Globalization has assumed a new form: global mass politics. Of course, political protests have been global for decades, as past marches against the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons and globalization itself demonstrated.
The revolutions of 1989 and 1991 in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union blanketed a huge region within months. But the anti-Iraq War protests reveal a new dynamic. Up to 10 million protesters in some 60 countries and 600 cities took to the streets on schedule on a single day, Feb. 15, showing that mass politics can now be approached globally.
Communications and mass media have long enabled "copycat" effects -- protests in one place ignite similar actions elsewhere. The overthrow of King Louis Phillipe in France in 1848 was carried by the recently introduced telegraph to Germany, igniting revolution. Television images of the fall of the Berlin Wall spurred revolutionary changes throughout the former Soviet bloc. On other occasions, protests such as May Day marches were transformed into widespread social mobilization, as happened in France on May 1, 1968.
What is distinctive about the recent mass protests against US plans for a war against Iraq is that the Feb. 15 event was planned ahead of time, at short notice, for a specific date, and with an explicit goal of worldwide scale.
The decision to launch Feb. 15 as a day of mass protest was apparently taken at a meeting of activists at the European Social Forum in Florence in November last year. In 90 days, these organizers turned out more than 5 million protesters worldwide.
There are three keys to this phenomenon:
The Internet allowed for a rapid worldwide dissemination of organizational plans at an extraordinarily low cost to the organizers.
Mass action depended on local organizations seizing the initiative, based on a loose global plan. This is what network theorists call "self-organizing" behavior. As each unit took its own steps, these local actions were communicated to the rest of the world through Web sites that tracked and disseminated global plans, as well as offering information, advice, and encouragement. A worldwide common concern: the prospect of an Iraq War.
There was a fourth specific feature fuelling the global protests, too: the exceptionally high level of arrogance and ineptitude displayed by the administration of US President George W. Bush. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld provoked the world's ire through a mocking disdain for global public opinion. Rumsfeld's juvenile attack on "old Europe" no doubt helped bring millions into the streets.
Indeed, it's no longer possible in an age of mass communication to "play to the home audience" without the world also listening. Bush's swaggering style plays well in Texas, but not in Paris and Berlin. It is unlikely that worldwide protests will stop the Bush administration's war plans, but they will help shape the political, security, and economic ramifications of such a war. The war is likely to proceed because the US can carry out the military phase of the war largely on its own, and because the Bush administration has no easy way to back down from its military mobilization.
Moreover, the uncertainties over war are hurting America's economy (and economies elsewhere), by causing a postponement of business plans and falling consumer confidence. If today's stalemate drags on, the weak economy will threaten Bush's re-election bid in November next year. His political advisers may well advise him that it will soon be "now or never" to launch the war.
But America will pay dearly for launching a war against global public opinion. Unless the Bush administration is vindicated in its actions -- for example, if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein launches weapons of mass destruction that unite the world against him, or if the US discovers hidden nuclear weapons in the Iraqi desert -- anti-American sentiments, and terrorism, unleashed by war, are likely to be massive.America's people have never been told about the huge financial and political burdens that lie ahead, and they are not ready to bear them.
Already the US is facing huge fiscal deficits and a squeeze on popular programs, even before the costs of war and its aftermath are taken into account.
Cheap and instantaneous means of global communication are here to stay. Feb. 15 demonstrates that people throughout the world will use them to demand their right to help shape global political decisions.
Jeffrey Sachs is professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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