The Political Economy of Dissent: Global Publics After Cancun

Studies & Reports 10 of 23

"We need to drill down and determine the value of these informational flows for the stability and vitality of the global economy and national communities. The question is, will states and global international institutions learn to view these networked flows and actors as a public good essential for a more equitable order? Or, are nation-states on an irreversible collision course with global public dissenters, their ‘new rivals and competitors’?

In part one, we examine the realignment of forces that derailed the Cancun meeting to broaden and deepen the WTO’s world trade agenda held in September 2003, which according to conventional wisdom was supposed to be a done deal. The growing disjuncture between global cultural flows of people and ideas, and the rules and practices of globalization has created a highly unstable environment for the G-20 with many opportunities but equally significant political costs. Regardless of what EU and US may admit in public, at Cancun global dissent and its publics acquired visible agenda-setting power. The growth in influence of the ‘nixers’ and ‘fixers’ has contributed to a tectonic shift in the international economy that has immediate and far-reaching consequences for destabilizing globalization and its narrow economic agenda.

Part two focuses on how global cultural flows of ideas, texts and wealth have deepened the global environment of dissent at Cancun. Many of these flows are the consequence of free trade itself. They have accelerated as economic barriers have fallen facilitating the movement of ideas, people and texts driven by new technologies and the appetite for mass culture. Increased trade has increased cultural interaction globally. These concentrated movements of peoples and ideas beget other flows triggering a cyclical movement of dissent and are highly disjunctive for the goals of economic globalization. When these global cultural flows function as catalysts for change, they become both a conduit and channel for the global movement of social forces. They set new agendas and, it is this agenda-setting capacity that challenges state authority globally no less locally.

The core argument can be summarized as follows: for G-20 countries powerful global cultural flows have added a whole new dimension to global dynamics that used to be primarily economic. Culture has become an explicitly fierce battleground against US cultural industries and American trade policies that are attempting to commodify cultural production and treat it like any other commodity on the world market to be bought and sold for profit. Cultural power, and its related issues, is the stamp of collective identity. If democracy is to be fostered argues Yudice, “public spheres in which deliberation on questions of the public good are to be held must be permeable to different cultures.” (Yudice, 2003:23) "