Peaceful Protest @ G20 : Melbourne Indymedia

How did the officers get it wrong? One may ask.
Well, to find out we must first see who these people are that defend 'our rights.' Well, these people are often family people, who don't get paid a significant amount of money, who go out into the streets to defend anyone who may need it. They are to render an un-bias view or decision for problems that most of us have no concern about, well, most of the time. They are hard working defenders of peace (lets face it, if there were no police, chaos would prevail.). However, during the G20 summits in Melbourne last year they encountered a foe unlike no other. The actions of the 'peaceful protesters' were not justified, for two reasons; The protests were anything but peaceful and their earth loving, creature hugging attitude was sent flying out the door. They bashed innocent men of duty for caring for the welfare of the general public. If it weren't for the police, the 'peaceful protesters' would have destroyed the city, the museum and killed everyone involved with the G20 summit. The actions of the protesters on that day was reflective of animal ism-like driven state, they had no regard for anyone else's opinion apart from they conspiracy driven ideology. The protectors who hit police officers, police horses and vandalized property were simply cowards, who believed they could get away with it because they could scurry back into the scum from whence they came. I hope all the cases against the police officers are dropped and the cowardly scum who committed these acts of terror get thrown into the slammer and get all the money they suckled away from hard working taxpayers, taken away. If the protest was peaceful, than none of this would have happened, and no one would regard the protesters as scum. I applaud those who did not take part in the violence, but instead carried out the peaceful protest that was promised. No matter what the people involved in the G20 were doing, there was no need to insight such excessive violence. Shame be upon your heads forevermore.
I will not be surprised if this article gets deleted very quickly, this just goes to show your lack of bias for equality.

A report into the G20 protests held in Melbourne last November has found police initially acted with restraint, but later used an excessive amount of force.

Victoria's Federation of Community Legal Centres released the study, finding only a small proportion of protesters were acting provocatively over the three-day event.

The study found a police baton charge on protesters outside the Melbourne Museum was "unnecessary" and "unprovoked".

The report's author, Anthony Kelly, says the police initially responded with restraint, but their discipline broke down over the weekend.

"That disciplinary restraint broke down gradually over the Saturday afternoon and there were several incidences of excessive and potentially unlawful use of force against non-threatening protesters," he said.

Victorian police are yet to comment on the study?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200705/s1923209.htm

I guess that they may have just done that but how extraordinary this statement is?

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You say, "They bashed innocent men of duty for caring for the welfare of the general public. If it weren't for the police, the 'peaceful protesters' would have destroyed the city, the museum and killed everyone involved with the G20 summit."

================================

I suppose you have some type of proof? And without it, if that's what you think, police think they were doing then there is no need to ask anymore questions about who got it wrong is there?

Hurley 6747
By Stephen Hagan - posted Friday, 9 March 2007

Frederick Douglass (1818-95) American former slave and civil rights campaigner speaking on the 23rd anniversary of Emancipation in Washington DC, April 1885, said: “The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful and virtuous”.

With amazing revelations emanating from a flood of media coverage of late, concerning the unconscionable conduct of police associations and weak politicians who choose to turn a blind eye to the Mulrunji case, only time will tell whether the commanding words of Frederick Douglas have any currency in Australia today.

After reading an article in the Sunday Territorian under the headline “Blue wrist bands to support Sgt Hurley” by Roberta Mancuso on February 9, 2007, I continue to be appalled by the unprecedented action, some might say militant deeds, of our protectors - the police - in support of their fallen comrade.

I, like many of my people, have friends who currently serve in the police service, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous officers, and often wonder what their position is on the extraordinary stance countless numbers of their colleagues are taking in support of Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley.

My reluctance to date in not asking my few police acquaintances whether they support their union’s stance is probably more reflective of my present state of mind on the subject and angst, I guess, of their possible agreement with the actions undertaken by the union and of future plans the union may have on the drawing board.

The Sunday Territorian alluded to the potential of all Queensland police officers who may soon be wearing blue wrist bands in a show of support for Senior Sergent Chris Hurley who was recently charged over the death in custody of Mulrunji on Palm Island in 2004.

At present it would appear, from the article, that most Gold Coast officers are wearing the blue bands stamped with the number “6747” - the official police registration number of Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley.

Queensland Police Union vice president Denis Fitzpatrick was quoted in the article saying the bands would not only help raise funds for Snr Sgt Hurley's legal costs, but show a “silent protest” against his treatment.

It was also widely reported that the Queensland Police Union is considering staging an unprecedented police march on Parliament House in Brisbane.

I don’t begrudge anyone from voicing a protest on any matter but one would have thought it more prudent of police to await the outcome of a jury of Hurley’s peers to arrive at a verdict before trying to influence the court’s outcome by threatening to march on Parliament House as well as an array of other innovative planned actions.

Why has this particular case caused so much anxiety to the all conquering and powerful police unions across the nation? Perhaps it has something to do with the history and culture of policing in this country and their perfect record of no convictions recorded against a single police officer for a death in custody of an Indigenous Australian.

To fully understand this observation I provide a journey back in time to illustrate a brutal start to our people’s contact with non-Indigenous law enforcement agencies and the judicial system.

1799 - Two Aboriginal boys killed near Windsor by five Hawkesbury settlers. A court martial found them guilty but referred sentencing to the Secretary of State for Colonies and the men were released on bail. Governor Hunter is recalled. Acting-Governor King is instructed to pardon the men.

1805, July 20 - The colony's Judge-Advocate, Richard Atkins when referring to whether or not Aborigines could be witnesses or criminals before a court stated that Aborigines "are at present incapable of being brought before a criminal court - and that the only mode at present when they deserve it, is to pursue them and inflict such punishment as they merit".

1838, June 10 - The “Myall Creek Massacre” occurs. Twelve heavily armed colonists rounded up and brutally kill 28 Aborigines from a group of 40 or 50 people gathered at Henry Dangar's Station, at Myall Creek. The massacre was believed to be a payback for the killing of several hut keepers and two shepherds. But most of those killed were women and children and good relations existed between the Aboriginal people and European occupants of the station. November 15, 1838, 11 Europeans were charged with murder but are acquitted. A new trial is held and seven men are charged with murder of one Aboriginal child. They are found guilty and hanged in December.

We’ve just had a brief look at the 18th and 19th century rapport, or lack thereof, between Indigenous Australians and the judicial system - now let’s peer through the window, via reference, in part, to John Pilger’s 1989 publication A Secret Country, and have a look at a similar relationship picture in the 20th century and see if conditions have improved.

You be the judge!

1981, June 12 - Eddie Murray was drinking under a tree with his cousins Donny and some friends. Eddie was arrested at 1.45pm and taken to Wee Waa police station. He was held under the Intoxicated Persons Act, a law used overwhelmingly against Aborigines. Within the hour he was dead, strangled with a blanket in his cell, his feet on the ground.

At the inquest five months later the police claimed Eddie had killed himself by hanging, even though his blood alcohol level at the time of death was 0.3 per cent. Under cross examination, the police agreed that Eddie was “so drunk he couldn’t scratch himself”. Yet according to them, Eddie had managed to tear a strip off a thick prison blanket, deftly fold it, thread it through the bars of the ventilation window, tie two knots, fashion a noose and hang himself without his feet leaving the ground.

One policeman gave evidence that he had been off duty that day, then admitted he had lied when four Aboriginal witnesses identified him as one of those in the police van that took Eddie away.

The inquest was also told about serious discrepancies in police notebooks, with dates appearing out of sequence and an absence of records altogether, except for a highly detailed record of events of June 12: the day of Eddie’s arrest and death.

The coroner found that Eddie Murray had died “at the hands of person or persons unknown”. He said there was no evidence that Eddie had taken his own life and he strongly criticised the police. And that was that.

For a more personalised insight into this disturbing case read Simon Luckhurst’s recent publication Eddie’s Country (Magabala 2006) as presented through the eyes of Eddie’s parents; Arthur and Leila Murray

1983, September 28 - John Pat, aged 17, died in Roebourne, Western Australia. He had gone to the aid of a friend who was involved in a fight with five off-duty policemen. Witnesses at the inquest said they had seen him kicked in the head after he had lost consciousness, “like a dog”.

Other witnesses, who lived overlooking the lock-up, said the police repeatedly assaulted John Pat after pulling him unconscious from the van. He was left in a cell and no doctor was called. He died from extensive head wounds; and he had broken ribs and a tear in his aorta, the main blood vessel leading from the heart.

The five policemen were sent to trial for murder, but the charge was later changed to manslaughter. They were acquitted and reinstated to the police force. The Aborigines arrested with John Pat were convicted of aggravated assault against the police and sent to prison. They are scarred from their beatings.

1987, August 6 - Lloyd Boney, killed in custody aged 28 and buried in Brewarrina Cemetery on August 16, with his football team forming a guard of honour. He was the 16th Aborigine to die in police custody with eight months.

That evening there were few whites on the streets of Brewarrina. Up from the river marched Aborigines to the Brewarrina Hotel, which, they said, refused to serve blacks. They hurled beer kegs and bottles, smashing windows. Riot police were called and at first were beaten back.

The New South Wales Police Minister said on television that violence by blacks “will only cause more harm to their cause”. The local National Party candidate, who was also town coroner, accused the Sydney media of causing “racial disharmony” and “stirring up” the Aboriginal community.

Regrettably I would argue that not a lot has changed over the past two centuries, as highlighted above, as they are almost identical in their origin of farcical patterns of arrest and violent in-custody fatal conclusion.

Once again I evoke the famous words of Frederick Douglass: “The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful and virtuous.”

So let’s all keep our fingers crossed for a fair and just outcome of the Hurley court case that commences in the Townsville Supreme Court on April 9 and that we don’t see any police officers on guard that day wearing a blue band boldly displaying “6747”.
******************************************************

Video gives graphic evidence of police brutality
After all the inquiries, reports and hand-wringing over the years, many people had expected, and hoped, that the bad old days of police brutality towards Aborigines were behind us. And then along comes a piece of evidence to remind people of what can still go on behind closed doors. Today, a NSW court was played a video showing a police officer bashing an Aboriginal man and hauling him unconscious into a cell by his hair.

---------
Compere: Tony Jones
Reporter: David Spicer

TONY JONES: After all the inquiries, reports and hand-wringing over the years, many people had expected, and hoped, that the bad old days of police brutality towards Aborigines were behind us.

And then along comes a piece of evidence to remind people of what can still go on behind closed doors.

Today, a NSW court was played a video showing a police officer bashing an Aboriginal man and hauling him unconscious into a cell by his hair.

The NSW Government had sought to prevent the tape's release, but after it was shown, the State's Police Commissioner ordered a review of what happened in the Armidale police station in 1997.

DAVID SPICER: This is the video the NSW Government tried to keep off tonight's TV news.

Aboriginal prisoner Vernon Moran was knocked unconscious inside the Armidale police station after being thrown into a wall.

Former senior constable Peter Connett then dragged him into a police cell by the hair.

NSW Police Commissioner Peter Ryan says it makes him sick.

PETER RYAN, NSW POLICE COMMISSIONER: I was both shocked and horrified when I saw this video and very angry indeed.

DAVID SPICER: The State Government urged a District Court judge not to release the tape today.

But Judge Robert Kelleman allowed the media into court to tape the video saying only its release could portray the viciousness and callousness of the attack.

Mr Moran this week received undisclosed compensation from the State Government.

Now it's suing the former police officer involved in the attack to recover some of the money.

Commissioner Ryan also wants to investigate why other officers did nothing.

PETER RYAN: So I want to find out exactly what the investigation discovered about them and what action was taken against them.

In my view, it wasn't sufficient.

DAVID SPICER: The Police Association says the officer involved in the attack was medically unfit for work at the time of the incident because of a work-related psychiatric disorder.

The association says he received no help for his problems.

PETER REMFREY, NSW POLICE ASSOCIATION: And this is a prime example where not only do they not provide assistance, but when they make a mistake as a consequence of being injured as a police officer, they turn their back on them.

DAVID SPICER: The police officer was discharged from the service as medically unfit.

David Spicer, Lateline, Sydney.

Police Terror in the Park
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2007/05/197834.php

The evidence and ideas you have given me do not support any of your cases because the reports and findings were done by those already bias to a point of view. Don't try and defend those dirty hippies that attacks hard working family men and women. Go back to the hole from where you came, lowlife.

Also, Go back to school and get a haircut, you worthless twerp.

Get a grip loser people should be scared of you with an imagination like that!

By Stefan Nicola
UPI Germany Correspondent

BERLIN -- German police raids of the far left seem to have backfired and strengthened the anti-globalization movement, less than a month before Berlin hosts the G8 summit.

Some 880 police and 20 attorneys of Germany's Federal Prosecution Office last week raided roughly 40 properties in six German states for the most comprehensive raid against the far left in recent years.

Police searched left-wing strongholds in Hamburg and Berlin -- cities with a long-established left scene -- in connection with investigations of two terrorist groups that allegedly want to disturb or even prevent the June 6-8 G8 summit.

Among the raided properties were offices, cultural centers, bookstores and even a left-wing merchandising shop. If Berlin wanted to intimidate the far left, it seems to have failed; in the wake of the raids, several far-left groups have received more support than before the security move.

Thousands of people have since marched in protest against the raids to protest what they saw as an attempt to criminalize otherwise legitimate anti-globalization groups. Berlin managed to victimize the far left after it surfaced that none of the 21 arrested was being held more than one day; it also searched the properties of several senior citizens, sparking protests from the left-wing opposition, who called the raids "out of scale."

The left has since said the move will increase the number of protesters and thus further threaten security.

"One of the consequences of the police operations was to mobilize people," Peter Wahl of the anti-globalization group Attac told Germany's ZDF television. "We have received a lot of e-mails from people saying 'at first I did not want to go to Rostock ... but now I am ready.'"

Berlin says it is ready, too.

Up to 100,000 people are expected to flock to the summit venue in Heiligendamm and to nearby Rostock to protest the negative effects of globalization.

The German government has introduced several measures besides the raids to guarantee security: It has installed a $20 million fence around the Heiligendamm Baltic Sea resort to keep protestors out, and the same is to be done at the country's exterior borders: Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives said Germany would reintroduce border security checks to stop potentially violent protesters from entering the country.

Normally, under the Schengen agreement, travelers entering Germany from a Schengen member country do not have to present their passports, but the checks can be reintroduced in light of an elevated security threat.

The minister has also threatened to have supporters of violent demonstrations arrested for up to two weeks during the summit if there is reason to believe that they are planning to commit a crime.

"Regional police authorities are considering taking recourse to so-called preventative detention," he told Germany's top-selling newspaper Bild.

The government had threatened to use the law against hooligans during the FIFA Soccer World Cup in Germany last summer.

Schaeuble warned that just because Germany was not subject to terrorist attacks during major events such as last year's World Cup, that "doesn't mean we will be spared this time."

Hans-Christian Stroebele, a senior Green party lawmaker, harshly condemned the minister's comments.

"What the interior minister currently does is the opposite of de-escalation," he told German news channel n-tv. "He is fueling the conflict, and I can only urgently call on him not to release new threats with each day."

The growing unease has also resonated with police officials, who are worried that the country's force will be overstretched during the summit.

Authorities are planning to deploy more than 17,000 police in Heiligendamm and the nearby city of Rostock, where most of the protest events and mass demonstrations will be staged.

Because of recent staff cuts, the G8 assignment will overstretch the police, which has to guarantee security for the rest of the country as well, Konrad Freiberg, the head of the police union GdP, told Sunday's Bild newspaper.

"The G8 summit is the biggest police assignment of all time," he said. "More than 100 activities and events will be staged parallel to the summit."

As for the rest of the country, "Criminals don't go on a G8 break," he said.

Besides the fear of far-left violence, Berlin shouldn't underestimate the high threat of an Islamist terror attack, Freiberg said, citing the example of the 2005 summit in Gleneagles, during which the London subway bombings were executed.

“Antiglobalization” Protests and the Future of Democracy

Mark A. Laffey and Jutta Weldes

These are strange times for global democracy. According to most commentators, the past decade has been very good for democracy. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe paved the way for a rapid expansion of liberal democracy into new territories.

In Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia too, authoritarian regimes were replaced with elected ones, often because of popular uprisings. Scholars, politicians, and international bureaucrats now routinely speak of the right to liberal democratic governance as an emergent global norm (e.g., Franck 1992). At the same time, however, a growing number of people—in both new and not-so-new democratic states—have challenged the global celebration of liberal democracy. Nowhere are these challenges more strongly voiced than in criticisms of the dominant discourse of contemporary globalization, that of neoliberalism.1

The worldwide expansion of liberal democracy is integral to neoliberal narratives of economic globalization; free trade, free markets, and free elections, it is regularly asserted, go together to produce “market democracies.” The desirability and necessity of liberal democracy is promoted and enforced through global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as international and regional organizations such as the G-8, the World Economic Forum, the European Union (EU), and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The global expansion of liberal democratic polities is thus linked directly to the continuing extension of capitalism to new spaces and the growth of world markets and multinational or transnational corporations to service them. The dominant discourse of globalization is overwhelmingly corporate or neoliberal globalization and the celebration of liberal democracy is part of it.

In the past decade, massive protests against neoliberalism have occurred at many “ritual celebrations of economic globalization” (Ericson and Doyle 1999, 589), including the WTO meeting in Seattle (1999), the IMF–World Bank meetings in Washington and Prague (2000), and the EU summit in Gothenburg and the G-8 summit in Genoa (2001) (Giuffo 2001). Defense of democracy, and calls for its deepening and enrichment, lies at the heart of the struggle against neoliberalism. As Stephanie Ross points out, “A central element of the movement’s critique of contemporary capitalism is that corporate power organized on a global scale undermines the capacity of citizens and national communities to make independent decisions about social, economic and political priorities” (2002, 281). Neoliberal globalization, in other words, “eats democracy for breakfast” (Kingsnorth 2003, 122). Protests against corporate globalization are almost invariably protests in favor of democracy.

In this paper, we explore the relations between globalization and democracy as they emerge in the struggle against neoliberalism. Dispute over the meaning of globalization and democracy is a large part of what the struggle against neoliberalism is all about. The international institutions promoting neoliberalism are dominated by the world’s most powerful states, almost all of which have democratically elected governments. These governments have responded to what they term “antiglobalization” protests by trumpeting their democratic credentials and reasserting the necessity and desirability of globalization as a remedy for problems of poverty, underdevelopment, and democracy—in their view, globalization is good for democracy. In contrast, critics of neoliberalism have questioned the empirical evidence and the theoretical models underpinning neoliberal policies and practices. Opponents of neoliberal globalization stress the ways in which democracy is undermined both in how policy is generated and implemented and in the effects of neoliberalism. Evidently, globalization and democracy are contested terms.

What our collective future will look like, and the place of democracy in it, will “depend upon the outcomes of current social struggles, struggles in which the meanings assigned to ‘globalization’ [and democracy] are central“ (Rupert 2000, 42). Analysis of the struggle against neoliberalism also throws light on the future of democracy. State responses to protests against neoliberalism—typically articulated as “antiglobalization protests—have had significantly antidemocratic consequences and implications, through the “criminalization of dissent” (e.g., Klein 2002, part 3). An oft-overlooked feature of the political dynamics highlighted in the struggle against neoliberalism is the continuing centrality of the state’s coercive functions in the context of economic globalization. Reinforcing this dynamic, protests against neoliberal globalization are also increasingly seen as a threat to state security. In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, protests against corporate globalization are increasingly defined in legislation as forms of terrorism, opening the way to the securitization of protest.2 Because of such measures, the scope for democratic freedom of expression, even in those states most often held up to the rest of the world as the best models of a modern liberal democracy, is dramatically narrowed.

This paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we locate the so-called antiglobalization movement in the long-term and worldwide critique of neoliberal or corporate globalization. We note that this “movement” is not new, is not against globalization, and is not a single movement, and that central concepts at issue in the debate over neoliberalism—notably globalization and democracy—are highly contested. In the second section, we then compare and contrast the competing conceptions of globalization and democracy put forward by advocates and critics of neoliberal globalization. We highlight the political salience of these contradictory conceptions and their centrality to contemporary political struggles. In the third section, we examine the practical implications for the future of democracy and globalization as manifested in the coercive policing of “antiglobalization protest.” In particular, we examine the criminalization of dissent and the securitization of protests through brief analyses of the policing of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Vancouver in 1997 and post–September 11 antiterrorist legislation, respectively. In conclusion, we argue that the widening impact of neoliberalism, the coercive policing of political protest, and the growing limitations on civil rights and liberties cast severe doubts on the future of liberal democracy.

Neoliberalism and the “Antiglobalization Movement”

Much discussion of the protests in Seattle and since, particularly by state managers and in the media, has stressed the novelty and the violent character of the antiglobalization movement. The protests in Seattle in 1999, when protesters briefly succeeded in halting the meeting of the WTO and helped prevent the launching of a new round of trade negotiations, are represented as the defining moment of a new development in world politics. Policing agencies, shocked and embarrassed by the initial success of the Seattle protest, stressed the necessity of using more aggressive policing to counter the violent tactics of the “antiglobalization movement.” Following Seattle, similar protests took place in rapid succession at the IMF–World Bank meetings in Washington and Prague in 2000 and the EU summit in Gothenberg and the G-8 summit in Genoa in 2001, providing further evidence of the “movement’s” power and reach. Politicians and corporate media highlighted the violent character of the protests, and media images of violent “antiglobalization” protesters confronting rank upon rank of heavily armed riot police in mass demonstrations have become increasingly commonplace.

Representations of the protests and the people making them in these terms, however widespread and taken for granted, are unconvincing. For example, the protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful. As events in Gothenberg and Genoa suggested, in fact, the state, acting through the police, is responsible for most of the violence (e.g., Callinicos 2003). There are also good reasons for questioning whether the “antiglobalization” movement is new, antiglobalization, or a movement, despite repeated claims to the contrary (e.g., Crossley 2002). Making sense of the so-called antiglobalization movement and antiglobalization protests is hampered by the systematic misrepresentation—most often by state managers and the corporate media—of the protests, their character, and motivations. In this section, we locate the “antiglobalization movement” in its proper context, the long-term and worldwide critique of neoliberalism. This in turn will enable us to consider how its evolution has shaped its strategies and state responses.

What are conventionally labeled “antiglobalization protests” are directly linked to the long-standing effort to resist neoliberalism. Over the past two or three decades, criticism of neoliberalism has emerged from a wide variety of different locations. Increasingly, the views held by organizations and movements (such as Third World Network, Jubilee 2000, Direct Action Network, Global Exchange, the International Forum on Globalization, Peoples Global Action) and campaigns against particular corporations (such as Nike) or practices (such as sweatshops)—to name just a few—have converged on a common problem: the growth and expansion of corporate globalization. Naomi Klein nicely sums up both the central issue and the rapid evolution of the understanding of what is happening to the world that drives the struggle against corporate globalization: “We’ve gotten very good at naming the problem. It’s taken a while. In the three-year trajectory that I’m writing about, it went from a critique of a few bad apple corporations, to a critique of privatization, to a critique of neo-liberalism as it’s being enforced, to a deeper understanding that this is a stage of capitalism” (qtd. in Chihara 2002). Increasingly also, these and other organizations have combined in protests and events such as the “global street party” held on May 16, 1998, to protest a variety of issues linked to the global political and economic system, its operation and consequences.

Despite the tendency to perceive this as a novel development in world politics, a perception reinforced by the success of movement histories such as Klein’s No Logo (1999) and Fences and Windows (2002), global antineoliberal struggle is not new. Protests highlighted by the media in places like Seattle, London, and Davos between 1999 and 2001 are only the latest in a long series of events expressing the genuinely global extent of opposition to neoliberalism (e.g., Shah 2003). Contemporary “antiglobalization” struggles have their roots in the “food riots” and “IMF riots” of the 1980s that protested policies of structural adjustment allegedly “imposed” on debtor states in the global South by the IMF and the World Bank (e.g., Walton and Seddon 1994).3 International media inattention to the world outside the overdeveloped North, and the protests and struggles taking place there, has generated a systematic blindness to the immense impact of neoliberalism on the South. As a result, more recent struggles in places like Seattle appear novel and are attributed a significance that is misleading and overstated. Meanwhile, “antiglobalization” protests large and small, the bulk of them outside the tunnel vision of the media, have continued apace since 1999 (Bircham and Charlton 2001). According to data compiled by the World Development Movement, since the Seattle protests in 1999 there have been more than 120 separate episodes of civil unrest in twenty-two poor countries directed at IMF and World Bank policies (Woodroffe and Ellis-Jones 2001; Ellis-Jones 2002). Contrary to representations of these protests as a novel development in world politics, then, arguably all that is new is the scale of the protests, their increasingly international and networked character, and the—admittedly welcome—media attention.

Contemporary criticisms of neoliberalism have emerged out of a long-standing and increasingly sophisticated set of efforts both to understand policies such as structural adjustment and to articulate alternatives to them. The rhetoric of “there is no alternative” (TINA for short), made famous by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher but also adopted by the international financial institutions, forced individuals, groups, and organizations opposed to privatization and debt reduction, for example, to offer alternative solutions to the problems such policies purported to address. After almost two decades of work, elements of the “antiglobalization movement” are able, through organizations like the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), to put forward a sophisticated alternative set of proposals for how the world economy should be governed, organized around economic democracy and sustainability. As a result, claims made repeatedly by proponents of corporate globalization that there is no alternative to neoliberalism, that critics are merely protectionists in disguise, or that they offer no realistic and concrete proposals, ring increasingly hollow. Indeed, neoliberalism is increasingly argued to be itself a utopian project, implausible on theoretical, empirical, and normative grounds: “To keep arguing as they do—that a system that homogenises global economic activity and culture to benefit corporations, removes power from communities and puts it into global bureaucracies, marginalizes and makes homeless millions of farmers and workers, and devastates nature can survive for long—that is utopianism. It’s not going to work” (International Forum on Globalization 2002, 32).

Seen in this light, it is immediately apparent that for many of those who participate in the so-called antiglobalization movement, the issue isn’t globalization at all. Opposition to neoliberalism does not necessarily entail opposition to globalization. The term “antiglobalization” has been routinely rejected by prominent participants in the struggle as a media-imposed description of a more complex reality. Participants in “antiglobalization protests” at meetings of the WTO, IMF, and G-8 are typically not opposed to trade or globalization per se, only the neoliberal or corporate form these currently take. Far from being “antiglobalization,” through their actions the protesters are in fact turning globalization into a “lived reality,” and one “not restricted to a narrow series of trade and tourism transactions” (Klein 2002, xv). What they want is not globalization from above, by and for the rich and the powerful, but rather globalization from below, for the vast majority who are poor and weak. To label these struggles “antiglobalization,” then, is “at best a contradiction, at worst a slander,” a better description, argues Susan George, would be the “global citizens movement” (2001).

Terms like “global citizens movement” are an improvement over “antiglobalization movement” and help clarify just who is participating in global actions such as Seattle and Genoa, but they also obscure the dynamics of what is happening. Convergence on common issues and problems—neoliberalism or corporate globalization—has not translated into either a common organizational structure or a centralized leadership. For this reason it makes little sense to refer to an antiglobalization or a global citizens’ movement. In part, this reflects the diverse origins of the different groups and organizations opposed to neoliberalism and the diverse character of the struggles in which they are engaged. Myriad differences—of emphasis, constituency, and strategy—persist. In part, too, it is also an expression of the broad-based commitment to democracy amongst the various movements opposed to neoliberalism. For this reason Naomi Klein suggests the phrase “a movement of movements” (1999).

It has become commonplace to criticize the “antiglobalization movement” as unrepresentative and undemocratic, but such representations again misrepresent a more complex reality. Significant elements of the “antiglobalization movement” are opposed to centralized leadership or the notion that democracy is synonymous with majority rule. Decision making often takes place through decentralized processes of deliberation and encompasses an explicit willingness to disagree, about tactics for example and the kinds of actions in which individuals feel willing to participate, whilst continuing to share an opposition to corporate globalization (e.g., Prokosch and Raymond 2002). In Seattle, many of the participants in the action “were organized into small groups called affinity groups. Each group was empowered to make its own decisions around how it would participate in the blockade. There were groups doing street theater, others preparing to lock themselves to structures, groups with banners and giant puppets, others simply prepared to link arms and nonviolently block delegates. Within each group, there were generally some people prepared to risk arrest and others would be their support people in jail as well as a first aid person” (Starhawk 2002, 135–36). Relations between groups, both in events like Seattle and in the “movement” more generally, are arranged in a series of more or less formal links and networks, within which particular groups and organizations retain their own identity and autonomy; hence Klein’s term: a movement of movements. The conception of democracy that emerges out of such processes is both richer than liberal democracy and defined in important ways against its perceived failings.

What is at stake in the “antiglobalization movement” and its struggle against neoliberalism and the burgeoning institutions of global governance, then, is neither “globalization” and “democracy” per se nor their absence. It is the quite dramatically different conceptions of what globalization can and should be—whether and in what ways it is inevitable, and to whose benefit it should be organized—and what democracy might mean—both in theory and in practice—that animates these movements and their critics.

For and Against Neoliberalism: Narratives of Globalization and Democracy

It is widely recognized that globalization was “the buzzword of the 1990s” (Hay and Marsh 2000, 1). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, to paraphrase Zygmunt Bauman, globalization is still “on everybody’s lips” (1998, 1). However, if “everyone” is talking about globalization, they are not saying the same thing. Analyses of globalization differ, often profoundly, over the conceptualization of globalization, its effect on the state, and its normative implications, amongst other things. There is no single account of what globalization is or what it means. Instead, we are faced with a large and diverse range of competing accounts, an ever-expanding “global babble” (Abu-Lughod 1991, 131). That said, not all discourses of globalization are created equal. Recognizing the existence of competing discourses or narratives of globalization opens up the question of how these discourses relate to one another and to other forms of social power as well as their effects. In this section, we compare and contrast the competing narratives of globalization and democracy put forward by advocates and critics of neoliberalism.

Different discourses construct globalization in different ways, producing significant material and ideological effects. Put simply, the representations that people entertain about globalization—what they think it is and how they think it works—affect how they act. When allied with economic, cultural, and political power, this can render globalization discourse a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Hay and Marsh put it, “Somewhat ironically, the very discourse and rhetoric of globalization may serve to summon precisely the effects that such a discourse attributes to globalization itself” (2000, 6). At the same time, the discourse and rhetoric of globalization may also obscure or render politically neutral the agencies and relations of power through which this phenomenon is produced. For instance, understanding globalization as simply the way the world is, as something to which we must respond, serves significantly to produce the state of affairs alleged already to exist. Many discourses of globalization work by claiming that globalization is already upon us and that we must respond to its new “realities.” In implementing the policies supposedly designed to manage those “realities,” state actors render them true, or at least increasingly true, while also making it harder to see the ways in which “globalization” doesn’t just happen but must be made to happen.

“Liberalization Works”: Corporate Globalization and Democracy

At the heart of neoliberal discourses of globalization sits a narrative of progress, driven by technological change. This narrative presents globalization as evolutionary, inevitable, and beneficial. Using “history” as his evidence, Mike Moore, former head of the WTO, stated in a speech “In Praise of the Future”: “Globalization is a process, not a policy. It’s just accelerating. Just as we went from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural, feudal societies and then into the industrial age, so today we are in the post-industrial age” (1). Governments and businesses do not debate globalization’s existence but respond to its effects. Driving this “process” is technological change, which has made globalization “a fact of life”: it is “simply the latest phase in the evolution of international business and the integration of the world economy” (Fitzgerald 1997, 739).

The most important changes—both cause and effect of globalization—concern the expansion and institutionalization of free trade. The “integration of the world economy,” driven by technology, is an unambiguously good thing, according to the neoliberal discourse: “trade liberalization and economic growth” form a “virtuous circle” (Moore, “The WTO,”2). “From the ancient Egyptians onwards the countries that have prospered—and not just economically—have been those that were open to new ideas, that traded” (Clare Short, qtd. in Underhill 2001, 2). According to The Economist, an enthusiastic globalization booster, the multinational companies that bring globalization to the developing world are “the embodiment of modernity and the prospect of wealth; full of technology, rich in capital, replete with skilled jobs” (Hooper 2001, 64). As Moore announced to a New Zealand audience in 2000: “Ladies and Gentlemen: I come to praise the future. There has never been a time in the history of our species when we have had such an opportunity to build better living standards and a safer and more secure world for all. Globalization is a part of this opportunity” (“In Praise of the Future” 1). The reason? “Liberalization works” (Moore, “The WTO,” 2).

Moreover, these benefits are virtually universal: “For the rich world, almost as much as for today’s poor countries, the next twenty-five years will be a time of unprecedented opportunity” (The Economist, qtd. in Hooper 2001, 65). Despite the recognition that globalization is developing unevenly—a recent IMF staff report acknowledges, “Some countries are becoming integrated into the global economy more quickly than others” (2000, 1)—the assumption remains that globalization will benefit the developing countries by producing economic growth. The IMF report continues: “Countries that have been able to integrate are seeing faster growth and reduced poverty” (2000, 1). Even more emphatically, Renato Ruggiero, another former head of the WTO, asserted in 1996 that “No one stands to benefit more from globalization than developing countries” because “production is now mobile, capital footloose, technology diffuse. . . . Globalization has erased the old ground rules for economic growth, providing countries, once relegated to perpetual ‘third world’ status, the tools to fast-forward their development” (1996, 3). The WTO mantra has become that “Poor countries need to grow their way out of poverty” (Moore, “Promoting Openness, Fairness, and Predictability,” 4). Achieving this end, however, requires rewriting the rules of the world economy. “Globalization,” asserts Ruggiero, “is an evolving reality. Our choice is between managing this reality and taking advantage of its immense potential, or attempting to resist the inevitable” (1996, 7).

Despite the benefits that derive from free trade—including greater international peace and harmony4—individuals and groups often have incentives to resist free trade, particularly if it threatens their established privileges in terms of exclusive access to markets, for example, or protection from competition in the provision of services. Governments too, for reasons having to do with the dynamics of liberal democratic electoral systems and election cycles, have incentives to reward their supporters and disadvantage their opponents in ways that distort the operations of the world economy. The influence of lobbyists can shape policy in ways that reduce economic efficiency. Making free trade a reality requires the reduction of trade barriers and protectionism but liberal democracy in its formal institutional expression provides means by which groups and individuals can mobilize public power to secure private benefits that hurt other producers and consumers. Imbalances of power between states put small states at a disadvantage, while enabling stronger states to shape terms of trade in ways that may benefit them whilst undermining the global efficiencies free trade produces. For all these reasons, then, it is necessary to implement a set of rules and institutional mechanisms through which the ideal of free trade can be realized.

Mike Moore explained it like this in defense of the WTO: “People do want global rules. If the WTO did not exist, people would be crying out for a forum where governments could negotiate rules, ratified by national parliaments, that promote freer trade and provide a transparent and predictable framework for business” (“The Backlash against Globalization?” 4). The past decade has seen a growing number of international agreements that taken together establish such a framework, in particular the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the FTAA, and the General Agreement on Services (GATS).5 Through these means is brought into existence “a system of multilayered global and regional governance . . . marked by the internationalization and transnationalization of politics, the development of regional and global organizations and institutions, and the emergence of regional and global law” (Held and McGrew 1998, 233). In the words of Ruggiero, speaking as head of the WTO, “We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among separate national economies. We are writing the constitution of a single global economy” (1996). The issue raised by a proliferating structure of global governance beyond the state, however, is, What happens to democracy?

Democracy in contemporary world politics is organized in territorial terms, within the context of particular sovereign states. The establishment of a global system of rules governing international trade, as both a function of past globalization and a commitment to a globalized future, potentially undermines the place of democracy in the brave new world envisaged by neoliberalism. The growth of new structures of governance beyond the state potentially puts in doubt the ability of citizens in liberal democratic societies to effectively express their preferences and exercise sovereignty. For proponents of neoliberal globalization, however, concerns about the process by which such arrangements are chosen and put in place, as well as their effects, are misplaced. From their point of view, democratic control of the process of globalization already exists. This is particularly apparent in the WTO, for example.

Recognizing that “Current trade rules affect the lives of everyone on this planet” (“The WTO” 1), Moore has been at pains to convince his audiences, “We are not a world government” (“In Praise of the Future” 4; “The Backlash against Globalization?” 4). Instead, the WTO is an intergovernmental arrangement and so is democratically accountable. The agreements made by WTO are “negotiated by Ambassadors and Ministers who represent their governments. We operate by consensus and every member government, therefore, has veto power.” Moreover, “governments are in turn accountable to parliaments” and “elected parliamentarians are the measurable and accountable representatives of civil society” (“Openness, Fairness, and Predictability,” 2). At the end of this long chain, the people still rule. Contrary to the critics of neoliberalism, then, the WTO is the concrete expression, not the antithesis, of the democratic control of the global economy. No reason to worry, then. The discourse of neoliberal globalization paints an optimistic vision of a globalized future that rests on a liberal, market-oriented, techno-utopian individualism. Neoliberal discourses have not gone uncriticized, however. What, then, is wrong with neoliberalism?

“Outing a Global System”: Anticorporate Globalization and Democracy

Opponents of corporate globalization stress three interrelated concerns (e.g., International Forum on Globalization 2002). First, against the claims that neoliberalism will produce a dramatically richer and more peaceful world, critics argue that neoliberalism cannot deliver on its promises. Not only is the empirical evidence against the neoliberal model of free trade and its effects but the understanding of economic globalization itself also is wrong or a deliberate misrepresentation. Second, there is nothing inevitable about the “process” of globalization. Instead, it is the product of particular agencies and institutions, promoting some interests over others in pursuit of a very specific and contestable future, itself only one of many possibilities. In its dominant neoliberal form, globalization is the millennial dream of corporate capital (Smith 1997). Third, against the claims that corporate globalization is an expression of democracy, critics charge that both the means by which globalization is being pursued and its consequences work against the ability of citizens to exercise meaningful democratic control over their everyday lives. At the heart of all three lines of criticism, then, is an understanding of neoliberalism as a form of political, economic, and cultural order promoted by and for corporate capitalism, not for the vast majority of the world’s people; the critique of neoliberalism amounts to nothing less than “outing a global system” (Naomi Klein, qtd. in Chihara 2002).

Protests against corporate globalization have long focused on the democratic deficits in the process by which the global economy’s new constitution is being written and cemented in place, both at the international level—in international institutions and agreements—and in the policies and practices of states around the world. For example, much attention has focused on the secretive means through which agreements like those of GATS are negotiated. A major target of contemporary neoliberal globalization is the privatization of public services, most notably public utilities, health, and education. It is difficult to organize effective resistance to these efforts if members of national and global civil society do not know what is under negotiation or on what terms. Lack of information about the content of negotiations also makes it difficult to assess the truthfulness of statements by state actors and international institutions—many of which turn out on inspection to be false or misleading—about the aims and effectiveness of international agreements (e.g., World Development Movement 2003). Meanwhile, corporate interests enjoy privileged access to policy makers and play a dominant role in structuring the terms of debate in international negotiations such as those concerning the environment, which consistently define corporations not as a source of environmental degradation but instead as part of the solution to the environmental crisis—through the privatization of services, for example (see Chatterjee and Finger 1993). Democracy, both in substantive input into decision-making processes and in the legitimization of outcomes, requires transparency and good quality information, something simply impossible if negotiations are held in secret or interested parties are excluded from them altogether.

Critics of neoliberalism have also highlighted its antidemocratic consequences. In particular, critics have been keen to highlight the authoritarian character of the WTO. The WTO is a “rule-making and rule-supervisory organization” (O’Brien et al. 2000, 137). Through its procedures, “the organization and control of vital national decisions have been gradually and irretrievably [sic] displaced from national control to a supranational organization shrouded in secrecy” (O’Brien et al. 2000, 136). Typical in this regard is the Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM). It is through the TPRM, in part, that “trade liberalization is increasingly subjecting domestic policy and regulations to the standards of the global trade regime” (O’Brien et al. 2000, 137). The WTO thus “wields unprecedented powers of surveillance and enforcement” in the areas of trade in goods, trade in services, trade-related investment, and trade-related intellectual property issues. This produces the “‘harmonization’ of (formerly ‘domestic’) rules and regulations governing business insofar as these appear, from the neoliberal perspective, as potential non-tariff barriers to trade” (Rupert 2000, 45–46). In the process, the meaning of “free trade” is stretched to cover issues and relations that range far beyond “trade” as it is more commonly (and narrowly) understood.

Neoliberal constructions of the WTO as “a rules-based, member-driven organization—all decisions are made by the member governments, and the rules are the outcome of negotiations among the members”—obscure its role as a vehicle through which an authoritative discourse of liberalization is institutionalized and imposed on the world economy. Indeed, as the Summary of the Final Act of the Uruguay Round makes clear, “The WTO framework ensures a ‘single undertaking approach’ to the results of the Uruguay Round—thus, membership in the WTO entails accepting all the results of the Round without exception” (http://www.wto.org). The policy choices of democratic states, in other words, are at the mercy of a distant, technocratic elite. Similar relations are apparent in the policies and practices of the IMF and the World Bank. These globalizing institutions, also bastions of neoliberalism (e.g., O’Brien et al. 2000, 189–91), impose the discourse of corporate globalization on poor states as a condition of assistance. Another, if less global, example of suprastate regulation is NAFTA. As some critics have argued, the policies of NAFTA “subordinate democratically developed standards to those created by supranational and democratically unaccountable entities. The ‘impact on trade’ would be the only yardstick for judging a large body of public laws with those who benefit from free trade as the judges” (Alternative Women-in-Development Working Group 1993, qtd. in Rupert 2000, 88).

Despite the liberal arguments praising globalization for its progressive effects on the freedom and prosperity of the individual person, understood essentially as a consumer and occasionally as a voter, globalization has thus far as often as not made things worse. This is especially apparent in relation to democracy. In a neoliberal world, democracy holds, at best, a paradoxical position. On the one hand, democracy in its liberal form is central to how neoliberalism explains and legitimates both the present state of world politics and the future. Neoliberalism equates democracy with polyarchy and defines it in an explicitly formal and institutional manner (e.g., Dahl 1961). What matters, from this point of view, is the character of the procedures through which governing elites are selected. By definition, if they are elected in free elections between multiple competing parties, governments are democratic. Policies adopted by such governments are also by definition democratic and legitimate. In the face of neoliberalism, however, such a conception fails even on its own terms. The imposition of neoliberal policies through mechanisms of global governance such as the IMF and the WTO means “the flip side of neoliberal economic policies is the global crisis in representative democracy” (Naomi Klein, qtd. in Chihara 2002). Efforts to institutionalize global free trade severely circumscribe the ability of democratic publics to determine the political, economic, and social arrangements that shape their everyday lives (e.g., Fisher and Ponniah 2003). In George Monbiot’s words, “Everything has been globalized except our consent” (2003, 1). Faced with choices between candidates and parties who accept neoliberalism as the taken-for-granted framework of policy, voters are increasingly likely to withdraw from the electoral process: Why vote when all the meaningful questions about policy have already been decided?

From this perspective, neoliberalism is not the expression of democracy, as proponents claim, but its antithesis. “Contemporary post-sovereign governance is strewn with democratic deficits” (Scholte 1997, 26). Mark Rupert puts it even more strongly: “Democracy is the unfulfilled promise of liberal capitalism,” he argues, “a promise which could not be met without calling into question the privileged status of private property, the powers of the class who owns it, and the social self-understandings of abstract individualism, which are attendant upon all of these” (2000, 5). Against the stipulated conception of democracy as liberal democracy, critics of corporate globalization such as Scholte and Rupert deploy a stronger conception, grounded in an appreciation of the historically mutable and contested nature of democracy in general and liberal democracy in particular.

There is a persistent tension in liberal democracy between liberalism—the rights of the individual person and of private property—and democracy—rule by the people (e.g., Bowles and Gintis 1986). Indeed, much of the history of Western European and North American societies is driven by struggle between these two ideals. It is in part through reflection on these histories that democracy has come increasingly to be understood not as a fixed set of institutional arrangements but as a project, as the product of political struggle over the degree to which diverse publics can participate in ordering the conditions of their lives. John Dryzek defines democratic projects in terms of scope—the range of social domains to which democracy is considered applicable—franchise—the number and character of those who may participate in deliberations about a domain—and authenticity—whether or not the deliberations take place in a clear, nontechnical language (1996, 4–6). Neoliberalism is in these terms a very thin form of democracy.

Democratic projects are also shaped by local and international relations of power. In other words, different forms of democracy are linked to the particular social contexts out of which they emerge and reflect the relations of power found there, of capital and labor, for example, or core and periphery. C. B. Macpherson and many others have pointed out that a capitalist socioeconomic order of the kind promoted by neoliberalism limits the democratic potential of liberal democracy and constrains the prospects for development beyond polyarchy (1977). The democratic deficits evident in contemporary world politics are not accidental or incidental to the rise of neoliberalism; instead, they are a reflection of the implications of a neoliberal order for the forms democratic projects can take. Applying the litmus test of democracy to neoliberalism, it turns out, is a powerful tool for “outing” the contemporary global system. Naming the beast has not been enough, however; despite temporary setbacks such as the failed effort to establish a Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the neoliberal project rolls on, promoted by governments of diverse political coloration and often in the face of large-scale political opposition. If neoliberalism is not on the ballot, or if political parties are willing to say one thing during elections and then do another once in office, voting is an ineffective means to register dissent from it. Recent resort to direct action on the part of the “global citizens’ movement,” and the emergence of the movement in the first place, is in large part a response to the perceived failings of “democratic” electoral politics.

The existence of multiple, sometimes overlapping, sometimes competing discourses of globalization and democracy highlights the political significance of these terms. “Globalization,” like “democracy,” is multi-accentual in that different interests can be and are refracted in this sign (Voloõinov 1986, 22–23). The meaning of globalization and the ability to define it authoritatively is contested because, as we noted above, the futures of world politics depend on the outcome of struggles in which the meanings assigned to globalization and democracy are central. The existence of competing visions of the future and the social forces that promote them also means that neoliberalism cannot be taken for granted but must be defended, by force if necessary. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS), released by the White House in September 2002, states unequivocally that the twentieth century issued in “a single sustainable model of sustainable success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise” (“Introduction”). According to the NSS, a central aim of U.S. security policy is to unleash a new era of global economic growth through the genius of free trade and free markets, in the service of producing a richer and freer world. The recent onset of a worldwide war on terrorism has not superseded neoliberalism; indeed, the two are inseparable.

Defending Neoliberalism: “Antiglobalization” Protests and the State

Despite the increasing sophistication and strength of the case against neoliberalism, and the growing number and organization of groups opposed to neoliberalism, recent years have witnessed neither retreat nor reform but rather acceleration of the efforts to put in place a global free-trade regime. In one forum after another, corporate globalization has become more entrenched, often aided and abetted by social democratic and labor parties—as in Britain, New Zealand, and South Africa, for example—dependent for electoral support on the very groups most disadvantaged by the privatization of public services and the adoption of free trade. Critics have also made relatively little impact on the international financial and trade institutions, which continue to celebrate and enforce corporate globalization. Looking back over two decades of largely ineffective efforts to resist neoliberalism, Naomi Klein observes, “we’re winning the argument but losing the war, because we have I think failed to really think seriously about power and how political change happens. I think a lot of us on the left still believe that it is about winning arguments, it’s about marshalling facts, being damning, just kind of auditing the record. And maybe we’re not thinking about the fact that nothing’s going to change until we really start organizing counterpowers that can be countervailing forces to the impunity we’re seeing from corporations or the state” (qtd. in Chihara 2002). It is in this context—of an increasing skepticism that governments and international institutions were in fact amenable to intellectual persuasion—that groups opposed to neoliberalism have turned increasingly to forms of direct action, both peaceful and, for a small minority, violent.

In much discussion of globalization—by both proponents and critics of neoliberalism—the role of the state in the world economy is understood to be diminishing. Globalization is about the escape of corporations from state control and this is seen, depending on one’s point of view, as either a positive or a negative development: reduced state control contributes either to greater economic efficiency as businesses make decisions on strictly economic grounds or to greater power for business over citizens as it escapes the reach of their duly elected representatives. In both scenarios, the escape of capital from the state is taken for granted. Such understandings, however, seriously misunderstand the role of the state in the world economy. Economic activity depends on the presence of public authorities able to define, defend, and ensure property rights. Currencies remain a state responsibility. Businesses also depend on the state to ensure a “good business climate,” whether in low and stable interest rates, a well-trained and disciplined labor force, or the provision of physical infrastructure, for instance. Most discussion of the central importance of the state to globalization focuses on its economic functions (e.g., Panitch 1996)). Analysis of the role of the state in the recent wave of “antiglobalization protests” in North America and Western Europe highlights the continuing centrality of the state’s coercive function in the context of neoliberal globalization. It would be a mistake, however, to see the state as simply reacting to the actions of protesters. Opposition to neoliberalism is itself a reaction to the prior use of state power to impose neoliberal policies on people and communities around the world. The state—and its various functions: economic, social, cultural, and coercive—has been and continues to be central to neoliberalism and its imposition and defense.

State “reaction” to the recent wave of “antiglobalization” protests in North America and Western Europe has taken two closely related forms: the criminalization of dissent and, particularly after the attacks of September 11 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the securitization of protest. In the process, the space for democratic expression has been significantly narrowed. We discuss these “reactions” through brief analysis of the 1997 protests at the Vancouver meeting of APEC, one of the best-documented instances of liberal democratic state policing of neoliberalism, and the impact of post–September 11 antiterrorist legislation on the right to dissent.

APEC 1997: The Criminalization of Dissent in Canada

Dramatic protests against the “democratic deficits” and distributional consequences of neoliberal globalization policies have occurred at many recent “global governance” events—at international meetings of governments, international institutions, and economic leaders. Such protests may enable host states to display—and thereby legitimate—their democratic qualities (Ericson and Doyle 1999, 591–92). A more disturbing trend in the policing of “antiglobalization protests,” however, is the growing criminalization of dissent. Through a variety of measures—including surveillance of individuals and groups before and during protests, preventive arrests, censorship of peaceful protest, and police violence—dissent is effectively transformed from a right into a marginalized and criminalized activity. This is well illustrated in the policing of the APEC summit held in Vancouver in 1997.

In November 1997 the fifth APEC summit took place at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver. An organization of eighteen states, APEC is working toward the goal of open trade and investment in the Pacific region by 2020. Already by 1997, ritual celebrations of neoliberalism such as APEC summits were a target for protest. The policing of the APEC summit in Vancouver, which subsequently became the subject of a government inquiry, revealed just how far the government of a liberal democratic state like Canada was prepared to go in defense of neoliberalism. Police forces “made illegal preventive arrests, censored peaceful expression, and assaulted protesters who were already dispersing” (Ericson and Doyle 1999, 602). Before the APEC meetings, Canadian security agencies carried out unprecedented levels of surveillance against lawful groups planning dissent. Extensive lists of security threats were compiled that included many legitimate organizations whose primary threat appeared to be a willingness to exercise their democratic rights to demonstrate. Examples included the National Council of Catholic Women, Catholic Charities USA, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, the Canadian Council of Churches, and the Council of Canadians (Pugliese and Bronskill 2001).

These threat assessments were compiled by the summit Threat Assessment Group (TAG), which included members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Vancouver police, the Canadian military, Canada Customs, and the Immigration department. It was often difficult to determine precisely why particular persons and groups had been targeted. For instance, Joan Russow, a sixty-two-year-old former leader of the Green Party of Canada, attended the summit not as an activist but as a reporter for the Oak Bay News, a local community paper in Victoria. Security staff questioned whether the newspaper existed and withdrew her press pass. However, according to the threat assessment on Ms. Russow, she was a “media person” and a “UBC protest sympathizer” judged “overly sympathetic to APEC protesters” (Pugliese and Bronskill 2001).

Other cases are more sinister, however: threat assessments were also used for preventive arrests. The TAG described Jaggi Singh, a writer and activist, as the biggest threat to the APEC summit. According to evidence produced in the RCMP’s inquiry into the policing of the protests, Singh was under surveillance before the summit and, as a “high profile” member of APEC Alert, an organization opposed to APEC and its neoliberal policies, he was targeted for arrest. On the day before the summit, Singh was “walking alone between two buildings on campus, a pedestrian area. Three men in suits said my name. They grabbed me and pushed me to the ground quite violently, saying I was under arrest. They did not show badges nor their IDs. I resisted their attempts but I’m not very strong physically, or am I a violent person. My hands were wrenched behind my back and cuffed tightly. I was trying to scream for help, but my mouth was covered by someone’s hands. An unmarked car screeched onto the scene and I was thrown into the back head-first” (qtd. in Manning 1999). Singh was driven to the RCMP detachment at UBC; on the way his captors identified themselves as RCMP officers. Held in custody for four nights, Singh was effectively removed for the duration of the summit. The charges against Singh—that he had assaulted a police officer some seventeen days earlier by pointing a megaphone at him—were subsequently dropped in February 1999, two weeks before he was due to come to trial. Nor was this an unusual outcome: according to Ericson and Doyle (1999, 595), of forty-nine protesters arrested and detained before and during APEC, only one—Singh—was eventually charged with a criminal offense.

The policing of the APEC conference became the subject of a government inquiry after complaints about the way in which dissent was handled; the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP subsequently released an extensive 453-page report (http://www.cpc-cpp.gc.ca/eAPEC.asp). Focusing on technical issues raised by “the policing of public order events,” the report and its recommendations overlooked the larger political context within which the events at APEC had occurred (Commission for Public Complaint against the RCMP 2001). Four years later, many of the techniques deployed at Vancouver in 1997 had become standard practice, in Canada and elsewhere. The criminalization of dissent—aimed at “antiglobalization protesters”—continued apace. In the aftermath of the shootings at Gothenburg in 2001, proposals were developed that entailed the effective criminalization of dissent in the EU by allowing for “the ongoing surveillance of any group whose concerns might lead them to take part in an EU-wide protest” (“The ‘Enemy Within’” 2001). Also in 2001, Belgium and the Netherlands proposed that the EU draw up “detailed common EU public order criteria” as the grounds for “refusing entry to EU citizens and expelling EU citizens from EU member states” (“Public Order Policing in Europe” 2001). This would be used to contain not only so-called football hooligans but also “antiglobalization protesters” and other demonstrators. The major objective was “preventing ‘known troublemakers’—what U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair at Genoa called an ‘anarchists’ traveling circus’—from leaving their own country to join in protest in another” (“Public Order Policing in Europe” 2001). The 1997 APEC debacle is not unusual but rather typical in the policing of protests against neoliberalism. Further acceleration of the growing criminalization of dissent and the emergent trend to securitize protests has occurred in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Post–September 11 Antiterrorist Legislation: The Securitization of Protest

It is often mistakenly assumed that the increased policing of political dissent evident in the state’s response to “antiglobalization” protests is largely a reaction to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In fact, most of the measures rushed into legislation in the aftermath of the attacks had been in preparation before September 11. The primary effects of the attacks were first to make it easier to pass into law legislation that previously had been subject to challenge and second to make the link between protest and security tighter. In many legislative responses to September 11, protests against corporate globalization are lumped in, either explicitly or implicitly, as forms of terrorism with very different events like the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (e.g., Panitch 2002). In equating political protest, and antiglobalization protest in particular, with terrorism—however misleading if not simply wrong it might be to make such an equation—political protest has come increasingly to be defined as a security issue. In short, protest has become securitized, with highly damaging consequences for democratic expression.

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, major pieces of antiterrorist legislation were passed in the United States, the European Union, and elsewhere. A common feature of this legislation is to expand the array of measures available to state agencies in dealing with a range of activities deemed terrorist in nature. The qualification is necessary because, in the process, the definition of what constitutes terrorism has been both expanded and made more imprecise. As a result, it has become easier to treat public protests and demonstrations—and the persons and organizations that participate in them—as terrorist. In Europe, the main piece of legislation was the EU Framework Decision on Combating Terrorism, which passed through EU Council and the European Parliament before Christmas 2001 and came into effect on June 23, 2002.6 The Framework is binding and must be incorporated into national law in EU member states and those seeking to become members.

Article 1 of the Framework defines “Terrorist offences” to include “the following list of intentional acts which, given their nature and context, may seriously damage a country or an international organization, as defined as offences under national law, where committed with the aim of: i. seriously intimidating a population, or; ii. unduly compelling a government or international organization to perform or abstain from performing any act, or; iii. seriously destabilizing or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country or an international organization.” Under article 1.iii.e, these offenses also include “causing extensive destruction to a government building or public facility, a transport system, an infrastructure facility, including an information system, a fixed platform located on a continental shelf, a public place or private property likely to endanger human life or result in major economic loss” (qtd. in Bunyan 2002, 3). As Tony Bunyan points out, it is relatively easy to imagine circumstances in which such a definition could be made to apply to the actions of protesters at a meeting of an international organization such as the IMF or the WTO. “There are millions and millions of people who, quite rightly, want governments or international organizations (NATO, WTO, etc.) to ‘perform or abstain’ from many acts. If this ‘aim’ is furthered by demonstrations/protests that result—for whatever reason—in, for example, extensive damage to private property resulting in a major economic loss, then these people become ‘terrorists’ through the effects of their actions” (2002, 3). Further reinforcing such concerns is the failure of the majority of EU governments explicitly to protect citizens exercising their democratic right to protest from the provisions of the Framework. Notably, actions by the armed forces of a state in the exercise of their official duties are so excluded.

Similar concerns about the reduced scope for protest after September 11 are raised by the USA PATRIOT—the United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism—Act, which became law on October 26, 2001. The massive, 342-page bill was passed without committee debate or public hearings and was the subject of almost no floor debate in Congress. In the U.S. House of Representatives, amendments to the bill were not permitted. Section 802 of the Act creates the new federal crime of “domestic terrorism.” Domestic terrorism includes “acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws” if they “appear to be intended . . . to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion” and if they occur “primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.” As Nancy Chang observes, the vague and expansive nature of this definition makes it easier for federal law enforcement agencies to read it “as licensing the investigation and surveillance of political activists and organizations based on their opposition to government policies. It may also be read by prosecutors as licensing the criminalization of legitimate political dissent. Vigorous protest activities, by their very nature, could be construed as acts that ‘appear to be intended . . . to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.’” In addition, she argues, “clashes between demonstrators and police officers and acts of civil disobedience—even those that do not result in injuries and are entirely nonviolent—could be construed as ‘dangerous to human life’ and in ‘violation of the criminal laws.’” Environmental activists, antiglobalization activists, and antiabortion activists who use direct action to further their political agendas are particularly vulnerable to prosecution as ‘domestic terrorists’” (Chang 2002).

As even these very brief sketches of the legislation rushed into place in the European Union and the United States after September 11 suggest, similar conceptions of terrorism are being deployed on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, it is also apparent that the kinds of activities that might count as terrorism are sufficiently broad and loose as to encompass many of the types of actions taken by opponents of neoliberalism. As we have argued, at the core of the opposition to neoliberalism sits an overt and abiding concern about the implications of neoliberal policies for democracy. Put differently, the opposition to neoliberalism is not antiglobalization—as politicians and international bureaucrats regularly charge—but prodemocracy. In the aftermath of September 11, such protest is increasingly understood in liberal states as a threat to state security. The implications for efforts to challenge neoliberal policies, and for the future of democracy more generally, are frightening.

Conclusion: Globalization/Antiglobalization and the Future of Democracy

As we have shown, popular opposition to the policies and practices associated with neoliberal globalization is not a new phenomenon. “Antiglobalization” has an international history—even if not under that name—in protests against the IMF and the World Bank. While acknowledging this history, however, our focus in this paper has been on the recent set of protests typically highlighted by the corporate media and by leading elements within the various “antiglobalization” movements themselves. Unlike past and present opposition to the IMF and the World Bank, the great bulk of which has occurred in the developing world, these protests have also taken place in the overdeveloped states of the North. In part, this location explains the attention they have received from the global media. Within contemporary discussions of world politics, these societies—North America and Western Europe in particular—are often held up as models to the rest of the world of what a modern liberal or market democracy looks like. Analysis of antiglobalization protests and the reaction they have engendered here—in well-established liberal democracies such as Canada, Britain, Italy, and the United States, for example—helps us better appreciate the all-too-real limits of democratic expression and the control of political power in our world. It also provides a better insight into the future of democracy in a neoliberal world.

Contrary to myths of progressive enlightenment in liberal democracies, the savage policing of political protest, particularly of labor but also other marginalized groups, has long been a defining feature of public life in both the North and the South. In this sense, the evident willingness of quintessentially liberal states to coercively police antiglobalization protests is nothing new. However, as the array of social subjects rendered insecure by the ongoing processes of neoliberal globalization continues to expand, so it becomes increasingly difficult for the state not only to present itself as the representative of all its citizens but also to claim that the protests are the actions of a radical, marginal few. The emergence of a “global citizens’ movement” suggests just how wide is the social impact of neoliberalism. Perhaps this helps explain growing limitations on free speech, civil liberties, and popular protest itself, and also answers the question: “Why must every meeting of the world’s financial managers be accompanied by police tactics to stifle free speech and disrupt the opposition?” (Guma 2001). The implications of corporate globalization and the growing criminalization of dissent it seems to entail—even for those states long held up as the very models of liberal democracy—is the building of “chain link democracy” (Braun 2001, 7).

Notes

1. Our thanks to Mark Francis and the Department of Political Science, University of Canterbury, Christchurch , New Zealand, for providing the material means of production for this paper.

2. Following Ole Waever’s seminal discussion, we use the term “securitization” to mean the discursive practices through which a potential threat comes to be performed as a security issue (Waever 1996).

3. The qualification is necessary, if only to acknowledge the complexity of the relations between state managers, international financial institutions, and the adoption of neoliberal policies. For two excellent case studies, which highlight different aspects of this complexity, see Broad (1990) and Kelsey (1993); on the relations between the state and neoliberalism more generally, see Panitch (1996). Such research reveals the misleading view of the character of corporate globalization and its sources held by elements of the “antiglobalization” movement itself, something we cannot address here; see Kiely (2002) for related criticisms.

4. On claims for a peace between liberal democratic states (also referred to as “market democracies”), see Barkawi and Laffey (2001). This paragraph draws on the WTO’s own arguments justifying a global organization for the defense of a rules-based world economy. See http://www.wto.org.

5. Also important is the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI); but see Rosenberg (2002).

6. Our analysis of the EU Framework Decision on Combating Terrorism draws on Bunyan (2002).

Ian Blair is right to open up debate on the police, but in reality their success depends on an end to the Blatcherite consensus

Robert Reiner
Thursday November 24, 2005
The Guardian

We all kill the things we love, warned Oscar Wilde. The police were the darlings of Thatcherism, and they are at least as adored by Blair. But the economic neoliberalism at the heart of the Blatcherite consensus brought a social tsunami mortally endangering the policing traditions these politicians revere.

The supposed golden age of British policing by consent (most of the 20th century, but particularly the 1940s and 50s) was a confidence trick. Crime and order were maintained by informal social controls, above all the gradual inclusion of the whole population into common citizenship. However, the police took much of the credit. In myriad individual cases police helped people in distress, although there was also rampant corruption and brutality. But the contribution of policing to the maintenance of order overall was primarily symbolic. Much research evidence shows that policing had little effect on levels of offending.

The police have been in a growing quandary since the early 1970s, as social changes have driven up crime rates and disorder. The key drivers have been the bitter fruits of economic neoliberalism (increasing long-term unemployment, inequality, poverty), an egoistic consumerist culture and declining deference. Economic laissez-faire engendered moral laissez-faire. There is copious evidence demonstrating that inequality produces crime and violence. This is not primarily because of social exclusion or poverty. It is relative deprivation that counts most. Contrary to Blair's many quips on the topic, the rich are a major part of the problem.

The crucial shift underlying the current crisis came in the early 1990s, when New Labour accepted the economic and social framework of Thatcherism. This meant that the second half of the celebrated slogan "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" could only have a very narrow meaning. The basic driver of crime, triumphant neoliberalism, was deemed beyond government control. So the police had to start living up to their myth, delivering the effective crime control once produced by the social cohesion that was being ripped apart.

To a limited extent the police have been able to keep a lid on crime, given the fair wind of relative economic prosperity since the mid-1990s. But the public remain worried despite falling overall crime rates; and rightly so, because nothing has changed in relation to the fundamental sources of insecurity. This is indicated by the growth of more serious crime within the overall reduction.

Terrorism has brought all this out in a dramatic way, but the issues are not dissimilar to those posed by other forms of crime. Government policies in Iraq and elsewhere have clearly exacerbated the causes of terror, and the police are left trying to suppress the symptoms. The perpetrators of terrorist and indeed other crimes bear the immediate moral responsibility for their heinous acts, and it is right that all is done to bring them to justice. But responsible efforts to reduce risk require analysis of the wider causes. Raymond Chandler said it best in The Long Goodbye: "Crime isn't a disease, it's a symptom. Cops are like a doctor that gives you aspirin for a brain tumour."

In his Dimbleby lecture last week, Sir Ian Blair called for "a debate about what kind of police service we want". This is a welcome recognition that, in a democracy, policies about policing cannot be the preserve of professionals. But the government seems only too eager to invite the police to shape policy, most blatantly in its deferral to police claims about the need for 90 days' detention for terror suspects.

Sir Ian attributes crime and antisocial behaviour to three trends: declining influence of "the agencies of community cohesion" (churches, trade unions, housing associations), the disappearance of non-police "agents of social enforcement" (park-keepers, caretakers, bus conductors), and the closure of long-stay psychiatric institutions.

These agencies were immediate sources of community cohesion. But such cohesion ultimately depends on wider social and cultural processes, including stable employment, the family as a crucible of responsibility and support, and a sense that the social order is just in its allocation of rewards. Sir Ian notes that it is now 60 years since the postwar Labour government's pledge of the welfare state to eradicate Beveridge's five giants: want, idleness, ignorance, squalor and disease. He suggests that Beveridge would now have added a sixth giant, insecurity about antisocial behaviour, crime and terrorism, "to join the remnants of his other five". But insecurity is largely the result of the resurgence of the other five giants, as the welfare state has been rolled back and "modernised" to near extinction.

Sir Ian's basic question, "What kind of police service do we want?" cannot be considered in isolation from the question of the kind of society we have and want. Policing is a symbol, not a source, of the character of a civilisation. Policing cannot be expected to underpin a social order whose foundations have been eroded by Blatcherite neoliberalism.

· Robert Reiner is a professor of criminology at the London School of Economics

Neoliberalism and the Demise of Democracy:
Resurrecting Hope in Dark Times

August 7, 2004

Neoliberalism has become one of the most pervasive, if not, dangerous ideologies of the 21st century. Its pervasiveness is evident not only by its unparalleled influence on the global economy, but also by its power to redefine the very nature of politics itself. Free market fundamentalism rather than democratic idealism is now the driving force of economics and politics in most of the world, and it is a market ideology driven not just by profits but by an ability to reproduce itself with such success that, to paraphrase Fred Jameson, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of neoliberal capitalism.

Wedded to the belief that the market should be the organizing principle for all political, social, and economic decisions, neoliberalism wages an incessant attack on democracy, public goods, the welfare state, and non-commodified values. Under neoliberalism everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit. Public lands are looted by logging companies and corporate ranchers; politicians willingly hand the public’s airwaves over to powerful broadcasters and large corporate interests without a dime going into the public trust; Halliburton gives war profiteering a new meaning as it is granted corporate contracts without any competitive bidding and then bilks the U.S. government for millions; the environment is polluted and despoiled in the name of profit-making just as the government passes legislation to make it easier for corporations to do so; public services are gutted in order to lower the taxes of major corporations; schools more closely resemble either malls or jails, and teachers are forced to get revenue for their school by hawking everything from hamburgers to pizza parties. As markets are touted as the driving force of everyday life, big government is disparaged as either incompetent or threatening to individual freedom, suggesting that power should reside in markets and corporations rather than in governments (except for their support for corporate interests and national security) and citizens.

Under neoliberalism, the state now makes a grim alignment with corporate capital and transnational corporations. Gone are the days when the state “assumed responsibility for a range of social needs.” [1] Instead, agencies of government now pursues a wide range of “‘deregulations,’ privatizations, and abdications of responsibility to the market and private philanthropy.” [2] Deregulation, in turn, promotes “widespread, systematic disinvestment in the nation’s basic productive capacity.” [3] Flexible production encourages wage slavery and disposable populations at home. And the search for ever greater profits leads to outsourcing which accentuates the flight of capital and jobs abroad. Neoliberalism has now become the prevailing logic in the United States, and according to Stanley Aronowitz “...the neoliberal economic doctrine proclaiming the superiority of free markets over public ownership, or even public regulation of private economic activities, has become the conventional wisdom, not only among conservatives but among social progressives.” [4]

The ideology and power of neoliberalism also cuts across national boundaries. Throughout the globe, the forces of neoliberalism are on the march, dismantling the historically guaranteed social provisions provided by the welfare state, defining profit-making as the essence of democracy, and equating freedom with the unrestricted ability of markets to “govern economic relations free of government regulation.” [5] Transnational in scope, neoliberalism now imposes its economic regime and market values on developing and weaker nations through structural adjustment policies enforced by powerful financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Secure in its dystopian vision that there are no alternatives, as England’s former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once put it, neoliberalism obviates issues of contingency, struggle, and social agency by celebrating the inevitability of economic laws in which the ethical ideal of intervening in the world gives way to the idea that we “have no choice but to adapt both our hopes and our abilities to the new global market.” [6] Coupled with a new culture of fear, market freedoms seem securely grounded in a defense of national security, capital, and property rights. When coupled with a media driven culture of fear and the everyday reality of insecurity, public space becomes increasingly militarized as state governments invest more in prison construction than in education. Prison guards and security personnel in public schools are two of the fastest growing professions.

In its capacity to dehistoricize and depoliticize society, as well as in its aggressive attempts to destroy all of the public spheres necessary for the defense of a genuine democracy, neoliberalism reproduces the conditions for unleashing the most brutalizing forces of capitalism. Social Darwinism has been resurrected from the ashes of the 19th century sweatshops and can now be seen in full bloom in most reality TV programs and in the unfettered self-interests that now drives popular culture. As narcissism is replaced by unadulterated materialism, public concerns collapse into utterly private considerations and where public space does exist it is mainly used as a confessional for private woes, a cut throat game of winner take all, or a advertisement for consumerism.

Neoliberal policies dominate the discourse of politics and use the breathless rhetoric of the global victory of free-market rationality to cut public expenditures and undermine those non-commodified public spheres that serve as the repository for critical education, language, and public intervention. Spewed forth by the mass media, right-wing intellectuals, religious fanatics, and politicians, neoliberal ideology, with its ongoing emphasis on deregulation and privatization, has found its material expression in an all-out attack on democratic values and on the very notion of the public sphere. Within the discourse of neoliberalism, the notion of the public good is devalued and, where possible, eliminated as part of a wider rationale for a handful of private interests to control as much of social life as possible in order to maximize their personal profit. Public services such as health care, child care, public assistance, education, and transportation are now subject to the rules of the market. Construing the public good as a private good and the needs of the corporate and private sector as the only source of investment, neoliberal ideology produces, legitimates, and exacerbates the existence of persistent poverty, inadequate health care, racial apartheid in the inner cities, and the growing inequalities between the rich and the poor. [7]

As Stanley Aronowitz points out, the Bush administration has made neoliberal ideology the cornerstone of its program and has been in the forefront in actively supporting and implementing the following policies:

[D]eregulation of business at all levels of enterprises and trade; tax reduction for wealthy individuals and corporations; the revival of the near-dormant nuclear energy industry; limitations and abrogation of labor’s right to organize and bargain collectively; a land policy favoring commercial and industrial development at the expense of conservation and other pro environment policies; elimination of income support to the chronically unemployed; reduced federal aid to education and health; privatization of the main federal pension programs, Social Security; limitation on the right of aggrieved individuals to sue employers and corporations who provide services; in addition, as social programs are reduced, [Republicans] are joined by the Democrats in favoring increases in the repressive functions of the state, expressed in the dubious drug wars in the name of fighting crime, more funds for surveillance of ordinary citizens, and the expansion of the federal and local police forces. [8]

Central to both neoliberal ideology and its implementation by the Bush administration is the ongoing attempts by free-market fundamentalists and right wing politicians to view government as the enemy of freedom (except when it aids big business) and discount it as a guardian of the public interest. The call to eliminate big government is neoliberalism’s great unifying idea and has broad popular appeal in the United States because it is a principle deeply embedded in the country’s history and tangled up with its notion of political freedom. And yet, the right wing appropriation of this tradition is racked with contradictions in terms of neoliberal policies.

The advocates of neoliberalism have attacked what they call big government when it has provided essential services such as crucial safety nets for the less fortunate, but they have no qualms about using the government to bailout the airline industry after the economic nosedive that followed the 2000 election of George W. Bush and the events of 9/11. Nor are there any expressions of outrage from the cheerleaders of neoliberalism when the state engages in promoting various forms of corporate welfare by providing billions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies to multinational corporations. In short, government bears no obligation for either the poor and dispossessed or for the collective future of young people.

As the laws of the market take precedence over the laws of the state as guardians of the public good, the government increasingly offers little help in mediating the interface between the advance of capital and its rapacious commercial interests. Neither does it aid non-commodified interests and non-market spheres that create the political, economic, and social spaces and discursive conditions vital for critical citizenship and democratic public life. Within the discourse of neoliberalism, it becomes difficult for the average citizen to speak about political or social transformation, or to even challenge, outside of a grudging nod toward rampant corruption, the ruthless downsizing, the ongoing liquidation of job security, or the elimination of benefits for people now hired on part-time.

The liberal democratic vocabulary of rights, entitlements, social provisions, community, social responsibility, living wage, job security, equality, and justice seem oddly out of place in a country where the promise of democracy has been replaced by casino capitalism, a winner-take-all philosophy, suited to lotto players and day traders alike. As corporate culture extends even deeper into the basic institutions of civil and political society, buttressed daily by a culture industry largely in the hands of concentrated capital, it is reinforced even further by the pervasive fear and insecurity of the public that the future holds nothing beyond a watered down version of the present. As the prevailing discourse of neoliberalism seizes the public imagination, there is no vocabulary for progressive social change, democratically inspired visions, or critical notions of social agency to expand the meaning and purpose of democratic public life. Against the reality of low wage jobs, the erosion of social provisions for a growing number of people and the expanding war against young people of color at home and empire-building abroad, the market-driven juggernaut of neoliberalism continues to mobilize desires in the interest of producing market identities and market relationships that ultimately sever the link between education and social change while reducing agency to the obligations of consumerism.

As neoliberal ideology and corporate culture extend even deeper into the basic institutions of civil and political society, there is a simultaneous diminishing of non-commodified public spheres —those institutions such as public schools, independent bookstores, churches, noncommercial public broadcasting stations, libraries, trade unions and various voluntary institutions engaged in dialogue, education, and learning–that address the relationship of the individual to public life and foster social responsibility and provide a robust vehicle for public participation and democratic citizenship. In the vacuum left by diminishing democracy, religious zealotry, cultural chauvinism, xenophobia, and racism have become the dominant tropes of neoconservatives and other extremist groups eager to take advantage of the growing insecurity, fear, and anxiety that result from increased joblessness, the war on terror, and the unraveling of communities.

As a result of the consolidated corporate attack on public life, the maintenance of democratic public spheres from which to launch a moral vision or to engage in a viable struggle over politics loses all credibility–not to mention monetary support. As the alleged objectivity of neoliberal ideology remains largely unchallenged within dominant public spheres, individual critique and collective political struggles become more difficult. [9] It gets worse. Dominated by extremists, the Bush administration is driven by an arrogance of power and inflated sense of moral righteousness mediated largely by a false sense of certitude and never ending posture of triumphalism. As George Soros points out this rigid ideology and inflexible sense of mission allows the Bush administration to believe that “because we are stronger than others, we must know better and we must have right on our side. This is where religious fundamentalism comes together with market fundamentalism to form the ideology of American supremacy.” [10]

As public space is increasingly commodified and the state becomes more closely aligned with capital, politics is defined largely by its policing functions rather than an agency for peace and social reform. As the state abandons its social investments in health, education, and the public welfare. It increasingly takes on the functions of an enhanced police or security state, the signs of which are most visible in the increasing use of the state apparatus to spy on and arrests its subjects, the incarceration of individuals coincided disposable (primarily people of color), and the ongoing criminalization of social policies. Examples of the latter include anti-begging ordinances and anti-loitering that fine or punish homeless people for sitting or lying down too long in public places. [11] An even more despicable example of the barbaric nature of neoliberalism with its emphasis on profits over people and its willingness to punish rather than serve the poor and disenfranchised can be seen in the growing tendency of many hospitals across the country to have patients arrested and jailed if they cannot pay their medical bills. The policy, right out of the pages of George Orwell’s 1984, represents a return to debtors prisons, which is now chillingly called “body attachment,” and is “ basically a warrant for... the patient’s arrest.” [12]

Neoliberalism is not simply an economic policy designed to cut government spending, pursue free trade policies, and free market forces from government regulations; it is also a political philosophy and ideology that effects every dimension of social life. Neoliberalism has heralded a radical economic, political, and experiential shift that now largely defines the citizen as a consumer, disbands the social contract in the interests of privatized considerations, and separates capital from the context of place. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism portends the death of politics as we know it, strips the social of its democratic values, and reconstructs agency in terms that are utterly privatized and provides the conditions for an emerging form of proto-fascism that must be resisted at all costs. Neoliberalism not only enshrines unbridled individualism, it also destroys any vestige of democratic society by undercutting its “moral, material, and regulatory moorings,” [13] and in doing so it offers no language for understanding how the future might be grasped outside of the narrow logic of the market. But there is even more at stake here than the obliteration of public concerns, the death of the social, the emergence of a market-based fundamentalism that undercuts the ability of people to understand how to translate the privately experienced misery into collective action, and the elimination of the gains of the welfare state. There is also the growing threat of displacing “political sovereignty with the sovereignty of the market, as if the latter has a mind and morality of its own.” [14] As democracy becomes a burden under the reign of neoliberalism, civic discourse disappears and the reign of unfettered social Darwinism with its survival-of-the-slickest philosophy emerges as the template for a new form of proto-fascism. None of this will happen in the face of sufficient resistance, nor is the increasing move toward proto-fascism inevitable, but the conditions exist for democracy to lose all semblance of meaning in the United States..

Educators, parents, activists, workers, and others can address this challenge by building local and global alliances and engaging in struggles that acknowledge and transcend national boundaries, but also engage in modes of politics that connect with people’s everyday lives. Democratic struggles cannot under emphasize the special responsibility of intellectuals to shatter the conventional wisdom and myths of neoliberalism with its stunted definition of freedom and its depoliticized and dehistoricized definition of its own alleged universality. As the late Pierre Bourdieu argued, any viable politics that challenges neoliberalism must refigure the role of the state in limiting the excesses of capital and providing important social provisions. [15] At the same time, social movements must address the crucial issue of education as it develops throughout the cultural sphere because the “power of the dominant order is not just economic, but intellectual–lying in the realm of beliefs,” and it is precisely within the domain of ideas that a sense of utopian possibility can be restored to the public realm. [16] Most specifically, democracy necessitates forms of education that provide a new ethic of freedom and a reassertion of collective identity as central preoccupations of a vibrant democratic culture and society. Such a task, in part, suggests that intellectuals, artists, unions, and other progressive movements create teach-ins all over the country in order to name, critique, and connect the forces of market fundamentalism to the war at home and abroad, the shameful tax cuts for the rich, the dismantling of the welfare state, the attack on unions, the erosion of civil liberties, the incarceration of a generation of young black and brown men, the attack on public schools, and the growing militarization of public life. As Bush’s credibility crisis is growing, the time has come to link the matters of economics with the crisis of