25 for 25. The Battle of Seattle (1999)

In previous essays I have remarked the tendency of each generation to think that history was culminating in them. Many historians have taken as a part of their job description explaining how the past led to the present. An impression of inevitability often informs the explanations, if only unconsciously.

So it wasn't surprising that Americans who became adults after 1945 tended to think that the arrow of American economic history pointed in the direction of free trade. If they knew American history, they knew that the United States had been protectionist during the 19th century and well into the 20th. But America had learned its lesson after taking protectionism to the extreme of the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, which sought to preserve American jobs during the Great Depression but instead triggered the implosion of world trade and contributed to the coming of World War II.

During that war, American leaders committed to a system of open trade and ever lower tariffs. Round after postwar round of trade negotiations reduced tariffs and other barriers to cross-border commerce. Regional groupings went farther than the world as a whole, with the European Union embodying a free trade zone in Europe and the North American Free Trade Agreement accomplishing the same thing for Mexico, the United States and Canada. Enlightened leaders and knowledgeable private citizens hoped and assumed that the World Trade Organization would do for the planet what the EU and NAFTA did for Europe and North America.

But not everyone got the memo. A distressing number got pink slips instead. It turned out that the benefits of free trade were not spread evenly among the populations of various countries. Corporations benefited by access to low-wage labor in certain countries. Consumers benefited from the lower prices charged for products made by the low-wage labor. But high-wage workers in America and other countries suffered from competition with the low-wage labor.

Auto workers in Detroit lost jobs to auto workers in Japan and then Korea. Textile workers in North Carolina lost out to workers in Bangladesh. Computers that had been assembled in Texas were now put together in China. Call centers moved from Nebraska to India.

As things happened, automation simultaneously reduced the number of American manufacturing jobs. Highly skilled sawyers in Pacific Northwest lumber mills were replaced by computers that could size up a log faster and more accurately than the sawyers could. Robots painted cars more efficiently than humans could. A handful of crane operators could load and unload giant container ships in a fraction of the time small armies of longshoremen had required to load much smaller ships in an earlier day.

Yet it was more tempting politically to blame free trade—or globalization, as it was often called—than automation. Critics of globalization could wrap themselves in the American flag while condemning China and other countries for unfair trade practices. Foreign countries make more convenient enemies than machines.

Anti-globalization forces achieved critical mass in the 1990s. They energized the candidacy of H. Ross Perot for president in 1992, propelling Perot to the best third-party showing since 1912. The anti-globalizers took encouragement from the end of the Cold War, which allowed a reconsideration of policies, including free trade, that had been in place since the beginning of the Cold War.

A meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in the autumn of 1999 afforded occasion for the anti-globalizers to come out in force. Seattle had a long history of working-class activism. The radical Industrial Workers of the World were a strong presence in the early twentieth century. A general strike shut down the city for nearly a week in 1919. The meeting of the WTO was too tempting for activists to resist, for no organization more strongly symbolized the structure of globalization.

The size and strength of the protest took city and state authorities by surprise. Some of the protesters were members of labor unions. Some were environmentalists. Some were anarchists. Some were onlookers who got swept up in the movement. Together they clogged the streets around the convention center where the WTO delegates were to meet and delayed the start of the conference. The anarchists broke windows and provoked the police, who overreacted, thereby engaging the attention of the media, which also overreacted, reporting as fact such spurious rumors as that the protesters had hurled Molotov cocktails at the police.

The anarchists among the protesters were disappointed, in that the capitalist system remained standing after the delegates went home. But for the rest what was being called the “Battle of Seattle” was a brilliant success. It gave focus to previously inchoate dissatisfaction with globalization. Major newspapers and television news networks considered the arguments of the anti-globalists more seriously than they had before.

The effect of the Seattle protest was amplified by subsequent events. Only months later a bubble in the tech industry burst, producing a dot-com crash that appeared to demonstrate the fragility of what globalization had wrought. The larger crash of 2007-2008 cast a long shadow over the postwar model of finance and trade. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and his imposition of tariffs unlike any since the 1930s drove a stake through the heart of the free trade model. Joe Biden agreed with Trump on little else, but he let stand the Trump tariffs and even increased some of them.

A quarter-century after the battle of Seattle, the anti-globalists control the political high ground in America. So too in other countries where the message of the Seattle protest resonated. Economic nationalism is the order of the day, and nothing short of a major war or other catastrophe appears likely to dislodge it.

Unfortunately, the beggar-thy-neighbor philosophy of the tariff warriors makes a regular war more likely.