From Jan. 31-Feb. 4, the World Economic Forum (WEF) will be meeting
at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan for it's annual summit. Alexander
Downer, who attended the 1998 Summit, describes the Summit as
the world's 'Business Olympics'. The yearly meeting, usually
held at WEF headquarters in Davos, Switzerland, was rescheduled
to meet in New York as a token of support for the injuries our
city sustained on September 11th.

The WEF is, in a way, a big cocktail party for the global corporate
elite. As an organization, it has no power to actually set policy,
but it creates a space in which international "leaders" can hash
out their vision for the rest of us. In their own words, "they
are fully engaged in the process of defining and advancing the
global agenda." More specifically, it's our globe, but it's their
agenda.

The Forum was born in 1971 as a yearly 'European Management Forum'
of Euro-corporates. It was funded by the European Commission until
1987, when it became the WEF and started to claim global reach.
Its membership reflects its class orientation, and includes the
most prominent transnational corporations, 1000 of which make
up the WEF 'Foundation Members'. In addition, there is a club
of 'Global Growth Companies'; 300 'Industry Governors'; 300 Global
Leaders of Tomorrow'; 'World Economic Leaders' from both politics
and business; 'World Media Leaders' from 100 media groups; 100
'World Cultural Leaders'; and 'Forum Fellows' from academia and
the heads of national economic research organizations.

The WEF aspires to be an agenda-setting Forum. It is, in its own
modest opinion, 'the foremost global partnership of business,
political, intellectual and other leaders of society committed
to improving the state of the world'. With the diffusion of neo-liberalism,
and consequent advances in corporate globalization from the 1980s,
the WEF has taken on an unprecedented role as a rallying point
for global elites, and as a vehicle for class power. Clearly the
WEF can't set the agenda and certainly can't determine the outcomes
- it is not a conspiratorial cabal standing over society. Rather,
it is a class grouping, fully embedded in social relations, that
self-consciously takes on the role of planning for collective
class interests. It seeks to influence the political agendas and
respond to the prevailing challenges - and in this respect, as
Kees van der Pijl argues, it is the first 'true International
of capital'.

The Forum has been remarkably successful - since 1971 the 'state
of the world' has dramatically improved for many of the participating
corporations. WEF strategizing drove the neo-liberal agenda in
the 1980's, bringing together politicians from the 'pretender'
states of the newly industrializing world, as well as from the
OECD states, to map out an agenda with transnational business
executives. It offered a proactive forum, removed from the public
gaze, and played a central role in diffusing neo-liberalism. The
model was presented as the solution to the crises of accumulation
experienced in the 1970s and early 1980s, and was highly effective
in extending the reign of the market.

This success has come at the price of built-in uncertainty and
instability. Globalized neo-liberalism had led to a dramatic redrawing
of the boundaries of capitalism (or rather, an unbounding of capitalism
altogether). Temporal boundaries have melted away with the speeding
up of circulation; spatial boundaries have been superceded with
the growing transnational reach of corporations; even socio-psychological
boundaries have lifted, with the increased commodification of
life. A newly empowered transnational capitalist class has emerged
triumphant, presiding over the new landscapes of accumulation.
But class hegemony is by no means assured - uncharted territory
imposes incalculable risk. Speeding circulation compresses business
cycles; confidence rests on ephemera; ideological symbols are
presented as so-called 'fundamentals'; frenzied speculation rules.
Corporate transnationalism exhausts social and physical environments;
deeper commodification disassembles social solidarity and generates
powerful imperatives for cultural survival, often carried through
the new modes of social communication.

As a result, since at least the mid 1990s, neo-liberal prescriptions
have been widely discredited (just look at the present crisis
in Argentina). Exponential rises in executive salaries, and in
corporate accumulation, along with a dramatic concentration of
economic power across all sectors, offer clear evidence of the
success of neo-liberalism as a class strategy. But neo-liberal
globalization has also brought unprecedented levels of global
inequality, and undreamed-of degrees of financial instability,
environmental exhaustion and social dislocation. The neo-liberal
triumph has created new sources of opposition, the impacts and
responses have been unrelenting, and advocates have been forced
to go on the defensive. The high water mark was 1995, when the
OECD declared it was marking out a 'global vision for the year
2020, a New Global Age'. But already a political revival, inspired
by social democratic ideas, and expressed in a new form of social
liberalism sometimes described as the 'Third Way', was sweeping
the OECD.

As neo-liberal prescriptions have unraveled, there has been an
urgent revision of the WEF's neo-liberal project. The WEF has
left behind its market fundamentalism, and now is charting a new
agenda for corporate globalism, one that embraces rather than
rejects 'the social'. The massed ranks of analysts, consultants
and advisers, from credit ratings agencies, management consultancies,
inter-governmental institutions and non-government organizations,
have entered the fray, battling to define the new accumulation
paradigm. There are continuing efforts to enhance 'market discipline',
to suppress the advancing crises, to institutionalize transnational
class power, and render neo-liberal globalism irreversible. Yet
there is also deepening dissent amongst policy-making groups.
There is a rethinking of neo-liberalism even amongst the most
elite institutions: as Hans-Peter Martin and Herald Schuman demonstrate,
many of the most powerful players in global capitalism are questioning
the 'dictatorship of the market'. Primary advocates and beneficiaries
of neo-liberal globalism, such as George Soros and Ted Turner,
both of whom had embarked on paternalist interventions - the imaginatively
branded 'Soros Foundation' and 'Turner Foundation' - began expressing
sincere regrets at the social costs of neo-liberalism. Other elements,
as van der Pijl highlights, went further and increasingly have
been rethinking and explicitly 'mobilizing against yesterday's
prescriptions'. These have much wider ramifications, potentially
enabling 'a deepening of democracy, a reappropriation of the public
sphere by the population, and eventually a more fundamental transformation
away from class society'.

Recent developments have only strengthened the leverage of this
dissenting segment. Institutional crises of legitimacy have accumulated,
with the OECD shelving its 'Multilateral Agreement on Investment'
in 1998, the temporary ditching of the World Trade Organization's
'Millenium Round' in 1999, and the advancing crisis in the International
Monetary Fund's global regime of 'structural adjustment'. Add
into the equation the continuing crisis in 'transitional' post-communist
societies, especially Russia, and the severe jolt delivered to
the 'Newly Industrializing countries' of East Asia by financial
'contagion' in 1997-8, and the impending bursting of the infotainment
bubble, then the challenges to neo-liberalism begin to seem irresistible.
Expressing this, there have been the dramatic public explosions
against neo-liberal globalization: Geneva 1996, Cologne 1998,
Seattle 1999, Washington 2000, Montreal and Genoa 2001.

For the first time in many years, 'anti-capitalist' protest has
returned to the capitalist heartland, and to the global stage.
These protests open up the ideological space for the articulation
of alternative guiding principles, putting on the agenda the possibility
of transformation away from the current malaise. As the promotion
of capitalist discipline is questioned, protest targeted at the
agents of neo-liberal globalization gains remarkable political
leverage. In this political climate WEF meetings start to take
on a special significance. Since 1996 the WEF has attracted increasingly
militant opposition, and it has responded by attempting to re-chart
the neo-liberal project. The WEF response is to deliberately avoid
the appearance of backroom strategizing, and instead to seek a
higher public profile, attempting to reground its legitimacy by
being seen to engage with prominent advocates of the emerging
alternatives. The WEF is thus placing itself at the center of
debates about the revision of neo-liberalism, asserting that it
can play 'important role in forging the new geometry'.

Reflecting this, the WEF has reached out to those 'excluded' by
neo-liberal globalization - notably non-OECD governments, such
as Mexico and South Africa, and critical Non-Government Organizations,
such as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).
At Davos in 1998 Hillary Clinton argued the role of NGOs and other
representatives of 'civil society' had to be enhanced, while John
Sweeney, from the AFL-CIO, focused on issues of distribution,
arguing markets had to 'work for the majority and not simply for
the few'. In 1999 Vice-President Al Gore appeared with Kofi Annan,
who appealed for a 'global compact' between business and the UN
founded on 'core values in the areas of human rights, labor standards,
and environmental practices'. In 2000 President Clinton shared
the Millennial limelight - somewhat blurred by Seattle - with
Tony Blair. Davos policy debates are now couched in terms of 'institutional
accommodation', 'corporate responsibility' and 'global dialogue',
with sessions in 2000 on 'responsible globality', 'inclusive prosperity'
and 'sustainable development'. Perhaps most cynically, the WEF's
'World Competitiveness Scorecard' - a yearly league-table of 'how
national environments are conducive or detrimental to the domestic
and global competitiveness of enterprises' - was supplemented
by an 'Environmental Sustainability Index' at Davos 2000. At the
same time, as Jane Kelsey highlights, a new 'World Economic Community'
internet link-up between 10,000 key economic decision-makers -
an internet 'hotline' for concertizing corporate responses - is
being constructed.

The contest is on to establish a revised normative and institutional
framework for the global economy. The WEF is claiming a central
role in shaping the agenda, and some, such as the ICFTU, are participants
in the process, taking heart in the WEF's apparent willingness
to become an advocate of 'globalization with a human face'. But
the key question is whether the WEF should be permitted to drive
this agenda. Should a forum that is dominated by corporate interests
be encouraged to take on the role of mapping out future frameworks
for global governance? Should it be granted recognition and legitimacy
in this agenda-setting process? Or, rather, should its role be
challenged, and alternative sources of legitimacy be asserted?

There was a telling moment at Davos 2000 when the assembled executives
refused to vacate the conference chamber to enable a security
check before Clinton's speech. The US President's Security Service
was forced to back down after a corporate 'sit-in'. Clinton's
speech went ahead: even the President of the US has to respect
the wishes of the corporate club. Perhaps he should have joined
the 1000 protestors outside the conference venue, and joined the
democratic movement against corporate power.

There will be similar protests outside New York summit of the
WEF later this month. In 1999 the summit lobbied for regional
governments to back the coming WTO 'Millennium Round', arguing
that trade liberalization was inevitable and needed to be extended
into 'free and fair competition, protecting intellectual property
and foreign investment'. In
2002 we can expect much rhetoric about inclusiveness and sustainability.
There will be plenty of ironic moments and opportunities to politicize
globalized neo-liberalism.

Information on the anti-WEF protest is available at http://www.s11.org

Sources:
Kelsey, Jane, 2000, Reclaiming the Future, Bridget Williams Books,
Wellington;

Martin, Hans-Peter and Schumann, Harald, 1997, The Global Trap,
Pluto, Sydney;

Kees van der Pijl, 1998, Transnational classes and international
relations, Routledge, London.

The website of the World Economic Forum: http://www.weforum.org

James Goodman, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences,
University
of Technology Sydney (UTS), PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia,

Tel: 9514 2714, Fax: 9514 2332, Email: james.goodman@uts.edu.au

Website: http://www.uts.edu.au/fac/hss/Research/protglob