Title: Massachusetts, Burma, and the World Trade Organization: A Commentary on Blacklisting, Federalism, and Internet Advocacy in the Global Trading Era
Abstract: While protesters took to the streets in the Battle in Seattle demanding greater accountability from international institutions, such as the WTO and the IMF, and the end of an era of trade negotiations conducted by sheltered elites balancing competing commercial interests behind closed doors, the Supreme Court began wrestling with a similar problem of balancing governmental and popular interests. In trying to determine whether the Massachusetts Burma Law was such an irritant to foreign relations that it impinged upon the federal government's foreign affairs powers or whether the state was simply exercising its rights to chose how to spend its citizens' tax revenues in the marketplace, the Court, like the WTO and the IMF, grappled with a new balance between governmental interest and democracy-a new federalism in a global era. As the Chair of the AFL-CIO International Affairs Committee declared in the wake of the Seattle protests, Globalization has reached a turning point. The future is a terrain of very public that will shape the world economy of the 21st century. The new communication technologies embodied in the Internet are fueling the globalization of the world economy. Ironically, the same tools that create these worldwide opportunities for businesses are also revitalizing an old strain of anti-corporate and anti-colonial sentiment while providing the ability to present these concerns in new ways. The protests in Seattle highlighted this other view of globalization, which harkens back to the old debate between the win-lose view of trade-the notion that First World wealth is obtained at the expense of the Third World-as opposed to the win-win view of trade embodied in the theory of comparative advantage. ia The protests addressed a number of different issues, going well beyond human rights in Burma to encompass concerns ranging from the environment to labor issues. While pervasive distrust of corporate power and regulatory institutions in the global marketplace is a common and familiar theme, the extensive use of the Internet to mobilize and communicate the protesters' positions on the contested terrain of very public choices is entirely new. The Burma example illustrates how the power of the Internet gives these popular concerns new currency in the marketplace, consequently requiring adjustments in how governmental institutions respond to the issues.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-10-24
Language: en
Type: article
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