaboration), our guess is that these anti-corporate globalization protests in the South are essentially protests that are confi ned (either by intention, or else by practicalities) to getting the attention of heads of state and fi nance ministers in the South.Our guess is that the anti-corporate globalization movement in the North is in some respects the more important segment of the movement, in that it has the socio-economic and geographical capacity to attack transnational institutions more directly as well as to gain the attention of the heads of state of the countries which have the dominant voices within these institutions.
Th e energy and vitality of the anti-corporate globalization movement are clearly very substantially due to the actions of the protesters who now contest the annual meetings of essentially all globalization institutions.But another critically important component of the movement is its active NGO supporters and affi liates.As we will note below, the anti-corporate globalization movements' cast of NGO supporters and affi liates essentially encompasses the "Seattle coalition," the unprecedentedly broad coalition that formed during the lead-up to and in wake of the protests at the 1999 Th ird WTO Ministerial meeting at Seattle.If the 95 percent rule that 95 percent or more of movement work is devoted to "education" (especially writing publications of various sorts and doing media relations work), and to meetings at which coalitions and tactics are negotiated holds in the case of the anti-corporate globalization movement, a sizable share of the work of the movement is in some sense that undertaken by other movements and associated NGOs.Th e anti-corporate globalization movement, for example, is now endorsed in the publications and on the home pages of a vast array of NGOs and related movements, and these other groups consider themselves to be integral components of the anti-corporate globalization movement.A wide variety of environmental, agricultural, labor, consumer, human rights, women' s rights, animal rights, and related groups now have "trade" or "globalization analyst" staff ers.Th e AFL-CIO has been a dependable and eff ective organizer and has a very strong presence at North American anti-corporate globalization protests.Much of the ideological coherence of the movement is provided by a small group of prominent intellectual fi gures (e.g., Walden Bello, José Bové, Vandana Shiva, Robert Weissman, Naomi Klein, Kevin Danaher, and Lori Wallach), all of whom are associated with NGOs whose work appears to accord with the 95 percent rule.Not unimportantly, these NGOs turn out a goodly number of their members at anti-corporate globalization protests, and probably many-fold more sympathizers who visit their websites.⁶ Th ird, the movement is largely consciously and intentionally acephalous, with the partial exception of the important role typically played by the organizers of local protests.Much of protest organizing occurs by way of the internet-websites, email, and chat rooms-without the need for a central source of command, and eliminating much of the resource and bureaucratic needs for organizing protests.Th e organizations established to loosely coordinate protests (e.g., the Mobilization for Global Justice at the April 2000 World Bank/IMF protest, the Initiative Against Economic Globalization in Prague [INPEG] at the September 2000 Prague World Bank/IMF protest, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence of the April 2001 Quebec City Summit of the Americas protest, and the Genoa Social Forum at the July 2001 Genoa g8 summit protest) largely recede after the protests are concluded.Months prior to a protest multiple independent "clusters" and "affi nity groups" form to organize traveling "road shows" and teach-ins throughout the host country.Cell phones and walkie-talkies are the principal means of communication and coordination during protests, often enabling protesters to outmaneuver law enforcement and security personnel.Th e Internet and cell phone modalities of protest organization have facilitated the accommodation of considerable diversity within the movement.Th e lack of direct contact among these various groups tends to militate against infi ghting, but also requires an acceptance of a certain incapacity to generate ideological consensus and enforce decisions on appropriate tactics.
Stressing the diversity that has been accommodated within the street protest component of the movement, Väryrnen (2000) goes so far as to refer to anti-corporate globalization movements in the plural, stressing that: …anti-corporate globalization protest is not a single transnational movement, but consists of multiple and variable, even contradictory trends folded into one.So far, close to 100,000 people have taken part in the demonstrations, among them are professional protesters who travel from one event to the other.⁷The appearance of continuity in the transnational protest movement is somewhat deceptive.In fact, it may better be viewed as a series of episodes-a chain of separate, but interlinked events (Väryrnen 2000:1).⁸[Footnotes Added] A fourth structural characteristic of the movement appears to be a tendency for many of its most active participants, particularly in protest actions, to be young people.In general, the majority of movement participants tend to be young and well educated or, in other words, to have a social structural profi le similar to that of the "new class," the presumed base of support of so-called new social movements (Scott 1990).However, those organizing protests and playing key roles in some of the lead organizations and participating NGOs tend to be substantially older, as are the participants representing organized labor.
Finally, the anti-corporate globalization movement fi nds itself being defi ned both advantageously and destructively by the mainstream press, which is itself often the focus of negative movement attention as a corporate vehicle for the dissemination of neoliberal ideology.To a signifi cant degree, the size and scope of protest events have been shaped by press attention.Publicity in the press, even when it has the clear overtone of foreboding the anticipated violence and disruption, tends to result in protests taking the form of self-generating growth; more press attention attracts more supporters and onlookers, which attracts more press attention, and so on.But since the Seattle protest, which received some positive mainstream press commentary for having raised issues of concern to many U.S.
⁶. Press accounts and participant observation (Gould) indicate that the following groups are relatively consistently represented at anti-corporate globalization protests in the advanced countries: developed-country trade unions such as the AFL-CIO, Rainforest Network, Sierra Club, Global Exchange, Alliance for Global Justice, Direct Action Network, Jubilee 2000, 50 Years is Enough, Radical Roots, Ruckus Society, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and Co-Motion Action.
⁷. Th ese and most other estimates of the number of persons at anti-corporate globalization protests need to be taken with a grain of salt.Väryrnen's numbers obviously pertain only to protests in particular focal point cities in the advanced countries up through the time his paper was written (apparently mid-2000).By contrast, there have been informal estimates that 300,000 people took to the streets in cities around the world after the death of a protester at the G8 summit at Genoa in July 2001.Some cumulative fi gures indicate well over one million people attending such protests in the North and South between, and inclusive of, the Seattle action in 1999 and the Genoa action in 2001, excluding the millions participating in the anti-IMF general strike in Argentina in May of 2000 (George et al., 2001).
⁸. Crossley (2002) concurs with this assessment, and goes so far as to say that anti-corporate globalization activism and protest are a "protest fi eld" rather than a movement per se, on account of their highly fl uid character.We largely agree with Crossley's characterization of global anti-corporate struggle but believe that this protest is a movement, albeit an acephalous one.
Conservancy had been at least nominally neutral toward trade liberalization.Th e WTO rulings shook most mainstream environmental groups-especially those that had supported or been neutral toward NAFTA and WTO-to their foundations.Th e willingness to initiate participation in anti-corporate globalization movement protest actions, most notably the Seattle protests of November 1999 is a clear indicator of the fundamental political shift generated by the WTO rulings.More generally, it became apparent to the large professionalized mainstream environmental organizations that a domestic environmental regulation may not be very eff ective unless its scope can be extended to pertain to the conditions of production of imported goods, as had been the case with the tuna-dolphin import amendment to the MMPA.Further, it became apparent that the WTO might indeed give foreign governments (and capital) leverage to overturn domestic environmental legislation under some circumstances.As the end of the 1990s approached, it was becoming apparent to American environmental organizations that the environmental side-agreements to NAFTA were largely ineff ective.As a result of these revelations there was a signifi cant shift in the center of gravity of mainstream environmental NGO opinion about globalization in general and trade liberalization in particular.By early 1999 these mainstream moderate environmental groups had joined Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and Public Citizen in taking a generally negative stance toward corporate globalization.
Second, the Kathie Lee Giff ord revelation on live television in 1996 to the eff ect that her clothing line was manufactured in Honduran sweatshops, and the subsequent revelations about the social and environmental conditions of production of Nike and Reebok athletic gear in Asia, spearheaded an aggressive and highly visible student/labor anti-sweatshop movement, with direct historical links to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s.Th e Nike incident in particular dramatized the social impacts, in both North and South, of footloose corporate capital shifting its production facilities to low-wage countries in the South.
Th ird, though its signifi cance has not often been appreciated in the North, the Asian fi nancial crisis, and the fact that the IMF appeared to privilege the protection of investors in the North over the livelihoods of billions in the global South, created an IMF crisis of legitimacy.Th e Asian fi nancial crisis demonstrated to many state offi cials and activists in the South that the "big three" globalization institutions -the IMF, the World Bank, and WTO-had less regard for the well-being of people in developing countries than for international monetary stability.
Finally, the explosion of public sentiments against genetically modifi ed (GM) foods in Europe and East Asia created a crisis of legitimacy for the WTO.WTO rules suggested that the EU would have little legal basis for excluding and world citizens (as well as considerable negative coverage), the mainstream press' treatment of the anti-corporate globalization movement has tended to cast the movement in a distinctly unfavorable light; of angry, antagonistic, violent protesters; of youthful protest participants who would rather demonstrate than negotiate; of the presence of the anarchist groups using "Black Bloc" tactics; portrayal of the movement' s message as incoherent and indecipherable, and so on.

RECENT ANTECEDENTS OF THE ANTICORPORATE GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT
While there is yet only a small amount of published literature on the anticorporate globalization movement, the literature that exists (e.g., Brecher 2000;Danaher and Burbach 2000;Danaher 2001;Dunkley 2000;Gills 1997;Cohen and Rai 2000;O'Brien et al. 2001;Starr 2000;Epstein 2001;George at al. 2001) has suggested a variety of historical tributaries to the movement.Some of the postulated historical antecedents include the late 1960s New Left and the Paris protests of 1968, the NGO activism leading up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, during the mid-1990s.
While not denying that these factors and antecedents may have played some role, there were four particularly critical events and phenomena that led up to the debut of the mass anti-corporate globalization movement in Seattle in 1999.First, in the early 1990s Mexico fi led a complaint against the U.S. to the General Agreement on Tariff s and Trade (GATT).Given that the GATT dispute resolution process would almost certainly have involved a ruling adverse to the U.S., there was a bilateral negotiation that led to removing the component of the Marine Mammal Protection Act (a 1991 amendment) that prohibited import of tunas produced under conditions that result in widespread death of dolphins.Th en, in one of the fi rst rulings of the WTO, it acted in support of a complaint by Venezuela and Brazil alleging that the U.S.' ban on imported gasoline that exacerbates air quality problems was an impermissible trade barrier.A similar ruling, against a 1998 U.S. law banning shrimp imports from countries whose shrimp harvesters kill sea turtles in shrimp nets lacking turtle excluder devises, was handed down by the WTO in 1999.Also in late 1999, the Vancouver based Methanex Corporation fi led suit under NAFTA against the State of California for its proposed ban on the gasoline additive MTBE.
Th e importance of these anti-environmental rulings cannot be overestimated.Until the 1990s trade liberalization rulings and suits, groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, Audubon, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Defense Fund had supported NAFTA and WTO, while the Defenders of Wildlife and the Nature GMO agricultural input products and GM foods, while European public sentiments against these technologies were so strong that the EU had little choice but to act in confl ict with WTO rules and with American corporate and federal government views.Th e GMO controversy galvanized the anti-WTO sentiments of many farm groups, such as the U.S.' National Farmers Union and sustainable agriculture organizations.Th ese precipitating events and processes combined to help forge the 1999 Seattle coalition.Th e Seattle coalition was impressive in its breadth.; and the governments (as well as NGOs and activists) of many countries of the South.
Perhaps the most telling symbol of the Seattle coalition was the ubiquitous poster which read, "Teamsters and Turtles-Together At Last."⁹What made the Seattle WTO Th ird Ministerial meeting protest so path breaking was the apparent environmentalization of the anti-corporate globalization movement, and the prominent role played by mainstream as well as radical and grass roots environmental groups in a coalition involving anti-WTO and labor activists.Th e strong environmental overtone of the Seattle protest was among the major factors that conferred on it a certain legitimacy among the U.S. public -and among the citizenries elsewhere among the OCED countries-and that contributed to the partially favorable press coverage of the Ministerial protest.
Following Seattle, there were numerous anti-corporate globalization rallies and protests across the world.Th e presence of protesters at the April 2000 World Bank/IMF meeting was such that the meeting could be held only with heavy police protection.Th e September 2000 World Bank/IMF meeting in Prague attracted tens of thousands of protesters.Th e Quebec City Summit of the Americas, which organized to negotiate a Free Trade Area of the Americas, attracted substantial protest in April 2001 and provoked security forces to launch a tear gas and water cannon attack that was largely unprecedented in Canada.Th e g8 Summit at Genoa in July 2001 has been the most violent protest to date (as of this writing), involving one protester death, widespread police repression and brutality, indiscriminate and targeted violence by some protesters (especially the various anarchist groupings), and hundreds of casualties on both sides.Even the United Nations, which is often associated with pro-South and pro-democratic sentiments, was the target of a large protest at its September 2000 Millennium Summit in New York.A protest was organized for the 2001 World Food Summit of the UN' s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, though the infl uence of the United States was the primary focus.Protests rivaling or exceeding these in size and intensity also occurred in such places as Bangkok (the protest at the Tenth Assembly of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, February 2000), Melbourne (the demonstration against the World Economic Forum, September 2000) and Gothenburg (demonstration at the EU summit, June 2001).
However, since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001 protests in the U.S. (e.g., the 2002 WEF meetings in New York City) have been more muted.Th rough internet discussions, hosted by coalition organizations such as Mobilization for Global Justice and others, and spokes council meetings, a conscious decision was made on the part of U.S. anti-corporate globalization activists to take a less aggressive tack as a result of a desire on the part of protesters to distance themselves from the violent terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center (which at least one Congressman had initially blamed on the movement).
Th e movement has also decreased its protest activity because of an increase in state repression stemming from the curtailment of civil liberties through mechanisms such as the USA PATRIOT Act.Th e increased state authority to defi ne any political group as a "terrorist" organization in the wake of the September 11th attacks, and the Justice Department' s new legal capacity to preemptively search, copy and monitor social movement organization communications, documents and offi ces caused most anti-corporate globalization activists to increase their own internal security measures, decrease the volume of accessible communications, and self-censor the expression of ideas on eff ective movement actions and tactics.Th e detention of anti-corporate globalization activists at the U.S.-Canadian border, and the denial of fl ying rights to some activists further disrupted movement organizing.Another factor was the major shift in the U.S. political climate following September 11, 2001, most notably a surge of nationalism openly hostile to dissent of any type.As political dissent became increasingly defi ned as disloyalty in the American political consciousness, the ⁹.Note that the reference to turtles was the 1999 shrimp-turtle ruling by WTO.
Frederick H. Buttel & Kenneth A. Gould 50 Global Social Movement(s) at the Crossroads 51 favorable press coverage.On the other hand, these dominant institutions have as their bottom line a neoliberal agenda and doctrine that cannot respond meaningfully to the concerns and demands of a diverse array of NGOs, social movements, and national-states.Despite its recent dismissal as irrelevant by the Bush Administration, perhaps the United Nations still off ers an institutional alternative to the international fi nancial institutions through which transnational economic relations may be mediated (Bello 2001).
Second, as the resource mobilization tradition of social movements' research has suggested, the nature of social movements is substantially shaped by their ability to extract resources of time and money from major social institutions as well as from adherents and sympathizers.Many resource mobilization theorists went so far as to suggest that successful social movements are those that are best able to extract funds from philanthropic foundations or government agencies (see the overview and critique in Scott 1990), and that the outer limits of what radical social movements can accomplish consist of the outer limits of what foundations are willing to fund.Th us, from a resource mobilization point of view, we can recognize that capital has latent veto with respect to anti-capital oriented movements.
Th e anti-corporate globalization movement is in some senses both the antithesis and the confi rmation of resource mobilization theory' s perspective on philanthropic foundations' roles in bankrolling and de-bankrolling the rise and decline of social movements.On one hand, the protest mobilization components of the movement appear to have required relatively few resources, and the most actively involved of protest groupings appear to have received essentially no direct funding from the major foundations and elsewhere.On the other hand, as noted earlier, there is a vast NGO network of movement supporters whose legitimacy and support have been lent to the movement, and which are critical to the movement' s legitimacy and public support over time.And it is in the NGO affi liate wing of the movement-at least that of the U.S.-where philanthropic foundation support has been critical.Pew, MacArthur, Ford, Rockefeller, Kellogg, Mott, McKnight, and other smaller foundations have funded numerous NGOs, particularly environmental NGOs, to weigh in on the trade/globalization/environment nexus.Foundation support of the NGO affi liate wing (encompassing groups as disparate as the Hemispheric Social Alliance, Alliance for Responsible Trade, Institute for Policy Studies, Development Group for Alternative Policies, Center for International Environmental Law, Friends of the Earth, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Global Exchange, Oxfam, and the International Gender and Trade Network) has been suffi cient to attract the attention of the right-wing foundation watchdog NGO, Capital Research Center.Th e Capital Research Center is a largely invisible, but well-funded right-wing movement experienced a certain protest paralysis, and the number of movement sympathizers willing to overtly express political dissent rapidly decreased.As of this writing, the U.S. wing of the movement has yet to return to the more aggressive tone that typifi ed protests from late 1999 through late 2001.

TRANSFORMATIONS AND DILEMMAS OF THE ANTI CORPORATE GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT
As noted earlier, the anti-corporate globalization movement is arguably the most signifi cant global social movement today, and clearly is the single most important global scale left movement.Th e movement has registered some major successes.As is expanded upon below, it has led to concessionary responses from various quarters of the "big three," particularly the World Bank.Anti-corporate globalization protests and related movement activity have essentially disabled the machinery for negotiating the Millennial Round of the WTO.Th e anticorporate globalization movement has been indirectly infl uential in helping to stiff en the EU' s resolve to hold its ground in the Millennial Round negotiations, e.g., by emboldening the EU member states to persist in rhetoric about "multifunctionality" in the WTO Millennial Round agriculture debate (Burmeister et al., 2001).It has also forced a shift in the rhetoric of international fi nancial institutions (IFIs), which are now on the defensive, especially in regard to poverty alleviation, ecological sustainability, and the collapse of the economy of the 1990s structural adjustment poster child, Argentina.But despite the movement' s stature and successes, it faces some very signifi cant dilemmas, if not contradictions.Interestingly, one of the key challenges to the movement is that the World Bank and IMF "have been surprisingly responsive, expanding and accelerating their policies on debt relief and strengthening their focus on the mitigation of poverty" (Väryrnen 2000:1).Th e Bank devoted its World Development Report for 2000/2001 to poverty alleviation, and in so doing has gone beyond the standard claims about macroeconomic restructuring to giving major attention to health, environmental, and educational mechanisms for reducing poverty and increasing the quality of life in the developing world.
Many of the dilemmas faced by the anti-corporate globalization movement are issues of discourse and strategy typical of mass movements aimed at widespread social transformation.Should the movement seek to transform or disable the main institutions of globalization (A dilemma often referred to within movement circles as the "fi x it or nix it" question)?On one hand, the dominant institutions of globalization are deeply entrenched.Th us, a possible shift toward a more conventional "advocacy network" approach, involving formal organizations, a decision making hierarchy, and greater ability to mobilize resources, could exact more concessions from the dominant institutions and create more NGO that undertakes exposés on left-leaning social movement organizations that are funded by major foundations.It aims to pressure the families and fi rms whose names are affi xed to these foundations into infl uencing these foundations to withhold funding from movement groups.Th e anti-corporate globalization movement, not surprisingly, is now one of the Center' s main targets.Th e Capital Research Center may very well not succeed in de-funding the NGO affi liate wing of the anti-corporate globalization movement, but it is also arguably the case that the foundation community may not need to be pressured to do so.Foundations are fi ckle in their funding priorities, since they see themselves as agents of innovative thinking and tend not to give long-term funding to a group to undertake essentially the same program or project.Th e cult of newness among foundations may very well lead to foundation de-funding of the NGO affi liate branch of the movement.Th e de-funding of this component of the movement will probably not deter protests, but it is likely to detract from the legitimacy of protests due to a reduction in more mainstream NGO and civil society support.Th e defection or reduced capacity mainstream environmental and other formal NGOs may, on the one hand, free the anti-corporate globalization movement to generate a more clearly articulated anti-capitalist ideology.¹⁰On the other hand, such an ideological stance may signifi cantly reduce its appeal to the majority of the northern citizenry.A resultant radicalization and political marginalization could potentially increase the capacity of neoliberalism supporters to discredit and dismiss the movement altogether, a process which the mainstream media has already shown a willingness to facilitate (Ackerman, 2001).
A third dilemma common to global movements concerns the matter of whether international strategies can succeed in a unipolar, U.S. dominated global political economy.Th is concern is even more immediate now that the Bush Administration in the U.S. appears willing to resist any international agreements that institutionalize agendas that confl ict with the prerogatives of international capital.Recent dismissal of the United Nations as "irrelevant" by key Bush administration members and advisors serves to highlight the extent of an increasingly self-confi dent U.S. unilateralism.
While some of the dilemmas the movement faces are those characteristic of related social movements, the anti-corporate globalization movement faces some dilemmas that are specifi c to its sphere.One dilemma that is most widely recognized concerns violence and the Black Bloc (Epstein 2001).Th e Black Bloc is the most frequently referenced anarchist group involved in property damage and direct attacks on police at anti-corporate globalization protests, but there are numerous others, most notably the Th ird Position.Violence, and the adverse press coverage associated with escalating violence, represents a key dilemma.Violence gains the movement offi cial and press attention, though almost always of a negative sort, regardless of whether the violence is initiated by police or protesters.¹¹There are indications that the violence and anarchist-group dilemma may be prompting a change in tactics.Mainstream movement participants are striving to distance themselves from violent tactics and from participants such as those from the Black Bloc.Following the World Trade Center and Pentagon destruction on September 11, 2001, violent protests have come under greater scrutiny and control, further constraining the standard type of anti-corporate globalization protest that occurred in 1999, 2000 and the fi rst half of 2001.Th e need to address the matter of violence, and the fact that the November 2001 WTO meeting was held in the largely inaccessible city of Doha, Qatar, has led many in the movement to ponder eschewing the strategy of staging a single mass action.Instead, they are suggesting that future protests should stress community based actions at the local level across the world.¹²Such debates grow out of longstanding discussions within the movement related to the effi cacy of employing a "diversity of tactics,"¹³ and a non-hierarchical consensus-based decision-making ¹⁰.Note that in the volume "Anti-Capitalism: A Guide to the Movement" produced in Europe, environmental GSM organizations are not mentioned as coalition partners (George et al., 2001).¹¹.Note, though, that there is some advantage to nonviolent activists having the opportunity to distance themselves from violence and anarchists in the media in the days and weeks following major protest actions.
¹².Also, note that in some cities anti-corporate globalization activists have visibly weighed in supporting local causes (e.g., the resistance against privatizing D.C.General Hospital in Washington, DC).
¹³. Th e "diversity of tactics" approach, wherein each affi nity group is permitted to engage in whatever tactical choices and actions it deems appropriate, is a source of confl ict within the movement, with much of the debate centered on the Black Bloc and property damage and direct attacks on police.Th e diversity of tactics issue largely emerges from the existence of a non-hierarchical acephalic organizational structure that makes it virtually impossible to impose constraints on individual affi nity groups.Th is debate is more central to movement discussion in the North American wing of the anti-corporate globalization movement than it is in the European wing, where targeted (and random) property damage and movement-initiated clashes with security forces are a somewhat more accepted feature of protest activity and political culture (Joppke, 1993).
Frederick H. Buttel & Kenneth A. Gould 54 Global Social Movement(s) at the Crossroads 55 structure, as well as ongoing debates on the extent to which targeted property damage constitutes "violence" within ostensibly "non-violent" protest actions.
Another signifi cant dilemma concerns the nature of the movement' s coalition and ideology.Since the Seattle protest in 1999, the movement has exhibited a signifi cant shift in its discourses.While the defection of many mainstream environmental groups from the "Washington consensus" and the resulting environmentalization of the trade and globalization issue were critical to the Seattle mobilization, there has been a signifi cant decline in the movement' s embrace of environmental claims and discourses, and a corresponding increase in its use of social justice (redress of socioeconomic inequality) discourses.Th e lead role played by organized labor in the Seattle protests helped to skew movement discourse toward issues of sweatshops, child labor, and international labor standards, ironically eff ectively rhetorically deprioritizing environmental claims just at the moment when many previously reluctant mainstream environmental organizations were joining the broad anti-corporate globalization movement coalition.Th e Genoa g8 protest in July 2001 was one in which the predominant emphasis of movement claims-making was focused on global-scale (especially North-South) inequality and growing international economic disparities, and on the imperative to roll back globalization rules in the interest of the poor in the South.Th is may represent a divergence in emphasis between North American and European wings of the anti-corporate globalization movement, or may represent a broader shift in transnational movement ideology.A recent European book produced by the anti-corporate globalization movement, subtitled "A Guide to the Movement", fails to list environmentalists or environmental organizations in the section addressing the key "Actors" in the coalition (George et al. 2001).
Th ere are some notable rationales for the movement having undergone a progressive "de-environmentalization" and having undertaken a shift toward North-South inequality claims.One is that while there are good reasons to predict that the WTO and other trade liberalization agreements will lead to pressures toward an environmental "race to the bottom" (Gould, Schnaiberg and Weinberg, 1996), there has in fact been little other clear evidence of an immediate environmental regulatory race to the bottom (see Kahler, 1998, for an early analysis on this point).Williams (2001:47) has likewise suggested that the WTO dispute resolution system offi cials now appear to be bending over backwards to avoid making more controversial anti-environmental rulings such as tuna-dolphin and shrimp-turtle.Th is may stem, in part, from the dominance of "Th ird Wave"¹⁴ environmental ideology among mainstream environmental social movement organizations, whose Boards of Directors often include a number of executives of transnational corporations (Dowie, 1995), and which often rely on fi nancial support from TNCs that rank among the worst environmental off end-ers (Foster, 1999).With a foot in both neoliberal and anti-corporate globalization camps (Brulle, 2000;Gonzales, 2001), some large mainstream environmental groups are well positioned to leverage traditional northern environmental concerns against the social justice issues that are gaining increased prominence in anti-corporate globalization movement discourse.
In contrast to the somewhat limited evidence for the notion that "free trade" regimes lead to the demise of national and transnational environmental regulations, there is ample and growing evidence of the enormous ecological damage wrought by IMF-imposed structural adjustment policies (SAPs).SAPs tend to structurally coerce heavily indebted southern nations to greatly increase agricultural and natural resource exports in order to meet transnational interest payment obligations (Athanasiou 1996).IFI-supported increases in the export orientation of southern nations result in widespread land degradation, habitat loss, and the progressive liquidation of the natural capital of southern nations (Gedicks, 2001;Korten, 2001).Th erefore, an increased movement focus on the ecological impacts of structural adjustment policies-rather than on the formal rollback of domestic and international environmental regulations-would help to recover the ecological dimensions of anti-corporate globalization movement ideology, while also illustrating the integration of environmental and social jus-¹⁴.Beginning in the 1980s, the Washington, D.C.-based mainstream environmental organizations increasingly moved toward the adoption of "Th ird Wave" environmentalism, emphasizing (a) cooperation with transnational corporate environmental off enders rather than confrontation, (b) compromise agreements that allowed them to claim victories for their mail-in member constituencies, and (c) increasing acceptance of corporate executives on their Boards of Directors (Dowie, 1995).Th is resulted in a growing distance between the professionalized staff s of these organizations and the grass roots anti-toxics (Szasz, 1994) and environmental justice (Bullard, 1993) groups which also emerged in the 1980s.Th ird Wave doctrine has exacerbated the mainstream environmental movement's historical resistance to incorporation of social justice concerns within their political agendas, and has refl ected a growing increasing alignment of the movement with neoliberal agendas emphasizing market-based mechanism to control pollution and depletion and voluntary monitoring and regulation of corporate environmental impacts.Dowie (1995) contrasts third wave environmentalism with fi rst wave environmentalism which emerged in the U.S. in the early 20th Century, and focused primarily on land and wildlife conservation, and with second wave environmentalism which emerged in the U.S. in the 1960s with a focus on state regulatory approaches to pollution control.

Frederick H. Buttel & Kenneth A. Gould 56
Global Social Movement(s) at the Crossroads 57 By contrast to the limited evidence of negative impacts on formal environmental policy, there is ample evidence that since the establishment of WTO there has been an exacerbation of global economic inequality, with roughly three to four dozen countries in the South having exhibited persistent declines in per capita incomes since the mid-1990s while most industrial nations exhibited considerable, if not vibrant, growth.Even the Harvard University free-trader and neo-liberal proponent Jeff rey Sachs has expressed the view in Th e Economist that the IMF essentially functions as the debt collection enforcer of private banks, and that as a result of these policies the IMF has sacrifi ced the economic recovery of most of South and Southeast Asia, and elsewhere in the South.Further, the concessions that have been granted thus far by the "big three" globalization institutions lie mainly in the arena of North-South inequality.Th e establishment journal Foreign Aff airs published a paper by Bruce Scott (2001) documenting the exacerbation of North-South inequality that has occurred since 1990.Th e deepening global economic marginalization of sub-Saharan Africa is a prime example of the unevenness of globalization processes and the exacerbation of international inequalities that result.Th us, there is in some sense an empirical underpinning to the shift of movement discourses away from threats to the integrity of environmental regulation and toward issues of socio-economic inequality and structurally generated environmental disorganization.
Arguably, though, the shift of anti-corporate globalization discourses to North-South inequality has been due mainly to ideological dynamics and to the growing coherence and self-confi dence among movement members rather than to a close reading of Th e Economist or Foreign Aff airs.Th e de-environmentalization of movement discourses and the predominance of claims-making about international inequality and social justice involve a major dilemma, however.In most of the North, which is ultimately the most critical audience for the anticorporate globalization movement, the North-South inequality issue is not likely to attract a wide swath of support, especially (although ironically and unfortunately) following the September 11th attacks and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.Environmental claims-making, along with discourses stressing environmental and domestic social-policy "races to the bottom" in the North, are more likely to generate long-term public support, despite a September 11th and recession-driven de-prioritization of environmental concerns on the U.S. public agenda.It is also likely that the current core and strength of the movement-a highly committed, dynamic group of young radicals who see pro-corporate globalization rules reinforcing mass poverty in the South (and generating related impoverishment and inequality in the North)-will not be suffi cient to attract a long-term mass following that will assist in eff ecting policy changes.It seems apparent that the anti-corporate globalization movement will need to be a coali-tice concerns.Such a focus on the ecological dimensions of IMF, SAPs is already quite evident within the movement,¹⁵ but this will probably do little to sustain a coalition with many of the "Th ird-Wave"-oriented environmental groups (Gould, Weinberg and Schnaiberg 1993;Brulle 2000).Th e focus on SAPs and environmental destruction has, however, helped to generate and sustain the coalition with Southern environmental social movement organizations.Th is focus on environmental destruction in the South is consistent with the ongoing shift of the attention of the anti-corporate globalization movement to the IMF and World Bank, whose environmental records are more troubling than that of the WTO.Strategically, the IMF and World Bank are also more accessible to the northern movement activists than the WTO.In contrast to the WTO' s ability to meet in remote locations, the IMF and World Bank have stationary offi ces on 19th Street in Washington, D.C.
In addition, while WTO actions that overrule existing national environmental regulations may be slowed for strategic reasons, transnational trade liberalization does reduce the likelihood that southern (and to a lesser extent perhaps, northern nations) will move to establish higher environmental standards and stricter regulatory regimes as competitive pressures to attract and retain foreign capital investment have a dampening eff ect on state willingness to constrain private capital (Gould et al. 1996).Th e SAPs imposed by the IMF, by reducing public revenues and staffi ng of public regulatory agencies, reduce the ability of states to eff ectively monitor and enforce compliance with existing environmental regulations (Kim et al. 2000).Th e political problems that these processes generate for the anti-corporate globalization movement are two-fold.First, it is much more diffi cult to draw attention to, and make claims about, the failure of environmental regulation to emerge (what Crenson 1971, called the "unpolitics" of environment) than it is to call attention to the reversal of existing regulatory restrictions.Second, the environmental GSMs' focus on formal regulatory mechanisms rather than on structural processes in identifying the causes of and solutions to ecological disorganization makes it more diffi cult to recruit these movements' support in opposition to the IFIs and trade liberalization organizations.
¹⁵.While the movement has always included a strong critique of structural adjustment polices in its rhetoric, the prominence and frequency of such critique in email discussions and protests signs, banners and slogans has clearly increased in recent years.
Frederick H. Buttel & Kenneth A. Gould 58 Global Social Movement(s) at the Crossroads 59 tional movement-involving, at a minimum, labor, environmental, and minority groups-to achieve its goals (Epstein 2001).Th at broad coalition, in constant internal dialogue, is needed in order to generate a coherent yet inclusive movement ideology and rhetoric.Such a coalition requires a focus on neoliberal policy impacts on domestic inequality and environmental concerns, in addition to (and perhaps above all) a focus on North-South equity issues depending on the extent to which such issues can be directly linked to northern job losses and high profi le environmental concerns such as rainforest destruction and megafauna extinction.Th e focus on neoliberal ideology provides the basis of the ideological glue that fuses the concerns of the diverse coalition participants in a common systemic critique.Th e need to articulate the connectedness of transnational processes and structures to domestic concerns most readily apparent in the lived experience and political focus of most citizens is necessary to broaden the domestic support bases of the movement in order to increase its political leverage at the national level, especially within the g8 countries that exert most infl uence over international fi nancial institutions.Further, the shift of the movement toward speaking primarily on behalf of the poor in the global South (and to a lesser but growing extent in the North) has some potential problems.One is that an increased emphasis by the movement on the IMF and World Bank may tend to threaten the coalition with organized labor, which has tended to be more actively supportive of protests targeting the WTO (e.g., Seattle in November of 1999) than the IMF and World Bank (e.g., Washington, D.C. in April of 2000).¹⁶Another is the "representation dilemma," of the movement increasingly being positioned to represent groups that are quite diff erent from themselves.For example, movement opponents now point to movement participants' relative affl uence and question whether protesters really have knowledge about what the Th ird World (or northern poor) really want.Perhaps most fundamentally, the anti-corporate globalization movement, in taking up the cause of the nation-states of the South, will inevitably come to stress agendas, such as adding labor and environmental standards to the WTO that state offi cials from most countries of the South will be ambivalent about at best.A good indicator of this is that the WTO dispute resolution panel rulings that overrode U.S. environmental laws were the result of complaints fi led by developing country governments such as those of Mexico, Th ailand, Venezuela, Pakistan, Malaysia, and India (Williams 2001).Th is may also indicate that forging and sustaining meaningful North-South coalitions within the anti-corporate globalization movement may require de-emphasizing formal environmental policy and regulatory standards.Th e extent of the movement' s losses in terms of its northern environmentalist constituency would then hinge on its ability to eff ectively articulate the structural causes of transnational ecological degradation to mainstream environmentalists who have traditionally emphasized regulatory policy and market-based environmental protection mechanisms over structural change.
Regardless of whether the anti-corporate globalization movement maintains its emphasis on the North-South economic inequality question or returns to the issues more likely to sustain the more diversifi ed coalitional emphasis of the Seattle protest, the political success of the movement will depend on whether it can help induce two potential blocs of nation-states to resist a "deepening" of the WTO during its Millennial Round negotiations.In a sense, the most likely bloc to be enabled and induced by anti-corporate globalization protests to support major reform (or to attempt to disable) the WTO is that of nation-states of the South (other than those agro-exporting Southern nation-states in coalitions such as the Cairns Group of the Uruguay Round).In the Uruguay Round, developing countries essentially signed away their rights to use trade policy as a means of industrialization and development (a strategy which was quite eff ectively employed by the Asian Tigers during the 1970s through the early 1990s).Governments of the South also agreed in the Uruguay Round to open up their markets for agricultural imports from the agribusiness superpowers, while receiving few benefi ts of liberalized markets in the North (Madley 2000:Chapter 1).In addition, liberalization of agricultural markets in the South has unleashed a tide of depeasantization that will have lasting negative eff ects (e.g., unemployment, mass migration, overurbanization, and perhaps environmental degradation) decades hence (Araghi 2000).
Indeed, state offi cials from nations of the South can take heart in the successes of the anti-corporate globalization movement and in the movement' s shift toward seeing its benefi ciaries as the people and countries of the South.In particular, most developing country states welcome the movement' s eff orts to press for debt relief.But most states of even the highly impoverished developing countries see little advantage to disabling the Uruguay Round agreement.Developing country governments now tend to be more interested in enforcing the Uruguay Round WTO agreement than they are in achieving a decisive roll-back of the ¹⁶.Th is further indicates a need on the part of the anti-corporate globalization movement to more fully and clearly articulate the linkages between the impacts of IMF structural adjustment in the South and job losses in the North.Th us far, labor has shown far more interest in trade liberalization agreements (FTA 1988, NAFTA 1994, FTAA expected in 2005) and the WTO than it has in the Bretton Woods institutions, for obvious reasons related to more clear and direct threats to employment in the North.
Frederick H. Buttel & Kenneth A. Gould 60 Global Social Movement(s) at the Crossroads 61 WTO.Such Southern state orientations may be an indicator of a growing gap between the interests of states and those of their domestic citizenries, and of a growing elite consensus on trade liberalization in both North and South.While these processes have recently led to grassroots backlash and major political shifts away from neoliberal regimes throughout Latin America, poor countries have few options other than participating in the world trading system on the most favorable terms possible.Th us, while one of the reasons the WTO is now paralyzed has to do with North-South disagreements, the ultimate negotiating position of most governments from the South may not be in sharp confl ict with the U.S. position of further market liberalization, deregulation, and more eff ective enforcement of WTO rules.Developing countries governments are more likely to side with the overall U.S. position against building labor and environmental protections into the next WTO agreement than they are to support the position of the anti-corporate globalization movement.Prohibitions against child and prison labor will be diffi cult for most developing country governments to accept without signifi cant concessions.Th e other bloc of nation-states with a potential interest in signifi cant WTO reform is that of the EU.Hirst and Th ompson (1999:228) have noted that: The role of the European Union is central because it is at one and the same time the most developed and the most completely structured of the major trade blocs.The evolution of the EU's capacities for coordinated common action by its member states will determine to a considerable degree whether the governance of the world economy is strong or minimalist.
There are growing reasons to suggest that the EU' s sympathies could well lie toward the minimalist pole.Public support for the anti-corporate globalization movement' s agend-and for related agendas such as curbing GMOs-appears to be significantly stronger in the EU than in the U.S. WTO rebukes of a number of European environmental, trade, and social policies that were prompted by U.S. complaints appear to have created a growing continent-wide view that the EU must stand up for the preservation of the social safety net and for its worker and environmental protections.This, combined with increasingly aggressive U.S. unilateralism in regard to the Kyoto Protocol and the war with Iraq, has hardened and expanded anti-U.S. sentiment throughout Europe.The fact that the EU is a customs union, and thus is built around the notion that fair trade among equal partners on a "level playing field" is desirable, gives the EU rhetorical license to resist claims that it is "anti-trade." Th e anti-corporate globalization movement has not, to our knowledge, specifi cally endorsed the EU governments' eff orts to promote "multidimensionality" in the Millennial Round WTO negotiations.But the EU states' multidimensionality line is clearly derived from the European (and Japanese) impulse to include social and environmental protections (i.e., of its agriculture and farmers) into the fabric of the Millennial Round Agreement.And the fact that strong advocacy of multifunctionality could derail the Millennial Round is no doubt music to the ears of the anti-corporate globalization movement.Th us, while the movement drifts toward radical North-South inequality discourses, it may fi nd that its most amiable constituencies with signifi cant power to promote tangible policy changes are the EU and Japan, and the North' s NGO communities, rather than the governments of the global South.Th e positions ultimately taken by the more anti-neoliberal governments of Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil and, perhaps Argentina, in regard to the FTAA negotiations may prove crucial to the anticorporate globalization movement' s ideological and tactical trajectories.

CONCLUSION
Th e anti-corporate globalization movement is a highly complex one that is enormously diffi cult to research and understand.¹⁷In addition, the Northern wing of the movement has changed very substantially over its fi rst four years (presuming that, for all practical purposes, its debut was the build-up to the 1999 Seattle WTO Ministerial).Its dynamics cannot be comprehended adequately by relying exclusively on either resource mobilization or collective identity/"new social movements" perspectives.Much more theoretical work on "global social movements" needs to be developed before this perspective can tell us much more than that the emergence of these movements is the logical outcome of globalization.
Th e anti-corporate globalization movement has already achieved some signifi cant successes.International institutions now must meet in remote locations or behind immense fortifi cations.Th ese institutions, which already have public relations problems because of their inaccessibility and lack of transparency, have to insulate themselves from the public to an even greater degree.Th ere is suffi cient public support for the movement' s agendas that several of these interna-¹⁷.Th e research methodology applied here included extensive review of anticorporate globalization movement and coalition member group web sites, documents and publications, as well as review of numerous documentary and news media video recordings of movement actions (Buttel and Gould).Participant observation of movements activities, meetings, and protest actions over the course of more than six years in three countries, and participation and review of over 1,000 internal movement and coalition member group e-mail discussion posts provided much of the data upon which this analysis is based (Gould).
Frederick H. Buttel & Kenneth A. Gould 62 Global Social Movement(s) at the Crossroads 63 tional regimes have been forced or prompted to make changes in their discourses and practices (or to make gestures portending future changes).Th e Millennial Round of the WTO has been stalled for over three years and counting.Despite major political gains, the movement faces important dilemmas of organizational structure, ideological coherency, multiple competing discourses, and tactical and strategic choices.But since the movement will very likely continue to be acephalous due to both its deeply coalitional character and its nonhierarchical organizational structure, it will not "make decisions" in the same manner that most social movements-particularly professionalized, NGO and issue-advocacy type movements do.It seems likely that the choices that will be made in the future are not so much choices within a leadership and organization hierarchy, but choices made by many diff erent groups of actors who consider themselves to be part of the movement.
In the analysis above we have implied that some of the most diffi cult dilemmas and future choices to be made concern the discursive emphasis of the movement.Among the critical choices will be whether to emphasize to groups in the North the employment and environmental benefi ts of restructuring or disabling the institutions of globalization as opposed to emphasizing a global social justice agenda of reducing North-South economic inequalities.Th is is not to suggest, of course, that it is impossible to imagine anti-corporate globalization movement agendas that have potential benefi ts for both groups in the North as well as those in the global South.Th e Fair Trade movement, a movement that is closely related to and allied with the anti-corporate globalization movement, strives to link conscience consumption oriented groups in the North with peasants and artisans in the South (Dunkley, 2000:Chapter 12).But the fact that a great many more examples such as this do not yet exist suggests that there is a strong element of truth to the notion that some diffi cult choices will need to be made, albeit within a highly decentralized structure.
Perhaps a greater integration of both northern and southern environmental justice groups and frames off ers a potential alternative to attempts to sustain the apparently fl eeting coalition with the most conservative Northern mainstream environmental NGOs, which in terms of both ideology and constituency will have a tendency to return to their initial alliance with the neoliberal "free trade" agenda (Dowie 1995;Athanasio, 1996;Taylor 1995;Pellow 2002).Such environmental justice/anti-corporate globalization coalitions could allow for a continued focus on North-South inequality, while constructing a greater focus on intra-North (and intra-South) inequality.Attention to domestic inequality could help to sustain-and in the face of the divisive political impacts of Bush administration energy policy initiatives, regain and solidify -an alliance with organized labor, while simultaneously reaching out to communities of color in the U.S. whose participation in the anti-corporate globalization movement has been minimal.¹⁸An environmental justice frame might also allow the movement to retain an environmental agenda (environmental justice in the North, complemented by socially and ecologically sustainable development in the South) that sidesteps the environmental vs. social justice trade-off that is deeply entrenched in "Th ird Wave" environmental ideology and practice.In the post-September 11th political climate, mainstream environmental organizations are more likely to return to their traditional resistance to both confrontational discourse and protest and direct action political confl ict (Schnaiberg and Gould, 2000), seeking accommodation with the very political actors (transnational corporations) and institutions (international fi nancial and trade organizations) which the anticorporate globalization movement intends to disempower.
Finding an ideological and discursive vehicle through which to link domestic socio-economic and environmental inequality and unemployment (and underemployment) in the North with structurally generated ecological degradation in the South, while still maintaining some emphasis on international inequality, may be necessary to sustain the major components of the diverse coalition which forms the basis of the anti-corporate globalization movement.While a shift to an environmental justice frame and focus on IMF SAP-generated environmental destruction may allow the anti-corporate globalization movement to retain and synthesize both North-South inequality and environmental concerns in its discourse, that does not fully solve the dilemma stemming from the loss of resources, legitimacy, and constituency that comes with a retreat of (or from) the major players involved in the environmental GSM.Environmental justice groups, both North and South, are small in formal membership, decentralized, and quite limited in terms of the fi nancial and other resources they can bring to the anticorporate globalization movement in comparison to those of the leading mainstream environmental GSM organizations.However, the environmental justice and anti-toxics social movement network is more politically aggressive, overtly active, and takes a more confrontational stance in both its northern (Bullard 1993) and southern forms (Taylor 1995;Gedicks 2001).Th e environmental jus-¹⁸.One reason for the lack of participation of people of color in the movement is related to the privileged socio-economic class and race of its primary constituency.Another factor is most likely its overt prioritization of Southern poverty over Northern poverty.A third factor is probably the high profi le participation of mainstream environmental groups with whom environmental justice groups have deep and longstanding grievances (Bryant and Mohai, 1992;Szasz, 1994;Dowie, 1995;Pellow, 2002).
Frederick H. Buttel & Kenneth A. Gould 64 Global Social Movement(s) at the Crossroads 65 tice movement operates through a deeper, more structurally oriented analysis of power (Lukes 1974;Gould et al. 1996;Foster 1999), making it an easier fi t with anti-corporate globalization ideology and tactics.In the end, perhaps the fate of both major GSMs lays not so much with the ideological and discursive decisions of the anti-corporate globalization movement, but rather with those of the international environmental social movement organizations.Th e extent to which the environmental GSM is willing and able to move itself and its broad constituency away from "Th ird Wave" approaches to solving the world' s environmental problems may ultimately determine the long-term eff ectiveness of both GSMs.
(s) at the Crossroads: Some Observations on the Trajectory of the Anti-Corporate Globalization Movement¹ INTRODUCTION Frederick H.Buttel & Kenneth A. Gould  48   Global Social Movement(s) at the Crossroads 49

Frederick
Th e coalition included anti-corporate globalization groups (e.g., International Forum on Globalization, Global Exchange, Public Citizen Global Trade Watch); joint anti-corporate globalization/environmental organizations (e.g., International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development, International Institute for Sustainable Development); farm, sustainable agriculture, and anti-GMO groups (e.g., the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Genetic Resources Action International); organized labor (e.g.Th e International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the United Steel Workers, the Communications Workers of America); consumer groups (e.g., Consumers International); development activist/world hunger groups (Oxfam, Development Group for Alternative Policies); animal rights groups; religious organizations ( Jubilee 2000)