Fw: What is WEF? (fwd)

[Jim Choate]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2002 21:14:18 -0500

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph K." <joseph.k at onebox.com>
To: <fsproject at topica.com>; <lrsh at qc.edu>; <rtsnyc at lists.tao.ca>
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2002 12:26 PM
Subject: What is WEF?


>
> This is kinda long and, frankly, it's not exactly Dostoyevsky
> (sorry), but it does pretty much cover the bases, I think.  It's
> adapted from an Australian website that was used to organize around
> a previous regional WEF meeting, and it's probably stuff we all
> need to know before we go screaming our heads off in front of
> the national media.
> jTuba
>
>
> What is the WEF?
>
>
> "As the world around us has become smaller, the Forum has grown
> in both size influence."
>
>
> >From Jan. 31-Feb. 4, the World Economic Forum (WEF) will be meeting
> at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan for it's annual summit.  Alexander
> Downer, who attended the 1998 Summit, describes the Summit as
> the world's 'Business Olympics'.  The yearly meeting, usually
> held at WEF headquarters in Davos, Switzerland, was rescheduled
> to meet in New York as a token of support for the injuries our
> city sustained on September 11th.
>
> The WEF is, in a way, a big cocktail party for the global corporate
> elite.  As an organization, it has no power to actually set policy,
> but it creates a space in which international "leaders" can hash
> out their vision for the rest of us.  In their own words, "they
> are fully engaged in the process of defining and advancing the
> global agenda."  More specifically, it's our globe, but it's their
> agenda.
>
> The Forum was born in 1971 as a yearly 'European Management Forum'
> of Euro-corporates. It was funded by the European Commission until
> 1987, when it became the WEF and started to claim global reach.
> Its membership reflects its class orientation, and includes the
> most prominent transnational corporations, 1000 of which make
> up the WEF 'Foundation Members'. In addition, there is a club
> of 'Global Growth Companies'; 300 'Industry Governors'; 300 Global
> Leaders of Tomorrow'; 'World Economic Leaders' from both politics
> and business; 'World Media Leaders' from 100 media groups; 100
> 'World Cultural Leaders'; and 'Forum Fellows' from academia and
> the heads of national economic research organizations.
>
> The WEF aspires to be an agenda-setting Forum. It is, in its own
> modest opinion, 'the foremost global partnership of business,
> political, intellectual and other leaders of society committed
> to improving the state of the world'. With the diffusion of
neo-liberalism,
> and consequent advances in corporate globalization from the 1980s,
> the WEF has taken on an unprecedented role as a rallying point
> for global elites, and as a vehicle for class power. Clearly the
> WEF can't set the agenda and certainly can't determine the outcomes
> - it is not a conspiratorial cabal standing over society. Rather,
> it is a class grouping, fully embedded in social relations, that
> self-consciously takes on the role of planning for collective
> class interests. It seeks to influence the political agendas and
> respond to the prevailing challenges - and in this respect, as
> Kees van der Pijl argues, it is the first 'true International
> of capital'.
>
> The Forum has been remarkably successful - since 1971 the 'state
> of the world' has dramatically improved for many of the participating
> corporations. WEF strategizing drove the neo-liberal agenda in
> the 1980's, bringing together politicians from the 'pretender'
> states of the newly industrializing world, as well as from the
> OECD states, to map out an agenda with transnational business
> executives. It offered a proactive forum, removed from the public
> gaze, and played a central role in diffusing neo-liberalism. The
> model was presented as the solution to the crises of accumulation
> experienced in the 1970s and early 1980s, and was highly effective
> in extending the reign of the market.
>
> This success has come at the price of built-in uncertainty and
> instability. Globalized neo-liberalism had led to a dramatic redrawing
> of the boundaries of capitalism (or rather, an unbounding of capitalism
> altogether).  Temporal boundaries have melted away with the speeding
> up of circulation; spatial boundaries have been superceded with
> the growing transnational reach of corporations; even socio-psychological
> boundaries have lifted, with the increased commodification of
> life. A newly empowered transnational capitalist class has emerged
> triumphant, presiding over the new landscapes of accumulation.
> But class hegemony is by no means assured - uncharted territory
> imposes incalculable risk. Speeding circulation compresses business
> cycles; confidence rests on ephemera; ideological symbols are
> presented as so-called 'fundamentals'; frenzied speculation rules.
> Corporate transnationalism exhausts social and physical environments;
> deeper commodification disassembles social solidarity and generates
> powerful imperatives for cultural survival, often carried through
> the new modes of social communication.
>
> As a result, since at least the mid 1990s, neo-liberal prescriptions
> have been widely discredited (just look at the present crisis
> in Argentina). Exponential rises in executive salaries, and in
> corporate accumulation, along with a dramatic concentration of
> economic power across all sectors, offer clear evidence of the
> success of neo-liberalism as a class strategy. But neo-liberal
> globalization has also brought unprecedented levels of global
> inequality, and undreamed-of degrees of financial instability,
> environmental exhaustion and social dislocation. The neo-liberal
> triumph has created new sources of opposition, the impacts and
> responses have been unrelenting, and advocates have been forced
> to go on the defensive. The high water mark was 1995, when the
> OECD declared it was marking out a 'global vision for the year
> 2020, a New Global Age'. But already a political revival, inspired
> by social democratic ideas, and expressed in a new form of social
> liberalism sometimes described as the 'Third Way', was sweeping
> the OECD.
>
> As neo-liberal prescriptions have unraveled, there has been an
> urgent revision of the WEF's neo-liberal project. The WEF has
> left behind its market fundamentalism, and now is charting a new
> agenda for corporate globalism, one that embraces rather than
> rejects 'the social'. The massed ranks of analysts, consultants
> and advisers, from credit ratings agencies, management consultancies,
> inter-governmental institutions and non-government organizations,
> have entered the fray, battling to define the new accumulation
> paradigm. There are continuing efforts to enhance 'market discipline',
> to suppress the advancing crises, to institutionalize transnational
> class power, and render neo-liberal globalism irreversible. Yet
> there is also deepening dissent amongst policy-making groups.
> There is a rethinking of neo-liberalism even amongst the most
> elite institutions: as Hans-Peter Martin and Herald Schuman demonstrate,
> many of the most powerful players in global capitalism are questioning
> the 'dictatorship of the market'. Primary advocates and beneficiaries
> of neo-liberal globalism, such as George Soros and Ted Turner,
> both of whom had embarked on paternalist interventions - the imaginatively
> branded 'Soros Foundation' and 'Turner Foundation' - began expressing
> sincere regrets at the social costs of neo-liberalism. Other elements,
> as van der Pijl highlights, went further and increasingly have
> been rethinking and explicitly 'mobilizing against yesterday's
> prescriptions'. These have much wider ramifications, potentially
> enabling 'a deepening of democracy, a reappropriation of the public
> sphere by the population, and eventually a more fundamental transformation
> away from class society'.
>
> Recent developments have only strengthened the leverage of this
> dissenting segment. Institutional crises of legitimacy have accumulated,
> with the OECD shelving its 'Multilateral Agreement on Investment'
> in 1998, the temporary ditching of the World Trade Organization's
> 'Millenium Round' in 1999, and the advancing crisis in the International
> Monetary Fund's global regime of 'structural adjustment'. Add
> into the equation the continuing crisis in 'transitional' post-communist
> societies, especially Russia, and the severe jolt delivered to
> the 'Newly Industrializing countries' of East Asia by financial
> 'contagion' in 1997-8, and the impending bursting of the infotainment
> bubble, then the challenges to neo-liberalism begin to seem irresistible.
> Expressing this, there have been the dramatic public explosions
> against neo-liberal globalization: Geneva 1996, Cologne 1998,
> Seattle 1999, Washington 2000, Montreal and Genoa 2001.
>
> For the first time in many years, 'anti-capitalist' protest has
> returned to the capitalist heartland, and to the global stage.
> These protests open up the ideological space for the articulation
> of alternative guiding principles, putting on the agenda the possibility
> of transformation away from the current malaise. As the promotion
> of capitalist discipline is questioned, protest targeted at the
> agents of neo-liberal globalization gains remarkable political
> leverage. In this political climate WEF meetings start to take
> on a special significance. Since 1996 the WEF has attracted increasingly
> militant opposition, and it has responded by attempting to re-chart
> the neo-liberal project. The WEF response is to deliberately avoid
> the appearance of backroom strategizing, and instead to seek a
> higher public profile, attempting to reground its legitimacy by
> being seen to engage with prominent advocates of the emerging
> alternatives. The WEF is thus placing itself at the center of
> debates about the revision of neo-liberalism, asserting that it
> can play 'important role in forging the new geometry'.
>
> Reflecting this, the WEF has reached out to those 'excluded' by
> neo-liberal globalization - notably non-OECD governments, such
> as Mexico and South Africa, and critical Non-Government Organizations,
> such as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).
> At Davos in 1998 Hillary Clinton argued the role of NGOs and other
> representatives of 'civil society' had to be enhanced, while John
> Sweeney, from the AFL-CIO, focused on issues of distribution,
> arguing markets had to 'work for the majority and not simply for
> the few'. In 1999 Vice-President Al Gore appeared with Kofi Annan,
> who appealed for a 'global compact' between business and the UN
> founded on 'core values in the areas of human rights, labor standards,
> and environmental practices'. In 2000 President Clinton shared
> the Millennial limelight - somewhat blurred by Seattle - with
> Tony Blair. Davos policy debates are now couched in terms of
'institutional
> accommodation', 'corporate responsibility' and 'global dialogue',
> with sessions in 2000 on 'responsible globality', 'inclusive prosperity'
> and 'sustainable development'. Perhaps most cynically, the WEF's
> 'World Competitiveness Scorecard' - a yearly league-table of 'how
> national environments are conducive or detrimental to the domestic
> and global competitiveness of enterprises' - was supplemented
> by an 'Environmental Sustainability Index' at Davos 2000. At the
> same time, as Jane Kelsey highlights, a new 'World Economic Community'
> internet link-up between 10,000 key economic decision-makers -
> an internet 'hotline' for concertizing corporate responses - is
> being constructed.
>
> The contest is on to establish a revised normative and institutional
> framework for the global economy. The WEF is claiming a central
> role in shaping the agenda, and some, such as the ICFTU, are participants
> in the process, taking heart in the WEF's apparent willingness
> to become an advocate of 'globalization with a human face'. But
> the key question is whether the WEF should be permitted to drive
> this agenda. Should a forum that is dominated by corporate interests
> be encouraged to take on the role of mapping out future frameworks
> for global governance? Should it be granted recognition and legitimacy
> in this agenda-setting process? Or, rather, should its role be
> challenged, and alternative sources of legitimacy be asserted?
>
> There was a telling moment at Davos 2000 when the assembled executives
> refused to vacate the conference chamber to enable a security
> check before Clinton's speech. The US President's Security Service
> was forced to back down after a corporate 'sit-in'. Clinton's
> speech went ahead: even the President of the US has to respect
> the wishes of the corporate club. Perhaps he should have joined
> the 1000 protestors outside the conference venue, and joined the
> democratic movement against corporate power.
>
> There will be similar protests outside New York summit of the
> WEF later this month. In 1999 the summit lobbied for regional
> governments to back the coming WTO 'Millennium Round', arguing
> that trade liberalization was inevitable and needed to be extended
> into 'free and fair competition, protecting intellectual property
> and foreign investment'. In
> 2002 we can expect much rhetoric about inclusiveness and sustainability.
>  There will be plenty of ironic moments and opportunities to politicize
> globalized neo-liberalism.
>  Information on the anti-WEF protest is available at http://www.s11.org
>
> Sources:
> Kelsey, Jane, 2000, Reclaiming the Future, Bridget Williams Books,
> Wellington;
> Martin, Hans-Peter and Schumann, Harald, 1997, The Global Trap,
> Pluto, Sydney;
> Kees van der Pijl, 1998, Transnational classes and international
> relations, Routledge, London.
> The website of the World Economic Forum: http://www.weforum.org
>
> James Goodman, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University
> of
> Technology Sydney (UTS), PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia,
>
> Tel: 9514 2714, Fax: 9514 2332, Email: james.goodman at uts.edu.au
> Website: http://www.uts.edu.au/fac/hss/Research/protglob
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Destroy it.
> Enjoy it.
> -slits
>
>
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