Global Organizations

Supranational organizations, some regulating international politics and others addressing finance and social issues, also challenged the nation-state. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) raised money from national governments and dealt, for example, with the terms of trade among countries and the economic well-being of individual peoples. The IMF made loans to developing countries on the condition that those countries restructure their economies according to neoliberal principles. Other supranational organizations were charitable foundations, think tanks, or service-based organizations acting independently of governments, many of them based in Europe and the United States; they were called nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Because some of these groups—the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Foundation, for example—controlled so much money, NGOs often had considerable international power. Some charitable and activist NGOs, like the French-based Doctors Without Borders, depended on global contributions and used them to provide medical attention in such places as the former Yugoslavia, where people facing war had no other medical help. Small, locally based NGOs excelled at inspiring grassroots activism, while the larger NGOs were often criticized for directing government policies with no regard for democratic processes.

Not everyone supported or was pleased with the process of globalization; some people formed activist groups to attack globalization or to influence its course. In 1998, the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens (ATTAC) worked to block the control of globalization by the forces of high finance, declaring: “Commercial totalitarianism is not free trade.” ATTAC had as its major policy goal to tax international financial transactions (just as the purchase of household necessities was taxed) and to create with the tax a fund for people living in poor countries. Some governments began to suggest such a tax themselves with the aim of raising much-needed revenue, not to help the poor. Another globally known opponent, French farmer José Bové, protested the opening of McDonald’s chains in France and destroyed stocks of genetically modified seeds: “The only regret I have now,” Bové claimed at his trial in 2003, “is that I didn’t destroy more of it.” Bové went to jail, but he remained a hero to antiglobalism activists who saw him as an enemy of standardization and an honest champion, in his own words, of “good food.”