*{ http://www.attac.org/fra/asso/doc/doc02en.htm
19 aout


Another World is Possible
No to the Millennium Round
The WTO, or the assault on democracy
Paris, 25th september 1999 }

At the last French parliamentary elections, the "plural left" was elected with a large majority. Its campaign platform did not, to my knowledge, include the privatisation of state-run health services, nor the dismanteling of either the state education system or any other public service. 

Yet these very measures (which no government calling itself “left-wing” would dare to endorse openly) stand a good chance of being imposed through the intermediary of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), an organization that has become familiar to the French public as a result of recent farmers' protests. It was the WTO who allowed the United States to impose a 100 % customs duty (representing US $116,8 million) on certain products from France (Roquefort cheese, for example), Italy, Belgium and other countries in retaliation for the European Union’s (EU) ban on US hormone-fed beef.

The WTO is an intergovernmental institution created in 1995 and is a successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs (GATT). With a membership of more than 130 countries, except Russia and China, its sole goal is to suppress all barriers to world trade. Its postulate is: the more trade, the more growth, and the more wealth for all. In point of fact, economic history demonstrates that the exact opposite is true: free trade essentially benefits the strong and spells ruin for the weak as is the state of affairs in many countries of Africa and South America which either believed in this ideological chimera, or had it imposed on them.

Undeterred, the United States and the European Commission nonetheless propose to put on the agenda of the upcoming WTO conference, due to take place in Seattle in late November, the liberalisation (as it is modestly called) of sectors which, in countries like France, are still run as public services and are based on nation-wide solidarity.

What is in the offing – if citizens do not stand in the way – is a plunge into a universe where everything is considered saleable, including the human body. And it will be to the sole advantage of financial institutions and multinationals, eager to establish markets in areas which, until now, have been denied to them, without so much as public debate. Clearly, we are a long way from mere considerations of international trading.

In Seattle, it will not be the French government at the negotiation table, but the European Commission famous for supporting the most unbridled forms of free trade. Notwithstanding, the Commission must act according to a mandate given to it by the 15 Member States of the European Union. Mr Lionel Jospin, the French Prime Minister, will very soon, therefore, be faced with an historic choice.

Either, in the name of an ill-conceived notion of European solidarity, he will totally, or partially, give way to the most ultraliberal of his partners (led by the loyal successors of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and friends of the present Prime Minister Tony Blair) and betray the very principles on which he was elected, or he will show himself capable of giving a categorical "no" to an agenda which violates the will of the French people, massively hostile to ultraliberalism, as evidenced by all the opinion polls and elections. Even the right-wing French deputy, Mr Alain Madelin, is casting about for another word to replace "liberal", a term he deems responsible for the pitiable showing, in the recent European parliamentary elections, of the list he presented with Mr Nicholas Sarkozy.

Some would suggest that a negative attitude on the part of the French Prime Minister would provoke a European-wide crisis. This may be so. But would this not be salutary or, at least, preferable to a world-wide crisis of civilisation?