Seattle, DC, Philadelphia, and Prague
A European Perspective by Sabastian Saam

"The Battle of Seattle," the protests against the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) conference, had a huge impact in Europe. People over here couldn’t believe that so many people showed up (50,000) and were amazed at the degree of street violence the international media depicted. Though the whole conference was cancelled in the end without having come to an agreement, some Europeans who sympathised with the demands of the Seattle demonstrators learned a lot from what happened there.

The Seattle protests, combined with the similarly radical protests in Washington, DC against the IMF/World Bank (just 5 months later), added a new dimension to the already-ongoing mobilisation against the IMF/World Bank summit in Prague (Czech Republic) in late summer 2000. Although protests, rallies, pickets and other manifestations of discontent with IMF/World Bank practices have a long tradition in Western Europe, the inspiration drawn from the Seattle protests gave many the impression that things would be different this time.

In several ways, things were different: this was the first such conference in former communist Eastern Europe and, as a result, it attracted unprecedented attention from the community. Interested, I started to gather information about the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, read articles about both the protests in Seattle and DC, tried to stay up to date with the debate issues in Prague, and contacted the networks that were campaigning to "turn Prague into Seattle." I had only superficial knowledge about the development of IMF and World Bank policies since 1989 and wanted to know more.

Seattle and What Can be Learned From It
The monthly newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique refers to the Seattle protests as the "turning point" for the American left. Even if you don’t share that enthusiastic point of view, it was astonishing that not only DAN (Direct Action Network, mainly representing the radicalised young white middle-class American) was involved in the protests and the later street fighting, but also trade unionists, environmentalists and human rightists.

Events in Seattle were obviously the product of different initiatives from very different organizations, but when the police charged on them as a whole, it effectively transformed the protests into a unified movement with clear demands and goals. Santa Cruz-based professor Barbara Epstein (author of Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Non-violent Direct Action in the 1970’s and 1980’s) argues that Seattle brought together a "progressive radicalised youth movement" (that was earlier locked into its own cultural bourgeois ghetto) with the working class.

In the process of my research, I felt it was necessary to get more up-date information about the IMF/World Bank practices that were being targeted by protestors in Prague. Almost everyone knows that IMF and World Bank policies are some kind of vicious circle, even if their officially declared goal is the development of poorer countries. Since the breakdown of the former communist block, the markets in those countries have been getting more and more liberalized, simultaneously, the negative effects on those countries get worse and worse, rivaling the so-called "Third World" states in the southern hemisphere. Those effects are almost the same in every country: a declining role of the state governments in economic regulation, heavy cuts on public spending, public health programs and education, pressure upon wages and the social security systems, liberalisation of trading, and reckless exploitation of resources and privatisations. IMF/WB will say that this is necessary in order to achieve development. Opponents will tell you that those practices constitute the most significant contributing factor towards worldwide instability and insecurity.

International markets today look much like a global casino. More than 1,500 billion dollars move across borders every day, and more than nine tenths of those investments are speculative and not productive. During the last 10 years, IMF/WB have expanded their vision of the so-called "free-exchange" in order to encourage governments all over the world to open their markets to international short-term investments. The amount of those investments in the poorest countries of the world has increased incredibly quickly in the last decade, from 44 billion dollars in 1990 to 256 billion dollars in 1997 (these figures were published by the World Bank itself). The problems start when investors begin to fear that their operations won’t pay anymore, and their money leaves at the same speed that it came into those countries. Facing crisis, these countries address themselves to the IMF and to the World Bank, hoping to regain the confidence of investors. The two organizations usually then demand what they call "structural adjustments". Those include, for example:

- Raising taxes to strengthen local currencies again (earlier in Mexico and Brazil, a large number of smaller companies had to shut down because of "adjustments" like that, leaving thousands of people unemployed)
- Massive cuts on the social system (according to the IMF/WB credo: "spend less, export more")
- Decreasing wages, while implementing oppressive strategies against trade unions
- A further devaluation of local currencies (which makes exports cheaper and imports more expensive) and a re-direction of production towards exportation
The latter phenomenon causes a whole range of negative side effects: so-called "zones of free trade" are created by removing indigenous people from their lands and/or devastating the environment; malnutrition increases in the concerned countries as prices get higher and local resources are exported; people working in those "zones of free trade" face terrible working conditions and exploitation. The whole idea behind the exportation dogma is, of course, to gather enough money to pay back the creditors.

But at the end of the day, IMF/WB proved helpless in the 1997 crisis and they had to mobilize their last reserves to prevent the crisis from spreading out to Japan, Europe or the US. Criticism about their policies today comes from both outside and inside the establishment. You might have heard about the Meltzer commission, for example, that moans that by intervening in the "free market", the IMF/WB would take away "chances" poorer countries supposedly have in the global run for gold. But there is also a widespread range of NGO’s that take part in IMF/WB meetings. One of their most popular claims is to demand a taxation of international speculative capital (the so-called "Tobin Tax") that should be transferred to development funds for poorer countries. That may not sound bad, but the problem with that idea within the given system of global capitalism is that such a tax would cause a major fleeing from stock exchanges which could cause a world-wide market crash (as German economist Norbert Trenkle wrote in the weekly German newspaper Jungle World).

The IMF/WB’s main goal today is to keep the economic world order stable throughout all its imbalances, while spreading their rhetoric of change at the same time. They will continue to intervene in places where they localize "countries of high systemic importance for global financial stability," as they call it. The effects of their actions have been analysed many times and it is clear that their practices do not work, even if IMF/WB and their collaborating NGO’s pretend otherwise.

Czech Republic Joins the Free World
It was the first such meeting in former communist Eastern Europe. Even before events in Seattle occurred, it was quite clear that the Czech government intended to show the Western World that it was ready to join the winning team. Months before the actual meeting, the Czech Interior Ministry tried to discredit the protests with negative propaganda, reducing it all to violence and vandalism. Plans to mobilise 11,000 police officers and 1,600 army soldiers (compared to the 5,000 police officers in Seattle) were announced, contributing to a civil war atmosphere that made its way through all of the Czech media. People living next to the conference place were warned to move away from their houses during the holding of the IMF / WB summit if they didn’t want to be subject to severe "restraining measures" on their daily lives. Flyers distributed to shop owners in the conference area used scare tactics: "When it comes to mass psychosis, it’s best to leave your shop immediately and at least save your life!" Tourists were advised not to come to Prague in September - the Interior ministry web page announced that, in the thick of things, no differentiation might be made between protestor and bystander. To top things off, the FBI had opened its Eastern European bureau in Prague a few months earlier, and were generous in passing out advice to the Czech leaders.

The Czech Republic has struggled for years to become a member of the European Union, but due to sincere economic barriers it hasn’t been admitted. All the effects that economic liberalization had in Eastern Europe didn’t bypass this state, which is bordering two EU member states (Germany and Austria). In 1990, the Czech government accepted a "structural adjustment program" by IMF/WB. Since 1996, the number of unemployed Czechs has increased at lightning speed, from 2% in 1996 to around 10% today, in some regions even 20%. Prices have quadrupled between 1990 and 2000.

Many of the social services that were free before 1989 have to be paid for today, and a large number of local enterprises have been forced to shut down, only to be taken over by foreign companies. The car industry today, for example, is totally controlled by Western European companies, the telecommunication industry is currently about to be sold to investors from the West. Perhaps the scariest example is the press market, which has been literally overrun by German companies. Today, 50% of the Czech press is owned by German companies, in the Western part of the Czech Republic that number is closer to 90%. Since 1998, Czech officials have admitted that there is a recession in the country, while IMF/WB advisors still demand to set up more severe criteria for access to social services or to cut them altogether so that the Czech government can pay back its debts.

Prague
Finally, around 15.000 people made it to the fortress Prague on September 26 for the "Global Action Day" mobilized by many different initiatives rallying for "Global Justice", "Drop The Debts" or "Shut Down the IMF". The biggest local network was the INPEG collective, representing an alliance of environmentalist groups, human rights advocates and so-called "autonomous" people (which you could probably best compare to DAN in Seattle).
The conference that was foreseen to last three days was stopped after two days. "The delegates did it faster than we thought" was the official statement of the IMF/WB, although just two out of 26 African delegates (representing the poorest part of the world) spoke before the ending of the conference. Might the street fighting that occurred after the demonstration have played a role? "Not at all" said IMF chairman Horst Köhler, although it’s hard to deny that the heavy fighting and the extremely aggressive (televised) behaviour of police units influenced that abrupt ending in a decisive way.

The demonstration symbolically besieged the Conference Centre on September 26. Riots took place afterwards around the area as more than 1,000 demonstrators tried to break through police chains to the Conference Centre. The protests later continued in the downtown area and more than 850 demonstrators were arrested. "30 people inside the jails have been denied food, water and sleep. We have reports of people having limbs broken and teeth knocked out. One woman has a broken spine. There is clear evidence of torture by the police," reports the Independent Media Centre (IMC) of Prague. Other individuals reported "incredible scenes" in the prisons, where officers in riot gear lined up and forced prisoners to walk through their abusive ranks. Even around October 10th (two weeks after the actual protests), some Czech citizens arrested during the anti-IMF/WB protests remained in jail.

The INPEG collective concluded nevertheless that the actions were successful, uniting both "peaceful resistance and active confrontation" and that they "occurred with a single united voice."

The concluding remarks of IMF chairman Köhler point in another direction, saying that "these days were marred by the violent and destructive behaviour of a few, who are not interested in dialogue and democratic process." More than ten reunions took place between the Bank officials and the 400 (!) accredited NGO’s for a "globalization with a human face." James Wolfensohn, the WB president, denounced the "unconsciousness of the rich countries" pretending that "if only the Northern countries would drop their custom barriers Southern countries could get a benefit of 250 billion dollars." He spoke of an "economic crime" that took away chances of development. This statement deliberately blames the whole tragedy on others. Today, the average wage in the 20 richest countries of the world is 37 times higher than in the 20 poorest ones, IMF/WB practices maintain this status quo and, unless changed, will end up making things even worse.