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U.S. Hegemony, Globalization and Social movements in Asia.

Muto Ichiyo

One of the warning signals of the times is that the past is often forgotten. This may be one of the effects of what is called neo-liberal globalization from above, an enormous historic process we have been all dragged into. Globalization wants to cut people off, especially the young people, from the past so that they concentrate on something immediately exciting and stop thinking. We are told that we have reached the end of history. If so, history must have evaporated

I. Post-WWII World - U.S. Hegemony

At the beginning of the 20th century, the nation state carried a great weight. It was taken as the most crucial and rare asset the majority of the people in the world were aspiring for. It is a period of colonialism and imperialism that excluded the people in colonies and semi-colonies from participation in world affairs. Violence was the means to keep that status quo, and those excluded waged a struggle for national liberation whose purpose was to become independent and build their own states. The world population then was about 1.4 billion, 1 billion of them subjected to colonial and imperialist rules. The six major powers including Japan divided the world among themselves and they were fighting each other to increase territory and influence. Two World Wars broke out to redivide the world in accordance with new power relations among the big powers.

Now let me talk about the hegemonic power. It is a power superior to other major powers and the power capable of deciding how the world should be run. The hegemonic power lays down certain rules to its benefit and wields powers to impose them on the rest of the world. From the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th century, Britain was such a power. After World War II, the United States of America, with its overwhelmingly superior economic and military might, took over the UK and assumed the hegemonic position. But the U.S. was not basically a colonial power though it did, and does, still have colonies. Colonialism based on territorial division of the world did not serve the U.S. purpose. Rather the U.S. wanted the whole world to be a unified market buying American goods and accepting American capital. After WWI America developed a new kind of capitalism that was based on mass production and mass consumption, the basis of the American style of life. The U.S. increased its productive capacity very rapidly during WWII against Nazis Germany and Japan as the main supplier of weapons and other war supplies. When the war ended, it was left with a huge surplus production capacities to run which it needed the whole world. America needed to turn the world into

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one market it could dominate. Unlike the colonial powers that sought to enclave certain territories for their respective domination, the U.S. had no objection to the independence of colonies and establishment of new nation states as that would facilitate free entry of U.S. goods and capital. But that was on condition that the newly independent states were pro-America and keep their doors open to American goods, capital, and influences.

Thus the original U.S. ideal after WWII was to include the whole world under its hegemony. But the Soviet Union under Stalin around 1947 refused to join the U.S.-managed world and frustrated the original U.S. design. The victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 undercut it in Asia. The world was divided politically, militarily, and ideologically, preventing the U.S. design to dominated a unified world. The Cold War started involving a global confrontation between the two antagonistic camps, each having a character of Empire. The Cold War lasted until it was ended in 1990s constantly threatening the outbreak of major nuclear war. The logic of the Cold War was not just an ideological confrontation between Communism and capitalism. In fact, the most crucial question for both Empires was within the empires themselves. Take the U.S. Empire that included the large majority of the world population. It was not a homogenous territory. It consisted of the North and South, and most Southern people were subjected to ruthless political rules, economic domination by the North, and suffered from legacies of colonialism. They put up resistance in various forms to end this situation, seeking equality, social reform, democracy, and liberation from the domination by dictatorships allied with the U.S. You can recall Cuba, Vietnam, Chile, and Nicaragua, to name only a few. Social revolutions were something the U.S. could not tolerate since they would undermine the very basis of its empire. So the U.S. intervened to suppress the rebellious moves, either by new nation states or popular movement, using terrorist means by CIA, economic blockade, or simply expeditionary massive military operations like in Korea and Vietnam. But that was not all. The logic of the Cold War was one of zero sum game. In the mind of Washington, the "loss" of any small part of the empire because of rebellion from within, given the confrontational territorial division of the world, would mean that much expansion of the other empire, the Soviet empire, and therefore the U.S. blamed it on Moscow. This was why the world had to go to the brink of nuclear war on Third World issues. The same was true of the Soviet Empire. For Moscow, success of Hungarian or Polish people, rebelling against the iron-fist Moscow rule and for democratic socialism, would automatically mean "losing" the two countries to the U.S. empire. These rebellions were blamed on CIA and Washington. That was the cold war logic.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, this logic is now gone. The United States has spirally came back to what it dreamed of before the Cold War - the one-polar domination of a global free market

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where it claims the single rule setter as its interest prefers. This is what the era of "globalization" means. But let us come back to this situation later.

II. Newly Emerging State Alliance as the Source of Hope - Bandung in 1955

In Asia the greatest people's movement that carried the day after the defeat of the Japanese empire was national liberation movement seeking to end the colonial, imperialist rules and to establish new nation states. This process was not a unitary process but involved great complexities. The task dragged on for some countries like Vietnam (national unification was achieved only in 1975 through two major wars against the French and the Americans) or still remains unachieved (the unification of Korea). Some national liberation struggles, typically the Chinese, were led by communists and others by nationalists of various strands. But most colonies achieved independence and created new nation states by the mid-1950s.

The achievement of that period raised a great hope for the oppressed peoples in the whole world. The picture of the world represented exclusively by the big colonial powers was gone. Those millions who had had no say in world affairs, who, for that matter, had been non-entity, now came to have their new voices. The new emerging force, as President Sukarno of Indonesia proudly declared, rose to a determining factor of world politics, and will change the global power relations. This hope culminated in the 1955 Bandung conference of Asian and African countries. Sukarno, Nehru, and Chou Enlai as new great leaders of world affairs, gathered leaders of Asian and African newly independent nations and issued the famous ten Bandung principles centering on peaceful coexistence, mutual respect for territorial integrity, non-interference in internal affairs, and peaceful resolution international conflicts. These were alternative principles to replace the jungle law of imperial rivalry and war. The alliance of newly independent states thus emerged as a major international political factor expected to bring about justice and peace to the postwar world.

III. Development Paradigm Full-Blown 1960-70's -- Its Problems Noticed.

That was the heyday of the national liberation movement. But it should be remembered that the national liberation movements that were people's movement, by achieving their aim, became the new states. They ceased to be people's movements. The people in the international arena were represented by their states, and it was their alliance that had to counter the overwhelming U.S. hegemonic influence. That alliance still inspired by revolutionary steam of the people mounted a major challenge to the new U.S. hegemony as well as the old order of imperialism.

Economically, the newly independent states inherited from colonial days distorted economies shaped under the colonial rule. Skewed to suit the interests

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of the colonial metropolis, they were heavily dependent on import for almost everything from daily necessities to industrial products. After political independence, they concentrated on gaining economic independence by adopting the strategy of "import substituting industrialization" (ISI), a strategy for the local production of what had to be still imported. But it was not an easy task. It required huge investment and often local products could not compete with what you could import in terms of price and quality. Though ISI was successful for the first ten years or so, by the early 1960s, most of the Asian countries came to face crises of their ISI strategies.

The turning point came in 1965, the year in which major events dashing the earlier hope for a new liberated Asia occurred one after another and leading the 1955 alliance to a historic collapse. In February 1965 the US began to invade Vietnam by bombing North Vietnam and landing large troops on South Vietnam. In September a CIA-machinated coup occurred in Indonesia, soon toppling the Sukarno government through the massacre of half a million communists and communist "suspects." This sent shock waves throughout Asia. The pro-American Suharto dictatorial regime came to power to rule the country for 35 subsequent years. Half a million people were killed. Symbolically enough, the Asian Development Bank was established in Manila in the same year.

IV Turning Point -- 1965

Why did these events mark a turning point? Because together they brought East and Southeast Asia into a new global orbit set by the United States and multinational corporations. The Cold War and its Asian version, containment of China, was already on. Now a new war front was opened in Vietnam connected with the China encircling front. Behind this strategic encirclement, U.S. multinational corporations began to arrive together with resurgent Japanese industrial giants. This region was thus turned into a large lake of American and Japanese capital where a particular mode of "development" prevailed. The newly independent Asian states in the region abandoned ISI and switched one after another to a new strategy, Export-Oriented Industrialization (EOI) under the guidance and pressure from ADB, World Bank, IMF, and northern governments. This strategy meant that they should from now on produce mainly for the world market, rather than for domestic consumers. To sell in the Northern markets, they should produce quality goods and to produce quality goods they should invite foreign capital with advanced technology to operate freely. To produce competitive products abroad, they had to offer special advantage, that was, cheap labor, easy access to resources, transportation, and export procedures. No less important is another advantage, no strike by workers. You must be familiar with Green Revolution that was brought in and spread all over Asia as part and parcel of the EOI strategy. It was ostensibly to increase productivity of rice by adoption of new

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high-yield rice varieties (HIV) developed by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) based near Manila. Almost all governments of Asia followed this policy and spread practically compulsorily throughout the region. But as HIV requires use of chemical fertilizer and pesticides, poor peasants could not afford them while rich farmers doubled their harvests. GR thus caused dropout of a vast number of poor peasants who became indebted and had to go to cities as slum dweller, petty workers, or go abroad to earn living. Hardest hit were women, many of them having to sell their bodies for survival. On the other hand, GR opened a vast market for oil interests as agricultural chemicals are all oil-based.

This switch brought on what is known as "development dictatorship" throughout the region, Marcos, Suharto, Lee Kuan Yew, and Park Chunghee as the typical names. Export processing zones began to be set up one after another to facilitate this strategy. The national liberation states then turned to "developmental states" caring about GNP growth but not at all about the welfare of the majority of their people. The anti-hegemonic alliance of states was fast undermined as its constituent states turned to "national security states" aligned with the United States whose concern was to suppress popular opposition from within in the name of anti-communism.

The keyword in this period was "development." Development was the almighty word, the policy goal, the values upheld, and the model all are compelled to follow. No one was allowed to question it. But what was meant by "development"?

It was a concept not existent in most Asian countries, nor having an exact corresponding local word for it. It was first used in the present sense by U.S. President Harry Truman in his "Colombo Plan" back in 1949 in which he envisioned a world in which the idea of "aid" for "development" was first set out. This idea involves a thesis that the "third world" can be turned into a good market if it develops and begins to follow the same pattern of life as exists in Northern countries. The U.S. hegemony as I explained earlier necessitates a world market that absorbs U.S. goods, and "development" was brought forward to facilitate formation of such a market. Truman launched the U.S. food aid program under which subsidized American wheat began to be delivered massively to "developing countries" and that made the recipients dependent on American wheat as bread eating got settled among the population. That was a new market opened for American goods.

As EOI "development" strategies applied in Asian countries began to prove destructive to the unprivileged majority in the 70's, people started to question development. Earlier, in the 1960s, radical scholars exposed to the third world realities advocated dependency theories, focusing on the center-periphery

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relations that are kept perpetuated dooming the overwhelming majority of the third world people to poverty and subjugation. One key idea was the "development of underdevelopment" put forward by Gunder Frank. But in Southeast and East Asia, "development" did occur in terms of industrialization by multinational corporations and export and GNP growth in the 1970s and 1980s. But "development" of this type, it was keenly felt, aggravated social contradictions, widening rich and poor gaps, destroying environment, undercutting peasant-based agriculture, and globally exacerbating the disparities between the North and South as the world GNP pie aggrandized.

V Social movements to counter "development"

People began to act in response to the disastrous consequences of development. And there emerged a radical trend of thought that not only critique the consequences of development but also call into question the very paradigm of development. There were different levels of response.

The failure of two Development Decades (1960s and 1970s) had to be admitted even by the United Nations, heightening the concerns of Northern citizens. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were set up in linkage between voluntary groups of North and South and began to work at the grassroots level to address problems brought about by development particularly in rural areas. The focus was on basic human needs such as shelter and water. The best of these NGOs realized that the lack of these basic needs despite GNP growth reflected structural problems - the basic relationship between the North and South and took the position that the answer was the empowerment of the communities themselves. They tended to distance themselves from direct political involvement, but they gradually developed the notion and practice of alternative development based on local resources, inherited wisdom of the people, environment friendly production, and values not oriented toward money only. They were linked up internationally and quite a few regional organizations promoting grassroots activities to combat poverty, discrimination, and unjust practices developed as the basis of later NGO coalitions.

On the national level, popular counter-offensive against developmental dictatorships took the form of political struggle for democratization. The struggle for democracy and human rights was met by harsh repression, but people never backed off. The well known cases include the struggle at Kwanju in Korea and the people power in the Philippines. In Kwanju the military acted ferociously to massacre bare-handed citizens but citizens fought back against all odds, held the city as Kwanju commune until the military invaded and took it back after killing many citizen fighters. This struggle laid the basis for the democratization of South Korea a few years after. Struggle for democratization later exploded in Indonesia toppling the corrupt development dictator-

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ship of Suharto, but is still to achieve its goal in a series of other countries including Burma and China. It is clear that without people being free to act you can have no gains in terms of solving the real social problems.

One thing that should be added in discussing the social movement in relation to this period was the rise and fall of a totally new type of social movement, especially encompassing Northern countries. I mean the protest movement against the Vietnam War, the struggle of minorities based on their reestablished identities such as the black and indigenous people in the United States, the second wave of feminist movement, French May struggle, and ecological movement. Though most of these movements did not continue as they were started, they irreversibly altered the grammar of social movement. In Japan the Vietnam War made many people question the status quo of their society that accept military bases and otherwise collaborate with the U.S. war machines organically connected with the killings in Vietnam - an eye-opener to the asymmetric North-South relationship that impelled us to address for correction. The radical feminist movement opened up a new horizon of identifying the abode of power and gender domination in everyday relationship and set out to eradicate it where it worked. Likewise student movement questioned the university and the knowledge structure it maintained. All these were radical in perspective and maybe too radical to survive as such. But these, though in modified versions, had a tremendous impact on the whole attitude and thinking of the times, largely, and ironically, because they represented voices from the North that had more legitimizing power than those from the South. The major U.N. conferences beginning with the 1972 Stockholm environment conference through the Vienna human rights conference to the 1995 Beijing women's conference, in which popular voices were represented by NGO participation, which in historical terms originated in the radical movement in that period.

VI G77-A New State Alliance to Counter North's Domination

After the collapse of the Bandung alliance, a new Southern state alliance emerged and grew into a significant countervailing power to the domination of the North and its multinational corporations. That was called Group of 77. It was an alliance of 77 Southern countries but later came to comprise more than 150 countries, a formidable pressure group in the world arena. This alliance originated in the United Nation Conference of Trade And Development (UNCTAD) in the 1960s but strengthened itself in the 1970s stimulated by the OPEC offensive on oil prices and resource sovereignty. They came up with a comprehensive set of proposals for the establishment of an New International Economic Order (NIEO), pressing the restructuring of the basic economic relations between the North and South, focusing on more equitable distribution of resources and South's participation in the control of such resources including finances. But the North-South negotiations soon became stalemated as the

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North was tough in keeping their privileges, particularly the World Bank, intact.

VII Neo-Liberal Offensive Defeating State Alliances (1980s)

This state alliance was crashed and defeated in the 1980s and the world went came to be dominated by a new mainstream.

But to understand what happened you need to go into the 1970s. As the result of the successful OPEC offensive raising crude oil prices, enormous cash went into the pockets of Arab shekhs as often caricaturized by orientalist American films. The money however went immediately into the Euro-American and Japanese bank accounts, and the banks had to led it to somebody. So started a frenzied lending operation to Third World countries. But how? The northern banking interests, aided by their governments, pressured third world governments from Mexico through Indonesia to Nigeria, to make huge development projects so they could borrow from them. Mammoth projects were thus set up one after another in these countries ranging from oil development through industrial complexes to petrochemical plants. The lenders and borrowers did not care about whether the people really needed them as the point was that the northern banks had to earn interests by lending the surplus money whatever the purposes were. Most of the development projects thus rushed soon proved failure because of lack of market, overlapping investment, but the borrowers had the obligation of the principal and interests.

At that time Ronald Reagan, ultra-conservative Republican leader, stepped in as new U.S. President. Now the United States was suffering from the "twin deficit," trade deficit and budget deficit, both huge. To finance the deficits, the U.S. had to call back overseas dollars into the country. The Reagan administration did it by raising domestic interest rates. The raised interest rates came as a heavy blow to third world debtors who had to pay back the loans at the raised interest rates. The northern governments and banks became veritable loan sharks. Their loan balances grew so rapid that they could not repay. Thus, in the early 1980s, Mexico declared that it would not pay back any more because it could not. Other major debtors were expected to follow suit. This triggered what is known as the debt crisis. It was a crisis of the debtor countries but a crisis of the northern banking system.

What was the answer? Generally what is known as "neo-liberal" approach was fully brought into the global political and economic mechanisms in response to this crisis. Specifically it was the structural adjustment Programs (SAP) that were imposed on debtor countries. The SAP is a policy package forcing the debtors to repay loans. You cannot just repay loans by printing local currencies. You have to do so in the "hard currency" that is the U.S. dollar. To get American dollars you have to export and earn dollars. The

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International Monetary Fund and the World Bank sent high-powered missions around the world, imposing drastic policy packages to enable indebted governments to begin repaying loans. The package had the following components: 1) local currency devaluation (to reduce the prices of local products sold abroad), 2) privatizing public sectors and services, 3) lifting restrictions on investment from overseas, 4) lifting restrictions on imports, 5) cutting public services such as medical, education, social security), 6) terminating government subsidies for the farmers and others who needed protection, and 7) encouraging export industries to grow to cater for Northern markets. The loans would be "rescheduled" only when the indebted governments fully accepted all of these conditions unconditionally and thoroughly implement them in their countries.

These, obviously, are measures to protect the interests of northern banks and promote free activities of multinational corporations. On the other hand, it was the poor and unprivileged majority that had to shoulder all the burdens of debt repayment. The government medical services were ruthlessly cut everywhere and teachers were fired in large numbers, leading to abolition of whole schools or university departments. Rural areas were victimized for loss of agricultural subsidies causing outflow of population and increase in urban slums. Vast numbers of people became unemployed, and the sacrifices of all this were shifted to women and children as many families disintegrated. Millions of street children were generated in, for instance, Brazil and a large number of girls were sold in flesh trafficking. SAP became the enemy number one of the vast majority of the people assaulted by it.

But where was the alliance of state that had worked to change the North-South power relationships? It was gone. You remember EOI in the 60s and 70s. Under that strategy, almost all G77 countries had embraced "development" through further integration with the North-dominated world economy. The G77's confrontation in the world political arena was not a real confrontation between the unprivileged people in southern countries and the northern financial-industrial giants but between the state elite and the northern interests over the share in the same pie. The states were therefore totally powerless in the face of the SAP when it was imposed. The states involved found themselves the executor of plans made by the IMF and World Bank concerned with northern business and national interests against the interests of their own people. This was a very contradictory situation since the state is supposed to protect its people. Otherwise there is no basis of legitimacy of the state. But now it has turned to the major agent of executing projects that obviously harm seriously the interest of the people they claim to represent.

Here we witness the emergence of a composite global power center that practically rules the whole world without any mandate from the people and

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therefore without any legitimacy. The United States is the core of this power center. Despite the lack of legitimacy, the power center operates and forces decisions. The state is indispensable to this governance as the power center itself lacks the means of coercion. The powers of coercion rests only with nation states. Therefore the global power center uses nation states as its agents to rule the people. The G77 type state alliance thus had been depleted when the debt crisis came.

It is important to note that it was not just SAP-attacked countries that were dragged into this orbit. The 1980s was when the neo-liberal logic and ideology rose to the commanding position of the world economy and politics. Reagan applied the same logic to the United States and Margaret Thatcher to the United Kingdom. Nakasone, then Prime Minister of Japan, also wished to do the same for Japan. The Reagan-Thatcher philosophy was that "free market" will make everybody happy and so human projects not guided by pursuit of profit through competition should go. Social security only makes people lazy. Public sectors directly serving the needs of the people are inefficient and therefore should be left to the hands of private agencies who, if they maximize their profit through competition, will better serve their needs. Unions should be a business collaborator to help companies to win in competition. All protective measures for local industries and communities are vices as they lower efficiency. For the smooth operation of "free market" capital should be allowed to go anywhere and everywhere in the world unhindered by protective barriers. The world should be one as a huge single market where business and money can move quickly and freely in pursuit of maximum or optimum profit. Forget about environment unless it opens up new business opportunities.

It is obvious that this philosophy serves the powerful and totally lacks the concern of the unprivileged people (who are the vast majority of the world people). If the CCA base ball team is asked to play a game with New York Yankees "on the same footing" (without handicap), has it a chance to win? This is a proposition that the world should be reorganized on the principle of the strong preying on the weak in the name of free competition.

VIII Neo-Liberal Globalization Dominates the World

This philosophy, whose disastrous human consequences were partially tested in the implementation of SAPs, was translated into a new complete set of rules to govern the global community through the GATT-Uruguay Round launched in 1985 that led to the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. WTO was vested with enormous coercive powers of execution as if a country goes against its rules it is met by economic sanctions, or ostracization from the world economy. While free trade is the WTO slogan, this is a double standard as it on the other hand bases itself on the principle

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of monopoly. I mean the establishment of the sacrosanct intellectual property rights turn technologies and technical knowledge of all sorts into northern companies' private properties to use which you have to pay. Not only the northern technological dominance is perpetuated by this, but also patents are being established on living beings, new seed varieties, ways to make medicine from herbs, and even human genes.

This has been a hop-step-and-jump process toward neo-liberal globalization. The hop was in the 1970s with "development" as the catch word, the step in the 1980s when with Reaganomics-Thatcherism and SAP, and the jump in the 1990s with the establishment of WTO and the unilateral dominance of the United States following the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. With this, the world power center established its grip all over the world to spread its neo-liberal messages and dragging all nooks and corners of the world into a mega-competition on the principle of the strong dominating the weak. State alliances totally failed to put up any significant resistance to this process as states had already been turned to the tool of globalization.

This decade was also characterized by aggravating conflicts between people's groups, divided by ethnic, religious, cultural, and other lines. The ubiquitous competition in which all people are involved and exclusion of a vast number of people even from joining the competition generate a few winners and a mass of losers. Ambitious misleaders, often extremists, can easily lead this situation into horizontal conflicts. Misleaders would tell you that you suffer because of your neighbor. And if you do not have solid alternatives, you follow. Fundamentalisms of various kinds, often involving a particular biased interpretation of religion, become rampant, inciting mutual killing. This is all the worse because the inter-people conflicts work to legitimate military intervention of global power. Global power center, the U.S. and NATO, send high-tech bombers and devastate whole countries like Yugoslavia and tell you that you owe them order.

IX Processes of Emergence of New People's Alliances to Counter Neo-Liberal Globalization

How then can we cope with this dire situation? If states and state alliances could not, who? In the 1990s some new hopeful moves emerged.

The most conspicuous, and much lauded, activities on behalf of the people in the 1990s were by NGOs. They together emerged as a new actor in international politics especially in connection with large U.N. conferences held one after another in the first half of the decade. The United Nations convened major conferences on environment (Rio, 92), human rights (Vienna, 93), women (Beijing, 95), population (Cairo, 95), habitat (Istanbul, 96), indigenous peoples (93), female farmers (Rome, 97), and global warming (Kyoto, 1997). While these were basically government conferences, NGOs of all sorts also participated

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to work on government representatives and influence the outcome in favor of people's interests.

These occasions were positive and significant as diverse NGOs, many working closely with grassroots, could enter into transborder exchanges and positive parts of the intergovernmental statements provided stimulus to national processes, and legitimated important new rights and concepts - biodiversity, sustainable development, human development, human security, women's rights as human rights, indigenous people's rights, reproductive health and rights, children's rights, girls' rights, regulation on carbon dioxide emission.

Why did the United Nations hold such conferences? Because as neoliberal globalization proceeded in full force, the destruction of people and environment became so serious that unless the U.N. paid attention to the negative consequences it would lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people in the world. To put it differently, the U.N. as the assembly of states wanted to complement its depleting legitimacy by getting NGOs on its side.

This was therefore a dual process. NGOs ascended to an auxiliary international actor status on the one hand. On the other hand, the same process was a process of appropriation of concepts of NGO origin by the global establishment. Some examples.: human development (to show the concern that economic development would not bring people's well being), sustainable development (admission that development destroys environment), social development (admission that economic development does not necessarily bring about social fairness), human security (state security does not secure the people), poverty elimination (admission of the notoriety of SAP), etc. The World Bank under the leadership of Wolfsensohn set out to coopt NGOs using these slogans, and it has largely been successful. A WB report says, "... increasing recognition within the World Bank as to the specific benefits which NGO involvement can bring to Bank-financed projects involved NGOs." (Two thirds of WB approved projects have NGOs as partners, the bank says). Can WB-aided NGOs openly critique WB conducts?

The new danger that arose in this 1990s process was that NGOs were institutionalized and placed in a privileged position recognized by inter-governmental organizations. Many of them opted for "partnership" with the governments and companies, weakening their ties with the grassroots. A full series of new concepts was introduced in the 1980s and 1990s to define roles of NGOs, like civil society, global citizenship, mainstreaming, participation, all high sounding and plausible.

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But overall, in which direction the world changed in the 1990s? In a more equitable, ecological, and peaceful direction? The reality shows that the 1990s was a decade where the neo-liberal globalization process took hold of the world and where the United States set out to reassert, and succeeded in reasserting, its unipolar global control with the backing of its reorganized and beefed up global military strategy. The introduction of new ideas by NGOs was undoubtedly a positive step forward. But there is no room for complacency on the part of NGOs either. Unless and until there is a definite change in the power relationship between the global power center and the majority of the people over the neo-liberal globalization agenda, the authorization of new, good principles won by NGO lobbying would serve as the legitimacy fig leave to hide the cruel globalization process that in fact determines the fate of the underprivileged billions.

X Emergence of Grassroots Responses - From Lobbying to Mass action

But there was another process. As grassroots responses we must pay special attention to what happened on January 1 1994, the very day the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect. You must know what happened. This was the voice against the globalization process from the bottom of bottoms of global society. It was an armed uprising by the most marginalized indigenous Campesinos in a remote area of Mexico, Chiapas, known as the Zapatista movement. What is different to any previous armed uprising in Latin America was that they did not want to take state power. What they wanted was Mexican civil society recognize and rectify the injustices they had been suffering for many decades. The strength of the movement was its power of moral appeal to the conscience of Mexican citizens, rather than its military side. The appeal went beyond Mexico to all people whose voices are not heard by the mainstream of societies and called forth deep repercussions. In 1996 they invited people from different continents and had a large international conference in Chiapas. A balance of power was thus created with the Mexican government and forced it to have negotiation with Zapatistas. This year in January Zapatista's marched to Mexico City and their leaders was invited to appear in and address the Mexican Parliament. The struggle is continuing.

Another move was the convergence of grassroots movements with the NGO coalitions bringing down to the ground the global anti-globalization movement that could have been coopted by the global establishment. The definite turn to mass movement was, as you know, occurred in Seattle in November-December 1999 when tens of thousands of people from different backgrounds staged forceful demonstration in the streets of Seattle and aborted the WTO's ministerial conference. The neo-liberal globalization was grasped for the first time as the central political issue of the times, particularly in the United States. As Vandana Shiva put it, the Seattle action revealed that globalization was

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not a fatalistic economic process but a political process which could be changed by people's action.

Seattle was a watershed, igniting mass protest against globalization (global capitalism) across borders. The movement became strong particularly in Europe (ATTAC), mobilizing various segments of population including migrants and marginalized people. Following Seattle, Cologne, Seattle, similar powerful demonstrations drawing tens of thousands of people, especially youth, were organized in Praha, Genoa, and Porto Alegre in Brazil, offering occasions of convergence of a very large spectrum of people. It is noted that in Seattle, the demonstration participants were largely heterogeneous, like mainstream unions, women's groups, environmentalists, NGOs, anti-capitalist groups, religious groups, who, meeting for the first time, began to interact.

Though the anti-globalization movement in Asia is not as integrated as in Europe and Latin America, the global multi-national financial interest-engineered financial and economic crisis in 1997 triggered national anti-globalization processes in a series of affected countries. The major popular reaction was the Indonesian change of government through the overthrow of the Suharto regime. In Thailand, the Assembly of the Poor movement based directly in the grassroots clearly recognizes the links between their sufferings and the World Bank and the global power center. In South Korea, the imposition of IMF conditionality gave rise to staunch resistance of industrial workers. After the myth of the "Asian prosperity" is gone under the 1997 impact, the connection between national processes and the globalization process is being realized by growing number of grassroots people in Asia. We in Asia are now urged to bring this realization into transborder action to join the global people's force that is emerging in the world for alternative socio-economic-cultural systems and alternative governance -- a transborder participatory democracy to replace global power concentration, as we defined in the People's Plan 21 process we launched as early as 1989. This democracy calls for alliances of people as its constituency and power source. This is not a pipe dream. These alliances are emerging through various interactions among, and joint mobilization of, various inter-religious, inter-gender, inter-ethnic groups. The global power center now find in this process a threat to its rule and muster its strength to defeat it. The global arena is where these two forces grapple with each other on all sides - in political, social, moral, and cultural terms.