*{Global Democracy and the Transborder - Global Policy Forum - NGOs 
Global Democracy and the Transborder 
Alliance of People 
By Muto Ichiyo 
Corporate Watch 
November 1996}

There seems to be no need to talk anew about the disastrous human, 
environmental, and cultural consequences and implications of the globalisation 
process based on the "free market" neoliberal model, of which APEC is a 
salient feature. In the past couple of days, at this forum, we have been 
exposed to a number of excellent analyses, reports, and criticisms of them. I 
therefore understand that the topic given me, transborder alliances, should 
relate to how the people can counter and ultimately overcome this dominant 
globalisation regime and its paradigm. In this brief intervention I will limit 
myself to raising some points considered relevant to our practice and 
perspectives. 

It is obvious that we need transborder people's alliances in order to counter 
the overwhelming power of transnational corporations, inter-governmental 
agencies and state coalitions rampaging our communities and environment. In 
fact, this people's forum represents a form of such alliance including 
people's movements and NGOs of a wide spectrum of concerns. In this sense, 
this forum already represents a transborder alliance of people. This in itself 
is new. Decades ago, such an alliance did not exist. Nor was one imaginable. 
The formation of SEATO in 1954 or of ASEAN in 1967 was not countered by any 
people's forum. This change is extremely positive - an historic stride in 
democratisation of the global and regional structures. But I feel that, having 
achieved this level of empowerment, we should ask ourselves further questions. 
As what are we gathered here in an alliance? Are we a pressure group trying to 
lobby the consortium of states in order to skew their decisions in favour of 
the people and environment? Are we here seeking a consultative status in the 
transnational decision making mechanisms? Are we militant activists morally 
and politically protesting the transnational power monopoly? We may be, and 
perhaps are, all these. But are we just that? 

*partie=titre Global democracy and people's transborder alliances *partie=nil    
I firmly believe that we can be far more than lobbyists, junior partners, and 
protesters if people's transborder alliance is placed in a perspective - the 
perspective of global radical democracy. I argue that global radical democracy 
is the major challenge of our times. Everyone can see that power concentration 
has reached an unprecedented height in the late 20th century, in an 
unimaginably more sophisticated and penetrating manner than in the middle of 
the century. Global inequality has aggravated and the environment is being 
irreparably destroyed, but there is yet no major force to reverse the trend. A 
single power bloc of a new type is dictating terms of competition and survival 
to all peoples of the world. 

I want to point out here that the APEC process is the most anti-democratic 
regional integration process ever engaged. It is even worse than the NAFTA and 
the European integration processes since, despite the vast negative 
consequences it will inevitably bring about to the people in the region, the 
people themselves have had and will have no opportunity to be consulted. APEC 
is being promoted without people's mandate, without any formal treaties to be 
accepted or rejected by the people. Generally, the global structure has become 
more undemocratic than in the first half of this century as nation states, in 
spite of their nationalistic rhetoric, have become, and been forced to become, 
players in this single globalisation game built around the cause of global 
capital accumulation. Thus, we can no longer expect an alliance of nation 
states to emerge as the actor or the subject to democratise the global 
structure as we could in the 1950s and 1970s. In the 1950s, the Bandung 
alliance of the newly emerging nation states was a great source of hope and 
inspiration and in the 1970s the group of 77 with the New International 
Economic Order (NIEO) program struggled to democratise the multinational 
corporation-dominated global economic structure. Now there is no such 
state-level alliance to democratise the global structure. Instead, we have the 
single overriding alliance of almost all states in the form of WTO and its 
accessory organisations as the core of the globalisation regime. 

If the states cannot, logically it is only the people themselves that can 
exercise global democracy to change the course of events. This, however, is 
simply a logical induction. What we need to examine seriously is under what 
conditions the people themselves can exercise global democracy. For the people 
of the world to emerge as the determinant of global affairs they must be 
constituted as an entity. The transborder people's alliance is conceived as 
such a body. However, I am not talking about "global citizens." The concept of 
"global citizenship" seems to be a utopian extrapolation of the western civil 
society model (which again is a construct). Citizens are political individuals 
with equal rights, but the people of the world cannot be reduced to a 
collection of individual citizens. Nor is there homogeneity enough in the 
global community to make one-person-one-vote type of individual participation 
meaningful. 

The actual people are peoples with historical underpinnings. They are 
gendered. They are positioned differently in the global hierarchy of 
domination and exploitation. They have complex, plural identities. This 
collectivity should not be missed when we talk about the people of the world 
as the exerciser of global democracy. The transborder alliance should thus 
mean an alliance of groups of people each with its socio-historical identity. 
Having said this, it should be added immediately that all collectives consist 
of individuals, each of them an actor of free will, not totally reducible to 
group identities. The process toward a transborder people's alliance engenders 
dynamic interaction between collectivity and individuality as well as between 
groups of people. It is not an alliance constituted once and for all but 
rather a permanent and dynamic alliance forming process that gradually shifts 
power relationships in favour of the majority of the people, undermine the 
dominant logic of maximisation of profits and eventually create a new 
democratic global governance gradually superseding nation states. This 
perspective may look like a wild dream. In fact, it is in short term. But here 
we are talking about a long term project and perspective.
 
*partie=titre The state of the state and trans-national-border alliances *partie=nil  
One of the most difficult, yet challenging aspects of alliance building is 
trans-national-border alliance building. The sovereign nation state is the 
most deeply entrenched universal institution of the modern period, and 
particularly in Asia, nationalism has historically been the most powerful 
source of inspiration for the vast majority of the people struggling for 
liberation. For this reason, going beyond it is not easy. But it is as well 
clear that we are at a time in history where the nation state as the universal 
institution of power has run its course, with many of its seams breaking. The 
limited length of this paper does not allow any consistent argument about the 
state of the state today. But it should be pointed out that the APEC scheme 
itself represents the deep contradiction in which the state is involved. The 
APEC process is aimed at removing obstacles to regional-cum-global integration 
of economy so as to create a borderless economy subject to the interests of 
maximum capital accumulation on a global scale. Various state barriers are the 
major obstacles to this process. And this is a violent process of the strong 
preying on the weak, giving free rein to corporate complexes and victimising 
the majority of the people. The contradiction is that it is precisely the 
nation states that promote this process - a process that makes them 
increasingly cosmopolitan and irresponsible to their own people. In this 
process that erodes the basis of legitimacy of the nation state, the nation 
state feels it its imperative to assert and impose itself on its people. This 
self-assertion is needed in order to compensate for the thinning of the 
"natural" basis of legitimacy. The state feels that it should show its 
presence by the use of brute military/police force to silence the masses of 
people, by emphasising nationalist rhetoric based on arbitrarily concocted 
"Asian values," by newly inventing artificial national identities, by 
agitating hostilities toward neighbours, by promises of better consumer life 
(which will be fulfilled for a sizeable middle class but not for the 
majority), or even by quickly mastering and using the new UN/NGO language of 
sustainable, human, and social development in order to recruit an elitist 
ideological entourage to legitimate it. In this sense, the historical 
weakening of the nation state does not lead to the physical weakening of the 
state. On the contrary, globalisation can, and in many cases does, motivate 
the state to take strong-arm policies to circumvent democratic popular 
upsurges, suppress dissent, and resort to national-chauvinist rhetoric. 

It is not accidental that this Manila APEC summit is being held in an 
ominously anti-democratic atmosphere shrouding Asia, generated by a series of 
anti-democratic and anti-human rights government actions in Indonesia, Burma, 
Malaysia, and China. The globalisation process is not compatible with 
democracy in the country involved. It requires a silent and divided people. It 
therefore follows that successful struggle for democracy is the people's 
immediate counter-measure to the actual and possible destructive consequences 
of globalisation. As the states are allied in jointly imposing the 
globalisation scheme, they are also helping each other in silencing the 
people. The Malaysian and Philippines governments' solidarity with Indonesia's 
President Suharto is a blatant case in point. This calls for the immediate 
need of trans-national action on the part of the people.

But generally, given this historical weakness of the nation state, it is 
easier now than before, say, in the 1950s or the 1970s, for us to demystify 
the nation state and work together to let transborder alliances of the people 
emerge in their struggle to democratise the oppressive structures beyond 
national borders. Actually, this is an ongoing process involving multifarious 
aspects. Solidarity with the East Timorese people is boldly manifested in 
Indonesia itself against the Indonesian politico-military power structure as 
well as by international networks, while expression of solidarity with the 
Burmese people struggling for democracy against the SLORC dictatorship is 
widespread. These are saliently political expressions of transborder 
alliances. Numerous other forms of linkages are now developing, 
farmer-to-farmer, worker-to-worker, human rights, environment, women, 
alternative development, and all other sectoral issue-based networks are 
developing and criss-crossing. Besides, millions of people now migrate to 
other countries to work under the impact of globalisation. This is a process 
that involves tremendous sufferings, but it inevitably undermines the national 
borders and gives rise to new critical perceptions about statehood. Last but 
not least, the amazing development of means of communication, which primarily 
facilitates the globalisation-from-above process, serves as a double-edged 
sword, also demolishing national barriers for people-to-people communication. 

*partie=titre Interaction for alliance building *partie=nil 
But these are still a description of what is going on. When we envisage 
people's alliances as alliances exercising democracy at all levels, global par 
excellence, we are talking about processes that allow the people to ally and 
empower themselves as the subject of global governance. To me interaction 
seems to be the key to such processes. But we need to qualify that vicious 
interaction is also at work. Armed conflicts, whether between states or ethnic 
groups, are a way of two groups interacting. 

In this connection, the Zapatista movement seems to have opened a new 
perspective. Though it is an armed struggle, it does not follow the 
conventional armed struggle line of seizing state power or creating a separate 
state. Instead, they appeal to the rest of the Mexican civil society to stand 
up to liberate themselves by changing the oppressive state structure of 
Mexico. With this attitude, they appeal more to discursive powers rather than 
military strength, shaking the hearts and minds of the rest of society, 
expecting the latter's responses. Zapatistas' perspective is highly 
interactive. They engage in interaction with a view to releasing 
self-liberating potential in other societies so as to create new relationships 
with them. It is through this interactive process that they want to form a 
large people's alliance. They do seek support for their struggle for the 
Chiapas campesinos' survival and dignity, but it is not unilateral 
solicitation of solidarity for their specific situation. They are engendering 
interaction, in an effort to help form people's alliances with other societies 
in a joint effort to transform the unjust power structure. In this sense, they 
are fighters and mediators at the same time. This kind of interaction goes 
beyond national borders. In the Zapatistas' case, they mobilised people's 
movements and NGOs from all the continents in an international program this 
year to fight the neoliberal imposition as typified by NAFTA. 

Interaction in our context changes the inner life of the groups (and 
individuals) entering into it. We have experienced this in a number of 
productive encounters and dialogues. Japanese citizens visiting and exposed to 
Manila slums being demolished amid the dwellers' cries and protests see Japan 
differently after learning that Japanese ODA is used for the project. The more 
or less complacent image of Japan is put to crucial test, and the assumed 
understanding of Japan is swayed to its foundation. 

In the People's Plan 21 program (PP21), launched in 1989 and continued as 
people's alliance building processes, we have experienced numerous mutual 
discoveries involving perceptive and structural transformation of the parties 
involved. In 1992, when thirteen mountain and ocean tribes of Thailand met in 
Northern Thailand as part of a large PP21 program in that country, female 
participants in the workshop asked their chiefs why women were not given the 
equal status as men in the community life at a time when they were petitioning 
the Thai government to give them an equal status with Thai nationals. That was 
an unexpected intervention. The chiefs did not look very happy, but did not 
object. Thus, this passage was written into the resolution: "The right of the 
indigenous women to participate fully in the political, economic, social, and 
cultural aspects of our life." The women were happy. The articulate women 
later joined an international meeting of indigenous people held in Bangkok and 
spoke up actively. It should be noted that this process occurred as a remaking 
of the community's indigenous identity, and not as a damage done to it by 
external imposition. The chiefs were persuaded to accept women's equal rights, 
and that moment the tradition was remade to include women's rights. 

Obviously, no community is monolithic and any culture is a composite product 
of various other cultures and influences. Monolithic appearances are almost 
always a construct imposed to suppress multiple identities from unfurling by 
those who try to preserve their domination. Multiplicity in identity is the 
ground for the possibility, and also the reality, of mutually liberating 
interaction. In other words, the transborder alliances we envisage are not 
alliances between monolithic collectives each characterised exhaustively by a 
single, static identity, like the Japanese, or the Filipinos, or the 
Malaysians, or the Muslims, or the Christians. Though those identities do 
exist and matter, transborder alliances will encompass various other 
relationships between peoples and, for that matter, between individuals.
 
*partie=titre Mediation and alliance building process *partie=nil  
Mediation thus emerges critical for the formation of people's transborder 
alliances. The myth of monolithic identity presented (by misleaders) as 
incompatible with another monolithic identity leads to mass killings in too 
many places. So-called fundamentalisms of diverse sorts are rampant throughout 
the world, even making advocacy of transborder alliance sound a joke. Only 
proper mediation can help groups engage in productive interaction. This is a 
complex issue and it is beyond my capacity to address all the problems 
involved. However, there seem to be two requirements for the process of 
resolution of antagonisms. 

The first is a discursive process, mediating an interaction that will help 
disintegrate the myth of monolithic identity. Interaction properly mediated 
will help the people involved find more commonality as, say, women, workers or 
farmers than unbridgeable differences such as Pakistanis versus Indians, 
Koreans versus Japanese, Muslims versus Christians, Hindus versus Muslims, and 
so on. Antagonisms are rooted not only in the existing conflicts of immediate 
interests but also involves the past interpreted in the present context - 
history. 

In Japan, for instance, influential politico-intellectual groups are all out 
to spread revisionist views of history trying to justify, using one or another 
rhetoric, the conduct of the Japanese Empire, some advocating deletion from 
school text books that mention of "the dark sides" of the modern Japanese 
history, particularly sexual slavery, Nanking atrocities, and so on. This is 
the core part of their drive to re-establish Japanese national identity. This 
campaign is to counter the growing people's consciousness about war crimes 
Imperial Japan committed against Asian people, a self-critical consciousness 
engendered by energetic movements in the past decade on "comfort women" and 
other issues involving Japanese war responsibility. Thus, an intense struggle 
in the discursive arena is now under way. Should the Japanese people fully 
identify themselves with the rightist view of history, then there would be 
little room for them to hope to be in alliance with the people in neighbouring 
Asia with historical memories of Japanese colonialism and invasion. An 
unrepentant Japan would then strengthen the stereotype image of Japan as a 
racially warlike people, which also is a wrong assumption. A vicious cycle 
would then be set into motion, perpetuating antagonism. We need to put into 
motion the reverse process of disentanglement, and this is a highly discursive 
process for productive interaction. 

The second is structural processes. As antagonism more or less has its roots 
in the actual material and social interests (whose distorted presentation 
justifies the myth), interaction leading to alliance building should be so 
mediated and developed that it engenders a process of structural changes, in 
some cases gradual but cumulative changes, to overcome the relationship of 
domination and exploitation exercised by one group over another. It is here 
that the notion of social classes should be redefined in reference to power 
distribution and reintroduced. This has nothing to do with the notion of the 
sacrosanct working class with the historic mission of liberating itself and 
the rest of the oppressed people, a thesis already proven inept. Nor is class 
defined as a monolithic, exclusive entity. Class here is a relational concept. 
We need to talk about class relations in this sense as we live in a global 
class society where power, economic, social, and intellectual, is distributed 
extremely unevenly, and this status quo is maintained by institutional 
arrangements and ideologies. This is a structure in which people are divided 
and abetted to fight each other because a group of people who are exploited in 
one context are themselves exploiters in another context. From this angle, the 
people's alliance we envisage should be seen as an alliance of classes in a 
process of structural transformation. When we say that alliance building is a 
dynamic process, it is dynamic because it involves processes to remake the 
inter-class relationships toward the redistribution of power toward more 
equality. This by definition must involve transformation of the structure. 

Take, for example, gender relations. Seen from the angle of power 
distribution, there is no doubt that for centuries women as women have been 
placed in an inferior position in society under what is generally termed 
patriarchy. In the past decades, powerful women's movements arose in 
sisterhood, empowered women, and have won considerable, if not full, successes 
in changing the power relationship in women's favour. To the extent this 
movement succeeded in bringing about broad changes in the thinking, 
institutions, laws, and structures. A no-nonsense struggle for power has been, 
and is being, fought because what is at stake is a major change in women's 
favour of existing social relationships (democratisation if you like) in the 
household, community, workplace, and in society generally. At first, most men 
positioned in superior power positions in the structure of patriarchy felt 
threatened and drew a scare picture that women were against men. But 
interaction with women's movements and feminist ideas gradually worked a 
change of culture in social movements and gender justice is now being not only 
accepted but also embraced by the majority of them as part and parcel of their 
own agenda. As gender sensitivity and concerns gradually permeate social 
movements, trans-gender alliance emerges. It is easy to see that here 
discursive processes are intertwined with structural transformation processes. 

The structural and discursive change thus worked out has far-reaching effects, 
not confined to particular aspects of institutions. Informed by feminist 
approaches, we develop a whole new perspective about human society, nature, 
and our ethics. "Our vision informed and enriched by our feminist 
perspectives," the Sagarmatha Declaration of PP21 Kathmandu convergence says, 
"will release us from the trappings of the "male"-centred logic of dualistic 
thinking that dichotomises relations into two poles - body and mind, nature 
and man, public and private, traditional and modern, unpaid therefore 
worthless work and paid therefore valued work, as well as the gender dichotomy 
assimilating women to nature and men to civilisation." It goes on, "Our vision 
projects a process of integration of productive activities with reproductive 
activities - our pursuit to eat, feed, bear, nurture, enjoy, mourn, to 
regenerate ourselves and the next generations in social relations - into a 
wholeness of life." This is only one way of reading the messages of feminist 
movement, and there may be many others. But whatever the reading, feminist 
views and practice inform all other movements and enrich the visions of our 
alternatives. 

The alliance building processes integrate not only gender aspects but also are 
informed and enriched by interaction with many other arenas of class struggle 
involving a number of issues - farmers and agriculture, indigenous people and 
environment, and so on. Besides, though women present themselves as a class in 
the patriarchy context, they are not in other contexts. The power position of 
rich urban middle class women far excels that of a small peasant man in the 
countryside. In the struggle to change unequal power relationship between the 
rural and urban, peasant women and men will emerge united. In this context, 
peasant unity will be stronger than sisterhood between well-to-do urban middle 
class women and peasant women. Thus, there are criss-crossing contexts, each 
designating a definite power redistribution pattern and therefore classes in 
relational terms. New structural relations obtaining from the 
struggle/negotiation will be integrated with transborder alliances of the 
people. 

But understanding classes in relational terms should not take us into the 
marsh of infinite relativity where everybody is somewhat to blame but none 
really responsible. Out of the projection of thousands of intersecting class 
contexts on the same screen emerges a general and definite pattern of overall 
class domination, which will designate the major arena wherein alliance 
building work should be most energetically carried out - the global South. In 
the unequal and undemocratic world we live in, conspicuous class polarisation 
exists between the global North and global South. 

*partie=titre Beginning to build an alternative society *partie=nil  
In concluding this presentation, I venture to emphasise that transborder 
alliance building is a fecund process generating visions of an alternative 
society and also creating and substantiating, if partially, the realities of 
an alternative society as new peoples join the process. This would require a 
drastic change in our perspective of global change. When the state was 
historically strong (when the sovereign state was sovereign), the generally 
assumed strategy was to change society using the state as the almighty 
leverage. There, the primary instrument to seize the state was the party, 
either the vanguard party or the social democratic party, representing the 
interests of lower classes. As the party is a pre-state state, it is 
symmetrical to the state, centralised, vertically commanded, and bureaucratic. 
The state of course matters. We must coexist, and work in interaction with, 
the state in the foreseeable future. We must come to grips with state policies 
and programs, democratise the state, and pressure the state to become 
accountable to the people. But the point is that we need to build ourselves 
into alliances which are not symmetrical to the state. Symmetry represents the 
oppositionist stance: we are formed by our adversary as the latter's mirror 
image, or we simply emulate the dominant model. 

Transborder alliances of peoples are not defined, if conditioned, either by 
the state, or by the dominant globalisation regime. As resistant, we are 
conditioned, in fact, somewhat shaped by the adversary. As builders we escape 
being shaped symmetrically to the regime of globalisation. As they grow and 
enrich themselves, the transborder alliances will begin to weave new 
relationships among collectives as well as individuals -- an autonomous and 
dynamic global human society itself. The alliance is more than a utilitarian 
coalition defined by the immediate need to fight the same adversary. In other 
words, the effort to create and animate transborder alliances is one to help 
the embryo of the global society of tomorrow to live, palpitate, and grow 
resisting, interacting with, and ultimately overcoming the dominant regime. 
I believe that the coalitions of people's movements and NGOs, like this forum, 
PP21, and many others, are important in facilitating the work to weave 
transborder people's alliances as an alliance of hope. We still do not know 
very much about how. Jointly we are in eager and constant search for new ways.