As the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Day 1994, a people’s revolt against free trade began. Poorly armed indigenous peasants, including many women, launched uprisings across Chiapas, Mexico’s most impoverished state. They called themselves Zapatistas, after the Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata.
Town halls were occupied, the capital, San Cristóbal de las Casas, included. Prisoners were freed, military barracks set alight and land seized. Their declaration of war was not just with the Mexican state, which had repressed and exploited them for so long, but with a global economic system that was destroying their way of life.
Their uprising started as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force. NAFTA would go on to decimate Mexican peasant farming as maize produced by US agribusiness and subsidised by the state flooded onto Mexico’s markets. It was exhibit number one in the wave of economic ‘globalisation’ then sweeping the planet, an artefact of the free trade ideology from which diminishingly few politicians demurred. The Zapatista revolt was the first crack in this shiny new future.
Over several months the Mexican state tried and failed to defeat this unlikely revolt, which garnered a high level of popular support. Eventually the Zapatistas retreated to pockets of land in the Chiapas countryside, which they control to this day and govern in a highly democratic way. But they also became something like the beating heart of a new anti-globalisation movement, which started to grow around the world.
The Battle of Seattle
By 1999, critiques of globalisation had reached increasingly broad sections of global society. That year’s Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) united them in dramatic fashion. From trade unionists to environmentalists (the ‘Teamsters and turtles’), tens of thousands of people descended on the city from around the US and beyond to try to shut down the summit with mass blockades. The ‘Battle of Seattle’ saw major police repression but made global headlines and encouraged global south countries to walk out of the talks in the face of global north bullying.
Seattle kicked off escalating protests as movements mobilised to oppose the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meeting in Prague in 2000, the G7 meeting in Genoa in 2001, and indeed every gathering of globalised capitalism. When Italian riot police shot dead 23-year-old Carlo Giuliani during the Genoa protests, outrage in Italy meant the next day’s mass protest was far bigger than expected. With global elites increasingly worrying where the dissent was going, The Financial Times described global civil society as a new superpower.
With global elites worrying where the dissent was going, The Financial Times described global civil society as a new superpower
Pluralism was an essential part of what made the movement tick. Even at summit protests space was made for different kinds of protest tactics under one umbrella – sometimes described as ‘one no, many yeses’. While summit protests gave expression to the no, the yeses found expression in the World Social Forum, first held in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, a city run by the Workers Party. It was a huge collaborative effort incorporating hundreds of discussions and events, and has continued to be held periodically on a modest scale right up to this year, when it took place in Kathmandu. Regional spin offs such as the European Social Forum took place through most of the noughties.
Meanwhile, however, Al Qaeda’s extraordinary act of terrorism in New York had kicked off a drive to war, with the invasion of Afghanistan followed by an impending US-led attack on Iraq. The first European Social Forum (Florence, 2002), which brought together tens of thousands of people, provided a platform to call for a global protest over the Iraq war the following February, in what became the world’s biggest coordinated demonstration. While the ‘war on terror’ ultimately disrupted the anti-globalisation movement’s momentum and its popular narrative, some of its biggest wins were actually still to come.
From ‘anti’ to ‘alter’
In 2005, negotiators finally gave up on the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas in a huge victory for Latin American social movements. This built on and fed into the ‘pink tide’ of left-wing governments, which swept a continent previously more associated with free marketeers and military dictatorships. The WTO found it increasingly difficult to strike any new market liberalisation deals, so that governments have increasingly turned to bilateral trade and investment agreements. Yet the institutions and alliances of the anti-globalisation movement have been central to resisting these too, most obviously in the 2016 defeat of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the US and EU.
The mobilisation of peasants against corporate globalisation continues through La Vía Campesina, now incorporating more than 180 organisations of small-scale food producers and farm workers. Formed in 1993, its key alternative to agribusiness, food sovereignty, is perhaps one of the most important concepts of the anti-globalisation movement. Combining land redistribution, agroecology, women’s rights and democratic control of the food system, it represents a new radical horizon for huge numbers of people.
Another important concept to emerge from the anti-globalisation movement is the ‘commons’ as an alternative to both private and state ownership. This draws on histories of resistance to enclosures of traditional common land both past and present, as well as the ‘creative commons’ that emerged from the early days of the internet. Barcelona en Comù (Barcelona in Common), which ran the city for eight years, owes much to the anti-globalisation movement, as does the Catalan capital’s large solidarity economy sector.
Ultimately, a movement against corporate-led globalisation produced a kind of globalisation of its own, one ‘from below, and to the left’ as the Zapatistas say. Recognising this and wishing to distinguish better between our critique of neoliberalism and that of reactionary nationalism, movement actors have sometimes talked of ‘alter-globalisation’. Whatever different ideas existed about what exactly that alternative is, the notion that ‘another world is possible’ and the coming together of a truly global movement to build it, was a vital antidote to capitalist triumphalism in the 1990s. It is even more important in the world of climate breakdown we find ourselves in today.
