[ October 21, 2011 -- Note: In honor of the 2011 APEC Summit in Honolulu, I went digging into my files and found the paper that I presented at a Pacific Networking Conference in 1997 in Victoria on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. It was one of the side events of that year’s APEC People’s Summit, held alongside the official APEC Summit in Vancouver, BC. This is an old paper but I spoke about organizing and resistance against multinational corporations and working to hold onto or regain control of our communities. I think these issues are still relevant today, to some extent, although the world has changed so much in the past 14 years. Globalization is here to stay and we must explore ways of co-existing with global forces, seek to limit their excesses as well as find ways to maximize benefit from global trade and exchanges as well. Primarily, we need to globalize human rights, respect for workers’ rights, women’s rights, Indigenous rights, and human dignity, environmental protection, etc. These are our challenges today, and this paper written 14 years ago tried to address some of the fundamental issues, as I saw them then. As far as alternative forms of globalization, take a look at the Annexes at the end of the paper which I included as supplements to this paper 14 years ago, the Asia Pacific Charter of People’s Rights: Globalizing Solidarities and Global Principles Governing International Trade and Investment as Alternative to the MAI. The MAI was defeated but I think the principles here are still relevant. Fair trade is what we need not the “free trade” rights of powerful multinational corporations who are focused solely on profit to the exclusion of everything else. ]

FROM A POLITICS OF PLACE TO A POLITICS OF SPACE: ORGANIZING FOR RESISTANCE AND COMMUNITY CONTROL

By Richard N. Salvador

Department of Political Science

University of Hawai’i at Manoa

Honolulu, Hawai’i

1997 Pacific Networking Conference

“The Big Squeeze: Islands in the New Asia Pacific”

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

November 14 16, 1997

Introductory Remarks

Before I begin, I would like first to thank the sponsors of this conference, the South Pacific People’s Foundation, the Pacific Concerns Resource Center, and the Native Students Union at the University of Victoria. On a more positive note, I would like to rename this conference, at least in my mind, “the Great Deliverance.” As we gather to network, this year in Canada, the conference provides an unmistakable contrast to what will be taking place at the other forum, the APEC Summit in Vancouver. In fact, it has largely been the calculated designs of APEC against which the immediate objectives of this conference have been shaped in response.

Apparent in the designation of our sponsors’ names, I would like also to conclude we have come here from across the Pacific to celebrate an expanded definition of “Pacific Peoples” that is inclusive of both the “Rim” and the “Basin,” to address genuine “Pacific Concerns,” and to collaborate accordingly with “Native Peoples” from across this vast area of the world. We have gathered here to explore issues related thereto and, in the words of the conference brochure, “to explore alternative approaches that are fairer to Pacific Islanders.”

This is a daunting task, especially when we are faced with the tangible consequences of globalization. It is even more disheartening to consider the continuing impacts of this growing international integration of markets for goods, services, and capital. Many Pacific Nations are being compelled to integrate their economies to the global economy with promises of brighter economic futures. But when small, vulnerable communities are asked to remove all internal barriers to international trade, what will be left to replace the little dignity that we have stubbornly refused to acquiesce through several centuries of foreign colonialisms that have permanently disfigured our communal, collective selves?

Indeed, what is left at all when we have sold away the prospect of being the protagonists of our own destinies? I would argue, and no doubt you will all agree, that our unwillingness to let go of such a vital element of our sovereignty during colonialism, has become the foundation of our continued survival. It would seem ludicrous that we might simply let go NOW, only because our political leaders are so invested in maximizing a short term economic advantage. But beyond the immediate pressures being brought to bear on our political leaders, we are all being coerced to integrate ourselves with the globalized economy. A cursory examination of the potential benefits accruing in a globalized market, as is currently being assembled, would amass great economic benefits on the part of many metropolitan countries whose crusade it is to put into place a single world economy. If colonialism is taken to mean the pursuit of metropolitan nations’ goals by means of various forms of coercion, political and economic, then we might correctly perceive a literal “return to colonialism,” inherent in the nature of the politics of global economy.(1)

Before going any further to comment on some practical steps we might choose to take, I have chosen to develop a theoretical understanding of resistance to colonialism, a theoretical framework which I hope will be usefully employed in shaping not only our resistance to colonialism but also to modern, more sophisticated forms, of colonial like global (economic) orders.

A Theory of Resistance

I have been invested, in my educational training, in developing a deeper understanding of colonialism, and resistance to it. I have been grateful for the contributions of many scholars from the so-called “Third World.” In particular, the possibility that the ideology of nationalism might offer relevant notes of caution vis-à-vis the vexing problems of a globalized economy, interests me greatly. However, I should preface these remarks by noting a vital distinction inherent in the emergence of the study of nationalism as a largely negative, even a dangerously reactionary discourse, or what Michael Billig calls “banal nationalism,” and a positive force for reinvigorating formerly colonized places that Ahmad Aijaz describes in his book, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures.(2)

Admittedly, nationalist ideology, as Partha Chatterjee concedes, “is inherently polemical, shot through with tension; its voice, now impassioned, now faltering, betrays the pressures of having to state its case against formidable opposition.” Furthermore, he continued,

“such polemic is not a mere stylistic device which a dispassioned analyst can calmly separate out of a pure doctrine. It is part of the ideological content of nationalism which takes as its adversary a contrary discourse the discourse of colonialism. Pitting itself against the reality of colonial rule which appears before it as an existent, almost palpable, historical truth nationalism seeks to assert the feasibility of entirely new political possibilities.”(3)

It is the latter allusion to the emergence of a politics of liberation from colonialism, which, I argue, has some passing relevance to strategical imperatives vis-à-vis an increasingly globalized economy. To be sure, I am not interested in investing such strategical moves with what are oftentimes perceived to be a dogmatic even fanatical nationalism. As I’ve indicated, there is a practical value of asserting initially the importance of nationalism to a geographically based project of liberation. The immediate and long term theoretical challenge would be to postulate a mastery of this nation based theory of resistance and liberation toward a more dispersed locus, of power, e.g. a global economy. This is where I have tried to conceptualize a politics of resistance tested and reinforced on the ground, that is, in particular contexts within nation-states (a politics of place) in the process of informing a theory and praxis of resistance toward dispersed loci of power (a politics of space). This is where the title of this paper has come from.

As for the utility of a nation based politics and its further claims, Chatterjee added, “it is precisely in the innovative thinking out of the political possibilities and the defence of their historical feasibility that the unity is established between nationalist thought and nationalist politics. The polemical content of nationalist ideology is its politics.”(4) Judging from this, it would almost be a given to conclude that a desirable unity, in this instance, would be in order, and would be uncomplicated. An actual shift from a politics of place to a politics of space, however, would require a much more sophisticated analysis to effect including, of course, activism on the frontlines and constant vigilance toward an inclusive resistance movement. I would much prefer that a constant dialogue be encouraged with the progressive forms of nationalisms in order to arrive at a preferred unity of theory, and politics, of space.

Resisting Unaccountable Global Corporatist Regimes

What is the nature of that which we confront? It is crucial to keep in mind what we have to work against with regard to the global economy. By the World Bank’s own admission,

“Globalization is altering the world economic landscape in fundamental ways. It is driven by a widespread push toward the liberalization of trade and capital markets, increasing internationalization of corporate production and distribution strategies, and technological change that is rapidly dismantling barriers to the international tradability of goods and services and the mobility of capital.”(5)

In the World Bank’s World Development Report 1997, Bank economist Brian Levy compares the emerging global economy to the nineteenth century “Wild West” economy of the United States. His comparison is brief, but the point has been well made. Even the zealous proponents of a single world economy are telling us all to brace ourselves for what is coming. Ironically, Levy lectures on what the State must do, within an emerging global market that seeks to obliterate any semblance of Statist structures.(6)

European researchers describe a similar picture of a nascent state of predicament associated with globalization, in their ruminations about the Pacific. Their conclusions, at a recent conference in Vienna, on the future of the Lomé Convention (an economic agreement between the European Union and select African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries dubbed the “ACP countries,” in existence since 1970 and an expiry date of February 2000), are that “the balance sheet of globalisation is mixed,” that while only a very few countries have benefitted, “it has coincided with growing socio economic inequities between and within countries, and [actual] reversals in human development.”(7)

In his book, The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization, Joshua Karliner describes a number of facts about corporate globalization and how progressively corporations have come to dominate the lives of peoples/communities across the planet, contributing massively to environmental destruction, and impoverishing thousands of peoples, ultimately undermining democracy. He writes,

“Transnational corporations companies which operate in more than one country at a time have become some of the most powerful economic and political entities in the world today. More corporations have more power than the nation states across borders they operate. For instance:

• The combined revenues of just General Motors and Ford two of the largest automobile corporations in the world exceed the combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for all of sub Saharan Africa.
• The combined sales of Mitsubishi, Mitsui, ITOCHI, Sumimoto, Marubeni, and Nissho Iwai, Japan’s top six Sogo Sosha or trading companies, are nearly equivalent to the combined GDP of all of South America.
• Overall, fifty one of the largest one hundred economies in the world are corporations.
• The revenues of the top 500 corporations in the U.S. equal 60 percent of the country’s GDP.
• Transnational corporations hold ninety percent of all technology and product patents worldwide.
• Transnational corporations are involved in 70 percent of the world trade. More than thirty percent of this trade is ‘intra firm’; in other words, it occurs between units of the same corporation.

“How many are there?

• The number of transnational corporations in the world has jumped from 7,000 in 1970 to 40,000 in 1995.
• While ever more global in reach, these corporations’ home bases are concentrated in the Northern industrialized countries, where ninety percent of all transnationals are based.
• More than half come from just five nations France, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and the United States.
• Despite their growing numbers, power is concentrated at the top. For instance, the three hundred largest corporations account for one quarter of the world’s productive assets.”(8)

I should note that the nature and reach of corporations that engage in the production and distribution of goods and services as are essential for livelihoods of peoples should not be unduly under appreciated. Each of us benefit immensely from these economic activities that transgress borders of nation states. Nation states are only recent innovations in the history of humankind (dating back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that codified the principle of territorial integrity of nation states). These were only arbitrary political boundaries that hardly posed any threats to the cross border exchanges of goods and services that have been taking place for as long as human beings have lived on this planet. But for a time, they allowed a veneer of protection (however superficial they were) against which the “local” and “non local” activities of human migrations and economic exchanges defined peoples’s communal (national) spaces. It is apparent that the superficiality of these political boundaries are increasingly fraying under the intense pressures of transnational corporations transgressing all sorts of familiar spaces in the unrelenting search of Profit that profits no one but a few, very select players.

What, ultimately, is the nature of such transgressions of “national” boundaries? Is there a logic to the “typical” politics of economic globalization? Karliner describes yet again the extent of transnationals’ powers and the extent to which they impact peoples and their communities.

“Transnational corporations exert ever more significant influence over the domestic and foreign policies of the Northern industrialized government that host them. Indeed the interests of the most powerful governments in the world are often intimately intertwined with the expanding pursuits of the transnationals that they charter.

“At the same time, transnational corporations are moving to circumvent national governments. The borders and regulatory agencies of most governments are caving in to the New World Order of globalization, allowing corporations to assume an ever more stateless quality, leaving them less and less accountable to any governments anywhere.

“These corporations, together with their host governments, are reorganizing world economic structures and thus the balance of political power through a series of intergovernmental trade and investment accords. These treaties serve as the frameworks within which globalization is evolving allowing international corporate investment and trade to flourish across the Earth. They include:

• The Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)
• The World Trade Organization, which was created to enforce the GATT’s rules.
• The proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment [MAI].
• The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
• The European Union (EU).

“These international trade and investment agreements allow corporations to circumvent the power and authority of national governments and local communities, thus endangering workers’ rights, the environment and democratic political processes.”(9)

Dr. Jane Kelsey, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Auckland in Aotearoa, has written extensively on the nature of the coming global economic order, more particularly on the shape of things to come within the Asia Pacific. Her analyses of APEC provide useful descriptions of what we are up against, and argue, beyond an exclusive focus on the politics of Nation statism, for an agenda of engagement that is global both in nature and scope. Her findings bode ill for the future of the Pacific Basin, and the Rim. I encourage each of you to consult and familiarize yourselves with her writings, for they depict, in a description of the pertinent challenges facing the region, the shape of a new politics to come vis-à-vis APEC.(10)

“Rimsters,” as Bruce Cumings in 1991 called those celebrating the incipient birth of a regional economic forum dominated by the Rim countries, now extol the unrelenting evolution of this regional economic order; back then, as Cumings wrote, there were just “academics trying to find some way to interest fatcats in funding Asian or international studies. ‘Pacific Rim’ was a discourse searching out an incipient material base, targeted upon exporters within Asian markets, or importers of Asian products. It was “a field for transnational technocrats and policymakers.”(11)   In APEC, we have a perfect marriage between the two. Furthermore, today, so called APEC Study Centers proliferate across the Pacific as well as Cyberspace, now with formidable financial backing from big financial places as the IMF and World Bank, including the East West Center in Honolulu, which receives its funding from the United States Congress.(12)  These have pretty much settled in, and now dedicated to justifying the “virtues” of globalization.

Previous to my arrival here I received, via Email from Azziz Chowdry at the GATT Watchdog organization in Aotearoa, a new version of Dr. Kelsey’s paper, “APEC: To Engage or Not To Engage?,” posted earlier to the APEC L Forum. The question is indeed a difficult one to answer, as APEC promises no likelihood of ever being addressed by anyone outside of its informal structure, and discourages initiatives aimed at such engagement. Even the South Pacific Forum, the regional grouping of Pacific Island Nations, with the exception of Papua New Guinea, is not a member, but has an Observer status. Yet as a regional vehicle for effecting international integration of Pacific Basin and Rim nations’ economies into the global economy, and thereby bringing to pass a host of fundamental changes that will bring about a historic transformation of the Pacific as a whole, it is a vital entity. Kelsey writes that the way APEC operates, NGO participation “realistically…is never going to happen,” and wonders whether, in the absence of parity, there is any value to be gained from seeking such participation.

“APEC was born of the market, having been nurtured enthusiastically and protectively by the forces of market liberalisation, especially the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council [PECC]. They have achieved deep integration of the interests and voices of capital into every element of its operation and reinforced the dependency of states on markets. No NGO or people’s forum will ever be elevated to an equivalent position within APEC.”(13)

In spite of its exclusiveness, APEC is a vital entity of sorts in the region, as it becomes the prime vehicle through which an immense amount of transnational capital passes. Twenty years ago, “world money markets traded about $10 billion per day,” while today, “these markets now trade more than $1.3 trillion every day, more than $400 trillion per year.”(14)  APEC’s agenda of creating “unrestricted foreign investment[s],” “minimal controls on big business,” “privatisation of state assets, utilities and services,” “unlimited export of profits,” etc, with their “serious ‘non economic’ flow on effects” are likely to dramatically change the face of Pacific communities forever.(15)

For APEC to be removing all impediments to the free flow of a portion of $400 trillion or more per year, we will need to brace ourselves for the biggest economic typhoon/hurricane that will ever hit the Pacific. Amidst such depressing conditions, we are compelled to ask, what can be “more fairer alternatives for Pacific Islanders” than inundation either by sea level rise caused by erratic global climate change and/or enormous amounts of global capital seeking to establish or exacerbate new dependencies.

Ending the Paralysis, Theoretical Prologue for Action

Have you despaired, and lost all hope? I hope not. I want to return to my theoretical musings about colonial-like economic orders. Can we chart our way out of the paralysis induced by the awesome nature of a transnational phenomenon whose consequences we can only (supposedly) seek to attenuate? In essence, we should ask, is there something inexorable about the myriad processes, and aspirations, of global capital? Are there possibilities even for alterity of imagination? Must we be inexorably led down a path that only promises nothing other than our collective demise? What does this mean then for the kind of work that we must do?

Again, as I alluded to in the beginning of this paper, I have been inspired to hope, by the current theoretical efforts being made in charting a course from within the intellectual debates given birth to by European/American colonialism and the anti colonial struggles that have been on going for many, many years. Judging from the nature, and spatial location, of these theoretical debates vis-à-vis the myriad places where actual liberation struggles are being waged and oftentimes the unfortunate distance between the two one begins to grasp that the foundations of this cacophony between theory and distant practice is at the level of imagination.

It is imagination then, I believe, that must be decolonized. When the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o first composed the words of hisDecolonizing the Mind, he was intending to make an intervention in the shaping of a particular practice, i.e. the production of African literature in the local vernacular.(16) Beyond the politics of language that interests and inspires him, this is a first step in a process of decolonization that then must seek to put in place the foundations for creating a new social, economic, and political order. This stage requires the decolonization of imagination, so that colonially emancipated peoples are free to explore new models for survival.

This is the stance of much of the progressive writings on the politics of post colonialism which try to depict colonial power, and its accompanying justificatory discourse, NOT as an all encompassing reality, but in fact one fraught with extreme ambivalence–what is taken to mean the scattered manifestations of the inability of colonial power to sustain its “unity” in both core and periphery, throughout all of its existence. Such ambivalence, according to Stephen Slemon, “bankrupts” traditional conceptions of colonial power, and allow for the retrieval of “agency” of the oppressed, the periphery, those on the “margins” of a global politico-economic order.(17)  Strategically, this becomes very crucial within the context of a reconfigured global (economic) order/power. We, both in the South and the North, are implicated in an increasingly integrated economic order that threatens to displace us all in the concentration of excessive wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

What is observed is that we have increasingly become detached from the privileged sites of power, and of subservience. A few days before I was to leave to come to Canada, a colleague of mine from Samoa invited me to a private video showing of the life and work of the powerful feminist writer Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde.” I was struck by Lorde’s words when she proclaims that we live in a world of intense contradictions, but that in spite of these, we must continue to reach out, we must not allow ourselves to be so overwhelmed by our individual or local battles that we surrender every ounce of our strength and imagination which might otherwise be of benefit to other struggles elsewhere. Each of us might be fighting overwhelming battles wherever we are, but remember we have a war to win. The fate of humanity, even the fate of the planet itself, cannot be left entirely to the transnational technocrats who demand that we sell bits and pieces of ourselves and the dignity of our communities so that they might more fully enjoy their leisure.

There is a lesson to be learned from this, I think. In contemplating the nature of the myriad processes of globalization, and of the proper responses to them, it should probably be useful to seek to “globalize the theory while localizing the effects,” i.e. efficiently managing local efforts aimed at ameliorating the monotonous, impoverished conditions produced by corporate takeovers of the local, national and/or regional authorities.(18)  Vigilance to efforts at all these levels, therefore, will not diminish, but instead will continue to evolve in ways that both inform and elevate our commitments to a common struggle.

There are countless groups of people organizing themselves everywhere in order to educate themselves about the nature of the economic/political predicament we all are facing, like we are currently doing. These should continue. Yesterday, several groups and individuals met in Montreal to consider and address similar issues as well as to prepare for the APEC Peoples’ Summit. Their objective was to gather “with the aim of building solidarity for people’s empowerment” and “to identify key issues concerning the peoples of the 18 APEC member countries.” We look forward to their findings and commitments for action at the Peoples’ Summit next week.  [note: I have attached, at the end of this paper, as ANNEX 1, a copy of the “Asia Pacific Charter of People's Right: Globalizing Solidarities,” which came out of that Montreal gathering.]

A Common Politics of Survival

Here is where I have pondered the nature of what we must do, or seek to effect in our lived experience of globalization’s impact. Having demonstrated an earlier (and preferred) proclivity for (a) localized agenda(s) for action, I would like to offer some comments on the island nation of Belau. The basis of our decolonization, our resistance to militarism and nuclearism may offer a modest version of the kind of resistance politics we are seeking to cultivate. However modest it may be, I think (or at the very least I would like to optimistically believe, even at the risk of romanticizing my own nation’s decolonization movement) that Belau is in one sense the quintessential exemplar of the kind of nation that we would idealistically desire to see, as a contrast to the rampant militarism and nuclear weapon development that continue unabated in a post Cold War World.

Against the very prominent backdrop of war and the ever present legacies of war’s devastation and against the pronounced aspirations of the U.S. Pentagon’s plan to linger on and loiter around in the Western Pacific, Belau sought to emerge as a nation! Americans didn’t just say no; they said, hell no. And we said in so much roundabout words, NO and to hell with you! The ensuing struggle took the next fifteen years to resolve itself, assassinations of our leaders, bombings and State sponsored terrorism, and the final break up of the mighty Soviet Union and delegitimation of the Cold War (which dictated the nature of politics inside Belau). In the words of a colleague of mine who is completing a political science doctoral dissertation at the University of Hawai’i, a descendant of the victims of Hiroshima, Belau “penned a most subversive plot and sought to impose it on the prevailing global nuclear power configuration.”(19)  The circumstances surrounding Belau’s emergence as a nation state therefore came to symbolize for us the kind of resistance that must be initiated and sustained in the kind of work we must do.

The details of our decolonization movement will be left for another opportunity to share, as we are intent on sharing relevant stories that empower us in terms of economic globalization and the manner in which its menacing tentacles both overpower and disempower our communities. We need to develop a politics of action that transcends the distinguishing features of our nations, as transnational corporations employ these features to divide and conquer our communities. I would like to say that the objectives of such a politics be those that are aimed at reaffirming, as well as re-establishing, our right to survival against these colonial like efforts to consolidate massive economic and political power.

Thus I have borrowed “a common politics of survival” from Bob Aldridge’s and Ched Myers’s book, Resisting the Serpent: Palau’s Struggle for Self Determination, to sketch a locally based response to the global processes of imperialism, militarism, nuclearism, and economic globalization/imperialism. Having passed the stage of articulating our political future with the United States, the root cause of our problem may have changed, but the challenge, I submit, is still very much the same–for all of us. It is seeking to assert our right to survive, unmolested as much as possible from the business of imperialism. This seems now to be an ancient struggle. The global integration of national economies is only the latest phase of this “imperialist pillage.”

This was Antonio Tujan’s conclusion at last year’s NGO meetings parallel with APEC Summit in the Philippines:

“Globalization is not simply a generic term for this phenomenon of integration into the global market or of world wide domination. It is an imperialist process of global redivision and increasing economic exploitation. Globalization is an imperialist economic offensive involving the forcible, greater integration of economies into the global system of monopoly capitalism that is now being camouflaged as free market economics.

“At the heart of globalization is this neo liberal program of opening up the whole world further for imperialist pillage, opening up the global market further for transnational penetration and control, restructuring third world economies further and increasing the power and role of the market to serve the demand for more raw materials and cheap labor and sell more first world products.”(20)

Aldridge and Myers’s portrayal of the collateral damage inflicted on indigenous peoples as American imperialism progressed relentlessly, not fully satisfied upon reaching the last tide lines of California’s shores, but stretching all the way to the Hawaiian Islands, thieving, conniving with traitorous conspirators, even overthrowing a sovereign nation, amidst its own empty pronouncements of love of “democracy,” “freedom,” “human rights,” “self-determination” and similar obscenities. They continued westward, exploding atomic bombs in the pristine tropical lagoons of the Marshall Islands, evaporating atolls and shamelessly committing ethno-genocide, all in the name of defending “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights.”

Once firmly established in Micronesia, America sent off its military aircrafts on a mission of death over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thousands and thousands perished in a genocide that could be labeled “Made in America.” The logic was the same: to defend “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights,” touting these as masks in covering up a vile environmental racism against Asians and Pacific Islanders. The “fruits of [Western] progress,” they loudly proclaimed as though they were really on to fooling someone. But,

“The ‘fruits of progress,’ from the perspective of the underside of history, has been this: countless once flourishing native cultures have been either eradicated, ‘assimilated,’ or decimated and pushed onto reserves. In the totalist systems of modernity there seems to be no place–other than museums–for indigenous minorities who refuse to cooperate with the grand western project of progress. If there is a kind of ‘primal sin’ of modern capitalist development, then, it is the violence, deception and theft perpetrated during the ‘age of discovery.’ It is the legacy that attests to the truth of Walter Benjamin’s dictum: ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’”(21)

The script is suspiciously still the same, to reiterate once more the intensification of a system that unduly benefits a multitude of metropolitan locations, at the expense of smaller nations. Belau wrote a nuclear-free Constitution, becoming the first country in the world to produce such a Constitution. We were rejecting a closer US relationship whose military prerogatives prevailed upon our democratic wishes to denuclearize our island; in essence it was a radical rejection of the prevailing bi-polar Cold War power formation which relied on militarism and nuclear-deterrence to keep in it check. The struggle took over 20 years. During its heyday, throughout the 1980s, we discovered that the neocolonial establishment in Belau, dominated by men, proved useless in the end in standing firm on behalf of protecting our nuclear-free Constitution and the integrity of the political process wherein we waged that nuclear-free movement. Palau’s president was assassinated as a result. Other peoples were killed and government was hijacked by pro-US military advocates intent on carrying out murderous threats against nuclear-free movement supporters. It’s a longer story that cannot be related here. Interested readers can consult one good source, the book by Bob Aldridge and Ched Myers, Resisting the Serpent: Palau’s Struggle for Self-Determination. I quote freely from it in prior research for this paper and whose publication information can be found in the Endnotes section below.

For us, the women of Belau took a lead and went into the frontlines, sensing the erosion of their matrilineal leadership roles in the society. They organized themselves, educated themselves about the real stakes inherent in the proposed militarization pact with the United States, and took to the streets to demand principled negotiations with the United States Government. The women sent spokespersons to the U.S. Congress and the United Nations. Ultimately, while we were compelled to accept what amounted to a non-choice, we look back at the enormity of the struggle and marvel at how we did it. We held out to the promise of a nuclear free island to the very end, even until the collapse of the former Soviet Union whose existence had shaped the very contradictions being played out politically in Belau.

The women were culturally endowed with the right to lead and in the end did so. Palau society as well as its political process though visibly led by men “is subtly but firmly guided by an undercurrent of matrilineal authority,” as Aldridge and Myers noted in their book. They write,

“Those familiar with Palauan politics are well aware of the reputation male politicians have for drifting back and forth on key issues–very few prominent Palauan public figures have remained steadfast, for example, to the principles of the original Constitutional Convention [which produced the nuclear-free Constitution]. In contrast, the women have assumed responsibility to uphold traditional ideals, and while their leadership is usually exercised through quiet, behind-the-scenes persuasion and influence, when they perceive a threat to the Palauan way of life they are quite capable of taking courageous action”.(22)

The kind of struggle being demanded as a price for constant vigilance in this great effort to thwart the designs of unfettered global capital may be similar to what Belau had to experience before achieving closure, a precarious peace that may just as soon disintegrate, if unfettered global capital only replaces what we feared more than a decade ago, unrestrained foreign money and interest in the progressive demise of our culture and country.

In 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, the world gathered to consider the impact such unrestrained global commerce was inflicting on humanity and its planetary land base. In 1994, just two years after the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, the Small Island Nations of the world met in the Caribbean to reaffirm that what we all proclaimed in Rio would continue to inspire our programs of ecological restitution and sustainable development that catered to the basic NEEDS, not wants, of human beings. We met there in Barbados “to ensure the means of survival,” as the NGOs reminded the Governments, “not for now only–but for all time.” But “[t]hese commitments,” as the NGOs proclaimed, “were not only about the basic need and right to eat, they were about the loftier human endeavours–justice, equity, acknowledgment, redress and partnership.”(23) Lofty indeed! Well, what has taken place in just the last five years that we are here gathered again to seek that perhaps just a semblance of these “lofty human endeavour” be given due respect? The NGOs in the West Indies continued,

“The world met then [in Rio] to acknowledge the state of all people and the earth itself. We met then to re order our priorities in order that we could guarantee a future not only for humanity but for all life and for the planet itself. We all accepted that the task would be great, the road long and the resolve might falter. But we committed then and we believe we are committed still to a partnership.”(24)

The authors of Resisting the Serpent [in Belau] end their book with William Appleman Williams’s powerful statement about imperial games. Having recently joined with Bob Aldridge and Ched Myers in the continuing international nuclear disarmament struggle, a privilege that I am eternally grateful for, I join with them in this recasting of William Appleman Williams, in this contemporary period:

“Now is the time to learn from them [who lost, i.e. the countless Indigenous/Native Peoples all over the earth who had to become collateral damage to Western 'progress']. What happens if we simply say ‘no’ to empire? Or do we have either the imagination or the courage to say ‘no’ to empire? It is now our responsibility. It has to do with how we live and die. We as a culture have run out of imperial games to play [read APEC, GATT, WTO, MAI]. (emphasis mine).(25)

In spite of the suspicious continuity of objective and method that all too readily betray a curiously similar politics of plunder inherent in these new models of economic globality, we cannot simply rule out globalization’s excesses as illegitimate. For reasons that I have described earlier, the transnational exchange of goods and services has contributed significantly to the material well being of communities within an international division of labor arrangement that allows communities to trade goods and/or services unique to their areas. However, the logic of global capital(ism), by its very nature, all too often exceeds expectations that are humane and just.(26) Thus Sforza Roderick, Nova, and Weisbrot write,

“The Institute for International Economics, a leading advocate of increasing global economic integration, asks in a book published in March, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? And in his now widely read article in the Atlantic Monthly, billionaire financier George Soros sounded alarms about the social disintegration that he argues is the byproduct of rapid economic deregulation”.(27)

There is no doubt even the staunch proponents of globalization are increasingly questioning the way the myriad processes of globalization are leaving countless communities and workplaces in economic ruin, with greater pressures to depress minimum wage, human rights, and worker rights, and environmental protection requirements in “developing” nations as incentives for capital investments. It is extremely important that the kind of work we do will be to identify and expose the weak links in the chain of arguments that globalization proponents use to legitimize transnational control of local economic systems. Politics does not take place within an economic vacuum, but does so in a reciprocal manner, reacting and responding to embedded economic forces. Giving in to the kind of economic forces that are dictated by transnational corporations located within metropolitan locations is, in essence, giving away our sovereignty, as local politics come to mimic/mirror these forces.

I have taken the liberty of including the suggestions and ideas that Dr. Jane Kelsey presents in her “Manual for Counter Technopols,” ideas for actions that challenge corporate rule (See ANNEX 2).

Again, I am grateful for the ever reliable Internet which, I admit, is perhaps one of the best thing that globalization has to offer if only because of the proliferation of essential information being simultaneously produced and circulated around the world in an instance. There are endless opportunities for collaboration, even as we are made aware of the limitations–in whatever form–that are placed on our ability to collaborate and conspire (in the tradition of the positive Aquarian Conspiracy Theory of Marilyn Ferguson–via Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “conspiracy of love”) to bring about a world liberated from the forces that disempower peoples and communities in the process of enriching a select few.(28)  Because the systems of globalization seek to erase human creativity and imagination, they are akin to slavery. Candido Grzybowski, Executive Director of The Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analysis, writes:

“There is no worse slavery than to be deprived of our ability to think, create, and dare in freedom. There is no greater domination than an imposed way of thinking that cannot be challenged. Nothing is more tragic than to be limited by visions, desires and justifications presented to us as inevitable.

“Globalization is more than a process in human history; it seems to be and to act as a prison for hearts and minds, thoughts and movements. The dominant form of globalization appears as the only way out that nothing could oppose. We are told that anyone who does not adjust to this fate will perish. At least, this is how the concept of globalization has been disseminated by governments, businesspeople, financiers or their ideologues

“We must rebel against this way of thinking. Planetary citizenship requires nonconformist thought and action. The first response to globalization is to acknowledge that it was produced by us, by human beings. It is not a monster to rule over us, but a human invention, with its limitations and possibilities like our own life condition.”(29)

I conclude this brief presentation by acknowledging once again a group of folks who have been organizing themselves and investing a great amount of time and energy in contemplating alternative principles that would govern more humane and just international trade and investment: CUSO, your very own Canadian NGO devoted to assisting many international development projects in developing countries from the Pacific to Africa. Last March when I came to Canada as a guest of the South Pacific Peoples Foundation and the Canadian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to participate in the Indigenous Peoples Roundtable, in preparation for APEC, I heard of a CUSO volunteer on her way to Vanuatu to be a nurse for people with disabilities. This is to be highly commended. Well, through the auspices of the CUSO branch in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Roger Peters offers his “Global Principles Governing International Trade and Investment: An Alternative to the Multilateral Agreement on Investment” which offers the parameters for a more humane international trade/investment arrangement. He describes these as subsets of the three areas of Need, Values and Principles. It is in draft form and was prepared for Community Coalition Against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). I have attached it to this paper as ANNEX 3.

There are endless reasons to be optimistic about the nature of our task. While it may seem that we no longer possess the power to act on our own behalf, we still do and we must respond, not merely react. Grzybowski continued explaining what we must do.

“We must use a different approach to think about globalization, taking alternative globalizations into consideration. For this, the conventional hegemonic way of thinking dictated by neoliberalism and by ‘free market’ consensus is not very helpful. It is necessary that we, as citizens of the planet earth committed to democracy, build our own agenda, our way of viewing issues and tasks, our own priorities. We can’t ignore other approaches and their proposals, but let’s not limit ourselves to them. Let’s face up to them.

“[O]ur strategy must combine actions and proposals to strengthen and mobilize civil society, and efforts to urge governments and multilateral agencies to take the pathway already indicated on the international agenda. The official [i.e. government] agenda should not set the limits of our action. We need to expand our independent spaces for political action, with our own agenda, even at the international level. NGO and social movements, conferences, debates, forums, and networks (including computer networks) should help in the task of emancipating societies, of providing them with autonomy and capacity for exercising their role”.(30)

These, I hope, will assist in the shaping of a politics of space that will help us in asserting our sovereignty from the global reaches of transnational corporations. Thank you very much for the opportunity you have given me to share a few thoughts about organizing ourselves to resist forces that conspire to disempower us. Only through vigilance and activism inspired by a politics of resistance/confrontation against spatially diffused power, can we continue to assert/retain control of our communities.

In conclusion, again, thank you very much.