“OUR RESISTANCE IS AS GLOBAL AS YOUR OPPRESSION” Multinational Corporations, the Protest Movement and the Future of Global Governance

provided helpful comments on the previous version. 2 " Yet, the basic adjustments demanded by the globalization trend cannot take place without a struggle. Too many interests in the nation states see the economic risks and costs of the adjustments involved, even if justified in the longer term, as unfairly distributed and deeply threatening. In addition, organizations with political or social objectives…see the expanding economic power of multinational enterprises as both a threat and an opportunity; in either case, their hope is to harness the multinationals to their global objectives. 1 " N30, " " A16 " and " J18 " are movements associated with the dates of large, disparate, and at times violent protests against globalization in Seattle, Washington and London. They were followed by similar events in Prague and Davos, Switzerland. While the protest movement, can be chaotic, less than articulate and uncertain about alternative futures, it should not be dismissed. Although the extent of popular support for the protests is far from clear, they may reflect widespread angst about the direction that globalization has taken, a sense of a loss of democratic control over outcomes, and a lack of faith in the legitimacy of international institutions. The anti-globalization and anti-multinational corporation (MNC) movement is comprised of a large number of very different groups with a wide range of concerns: the environment, labor and worker rights, human rights, poverty, inequality, neoliberalism, and consumerism, among others. International economic institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the IMF are one clear target: " Defund the Fund " and " Break the Bank " have become oft-repeated mantras of the marchers. The power and dominance of multinational corporations, however, is an underlying and unifying theme. Globalization is " corporate globalization. " In Ralph Nader's words, globalization represents an institutionalized " global economic and political structure that makes every government increasingly hostage to a global financial 3 and commerce system engineered through an autocratic system of international governance that favors corporate interests " (Wallach and Sforza 1999, p. ix). Protests against international business and multinational corporations are not new, they go back to at least the middle of the 19 th century. In this paper, I argue that the current protests differ significantly from past criticism in a number of ways. MNCs typically have been taken to task for specific reasons, for " doing something wrong: " The …