Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The World Trade Organization's first ministerial meeting, held in 1996 in Singapore, opened to an air of triumphalism, a sense among government delegates that corporate-driven globalization was the wave of the future. Mike Moore, the second director general of the organization, toasted the newly established WTO as the “jewel in the crown of multilateralism,” and officials of the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank saw the remaining major task of global governance as the achievement of “coherence.” All that was left to do, in their view, was to coordinate the neoliberal policies of the three institutions in order to ensure the smooth technocratic management of the global economy. Those who dissented from this view of the future were definitely a minority. Ten years later, the World Bank and the IMF held their annual meeting in Singapore behind the heavy protective shield of the Singaporean government, which banned possible dissidents from entering the country on various pretexts. Seemingly triumphant a decade before, corporate-driven globalization was in very deep crisis due to widespread resistance. Several factors indicated crisis. First was the loss of legitimacy of the key multilateral institutions that serve as the political canopy of corporate-driven globalization. For one thing, the IMF was practically defunct. Knowing how the Fund precipitated and ... log in or subscribe to read full text