When nonviolence confronted the World Trade Organization in the streets of Seattle on November 30, 1999, nonviolence won. In the year that followed, protests against corporate-dominated globalization spread around the world from Seattle to Washington, DC, and from Vancouver, Canada, to Davos in Switzerland to Prague, focusing attention on a small group of powerful institutions that have written and enforced the rules for the world economy for five decades. Those rules favor corporate profit over human needs, at the tragic price of impoverishing millions of people worldwide.
But despite the attention focused on the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, one of the underlying institutions of globalization has remained largely invisible—the Pentagon. The Pentagon and global institutions of militarism create the conditions that allow corporate-dominated globalization to be enforced. Military power has been used around the world to criminalize dissent, intimidate union organizers, harass human rights activists and crush popular movements for social justice, economic equality and environmental protection. In nations as diverse as Chile, China, Nigeria, Burma, Guatemala, apartheid South Africa and Indonesia, military might has been the power that created a climate favorable for investments. Without the threat and use of military force, the struggle between corporate profit and community well- being might be more evenly balanced. The repressive apparatus of the state may have grown more sophisticated since the days when Pinkerton guards (named after the private detective agency they worked for, established in the United States in 1850 by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton) were hired to break up strikes, but the dynamic is largely unchanged. As one commentator noted, referring to the most famous producers of fast food and jet aircraft, respectively, McDonald’s cannot function abroad without McDonnell-Douglas.
Wealth and Underdevelopment
The relationship between military violence and economic exploitation is not new—nor is it limited to modern capitalist economics. The dynamic was present in the former Communist societies, and it was present before industrial capitalism developed. Many have argued that globalization began more than five centuries ago when the Europeans first sent their armies to the New World. The conquest of the Americas (and subsequent subjugation of Africa and Asia) produced fantastic wealth for the imperialist countries of Europe and death, destruction and unimaginable suffering for the indigenous peoples of the conquered territories. Military domination and commercial exploitation developed side by side as the imperialist nations extended their conquest and occupation around the globe. Despite the end of traditional colonialism in the post-World War Two era, its economic and military dynamics have continued to dominate every corner of the globe.
In the 1960s, African independence leader Kwame Nkrumah decried the forces of neo-colonialism that placed economic control of the former colonies in global institutions while granting formal political control to local elites. Latin American scholars developed “dependency theory,” arguing that underdevelopment does not lead to social advancement; rather, it drains natural and human resources from poorer nations to the benefit of the richer nations—a process similar to traditional or formal colonialism.
The Pentagon’s Wide Reach
As the United States emerged from the Second World War as the world’s leading economy, the Pentagon (a wartime institution that should have been disbanded at the war’s end) became the global police force. Through the use of military training for foreign soldiers and the establishment of overseas bases, the U.S. military positioned itself to enforce the rules of the global economy. The rules were set by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs—institutions created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1948 to regulate postwar economic activity. Eventually the so-called “Bretton Woods Institutions” led to the formation of the now-infamous World Trade Organization. The wide reach of U.S. militarism has regularly betrayed many of this country’s most deeply held ideals, sparking protest against the School of the Americas and against U.S. bases in Panama, the Philippines, Okinawa, South Korea and Puerto Rico.
Today, in the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism, global capitalism has taken on new manifestations around the world. The North American Free Trade Agreement, established in 1994 by Mexico, the United States, and Canada, may be a precursor to the kind of economic and political relationships among nations that may one day cover the world. Champions of the free market proclaimed “the end of history” when liberal democracy and capitalism emerged victorious in the struggle against Communism. Right-wing political leaders were equally ideological, proclaiming there is no alternative (or TINA in shorthand). But around the world, the triumph of capital has led, not to a more benevolent state, but to governments focused on social control. Unencumbered corporate movement is accompanied by increasing restrictions on immigration and a rise in ethnic prejudice and violence. This pattern is most obvious in nations ruled by military dictatorships, but the state’s role in social control is also manifest in the liberal democracies, most notably in the increase in police brutality and dramatic expansion of prisons.
The War Resisters League has a long-established and well-known history of resisting violence and opposing militarism in all its forms. The founders of WRL, who had rallied in support of those brave few who resisted conscription during the First World War, were pacifists, suffragists and socialists. Their earliest pledge was not to support any war and to strive toward the removal of war’s causes, including economic exploitation. WRL members and other pacifists were among the earliest supporters of Gandhi’s anti-colonial struggle in India and of Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign to end government-imposed segregation in the United States. Both movements employed nonviolent direct action as an effective tool for political struggle and personal transformation; both movements also focused attention on the economic roots of violence and discrimination.
The Great Debt
The movement against globalization owes a great debt to those earlier justice movements, following most closely, perhaps, the tradition of King, who wrote that the power of nonviolence is to construct a situation of creative tension in an unjust status quo so that the injustice may be corrected. The protests that have followed the institutions of globalization around the world have generated that situation of creative tension: Whereas those institutions were once able to conduct their business away from the spotlight of public attention, today they must contend with a better-informed and aroused public. People who live in the industrialized nations of the global North have become aware of the impact of globalization for the people of the global South. IMF-imposed “structural adjustment programs,” now the leading condition for loans and international aid, demand that poor nations cut education and health care spending, reduce social services and shred the social safety net. Inevitably, these policies lead to increased poverty, a widening gap between rich and poor and deeper indebtedness. The resulting protests and instability often lead to increased repression and militarization of the state. The links between militarism and economic exploitation continue, but although genuine reform of these institutions may be years away, the protests against globalization have already forced some changes. In particular, the world-wide movement for debt relief, Jubilee 2000, has already forced the World Bank and the U.S. Congress to offer modest relief to the poorest nations.
While the protests against corporate-dominated globalization have used nonviolence to great effect as a consciousness-raising tool, the traditions of nonviolence may also be the source of some of the solutions to the current problem of global greed and exploitation. During the Indian struggle for independence, Gandhi emphasized that his approach to nonviolence was 10 percent protest and 90 percent positive program. He recognized that India could not be truly free if it remained economically dependent on Britain or any other nation. Moreover, formal political freedom would mean nothing to the majority of Indians as long as their basic economic needs were unmet. Gandhi’s positive program included economic development based on India’s village system and involved low-technology production, local control and self-sufficiency. The principles that currently lead the world economy are the precise opposite of those Gandhi advocated. Although it may stretch the imagination to apply principles that were developed for a rural agrarian society to more complex industrial and post-industrial societies, exploration of alternatives to the dominant economic orthodoxy—alternatives based on nonviolent economics—may well become a fertile field for peace and social justice activists in the years ahead.
This article is adapted from Chris Ney's introduction to WRL’s new resource Greed and War: Making the Links Between Militarism and Globalization. Chris thanks Norma Becker, Frida Berrigan, Janet Ney, Melissa Jameson and Joanne Sheehan for their help; Tyrone Savage, former WRL Disarmament Intern, for his work assembling it; and Rick Bickhart for his excellent layout and design work on it.
