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December 1, 2009
Protesters dressed as sea turtles; teargas billowing through the streets; the ignominious collapse of efforts to launch a new round of global trade talks. It is 10 years since the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle broke up in chaos.
Protesters dressed as sea turtles; teargas billowing through the streets; the ignominious collapse of efforts to launch a new round of global trade talks. It is 10 years since the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle broke up in chaos.
The biennial conference of trade ministers that started yesterday in Geneva is a much quieter affair. There have been some demonstrators - and a few even smashed windows and torched cars over the weekend - but not the tens of thousands in Seattle. The so-called Doha round of trade negotiations is so deadlocked that it is not even on the formal agenda - the rough equivalent of holding the 1919 Versailles conference without talking about the war.
Since Seattle, two global asset bubbles have popped, the world economy has plunged twice into recession and trade has suffered its sharpest drop since the Great Depression. Yet the multilateral organisations supposedly governing the world economy, particularly the WTO and the International Monetary Fund, have barely changed and often struggle to have an impact. Why has a global financial crisis not brought forth a global response?
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