ONE WEEK TO CHANGE THE WORLD

A fly-on-the-wall history of a fateful gathering of capitalist trade ministers in 1999.

What is the World Trade Organization? By some lights, it’s a group that makes sure that international business plays by the rules. By others, it’s a means by which the major capitalist powers keep the developing world on a string. As Gibson, author of 14 Miles and The Edge Becomes the Center, recounts, representatives from a host of nations came to Seattle seeking to lock down an agenda that would make the “Quad”—the European Union, the U.S., Japan, and Canada—de facto rulers of the global economy. Thousands came to protest. Says one leading anti–WTO organizer of those street actions, “For people within the U.S. to break from the idea that Americans support their government’s corporate globalization policies was a big shift in how the world saw things.” The police had a different view, but some were less inclined to bust skulls and haul protestors off to jail than others. Similarly, Gibson reveals, some protestors were looking for an excuse to break things, while most, as one government worker related, “were the model kids—if you had a teenager, how you would want them to be.” A labor council leader was even more conciliatory: “This is what democracy looks like. Sometimes it’s ugly. And sometimes it’s not. We all have a responsibility and role to play, one way or the other.” Interestingly, Gibson records, several organizers from the day lament that, today, social media keeps people from banding together in person, even as governments learned a lesson and now maintain deep cordons between WTO meetings and any possible discontents—who, notes one contributor, now run the risk of being “viewed as a Trumpist in some way” for opposing so-called free trade.

A readable, provocative study of globalism and anti-globalism in conflict.