By Reginald Dale International Herald Tribune March 16, 2001 Movement Brings Together Strange Bedfellows From Right and Left WASHINGTON Mike Moore, the genial director general of the World Trade Organization, likes to claim at least one world record: When he visited India recently, he says, he was burned in effigy in 30 different cities simultaneously.
It might seem that anyone wanting to study the so-called backlash against globalization would only have to follow Mr. Moore as he traipses around the world from one international meeting to another besieged by hordes of angry demonstrators. If that was all there were to the backlash, however, there might not be so much of a problem.
With their jumble of fringe causes and their ignorance of basic economics, most protesters are at least intellectually harmless. But the demonstrators are only the most visible and vocal elements of a much wider anti-globalization movement that, at least in the United States, is mounting an increasingly powerful political challenge against further moves to open up the world economy.
The movement has brought together strange bedfellows from right and left, including the former presidential candidates Patrick Buchanan and Ralph Nader. It comprises protectionists, labor unions, environmentalists, human rights activists and economic nationalists.
As Susan Ariel Aaronson writes in a forthcoming book, "Taking Trade to the Streets," to be published by the University of Michigan Press, the anti-globalization forces are by no means all protectionists. Some want more government, some want less; some want to enforce their goals through international rules, others want to prevent international rules from interfering with domestic policies.
But that isn't the whole story, either. According to a new study published by the Institute for International Economics in Washington, "Globalization and the Perceptions of American Workers," the backlash cannot be fully understood without taking into account the views of the broader U.S. population, much of which has strong reservations about globalization.
Numerous surveys show that a plurality or majority of Americans opposes policies to further liberalize trade, immigration and foreign direct investment or wants to go more slowly, the study says. Most Americans know the advantages of open markets, including greater product variety, lower import prices and increased competition for U.S. producers. But they tend to view the costs - especially the supposedly negative impact on American jobs and wages - as more important than the benefits.
The most striking conclusion of the study is that opposition to globalization is dictated almost entirely by the skill and educational levels of the respondents, regardless of their location or whether they work in industries hurt by imports.
Democrats, women and union members tend to be more opposed to globalization, but the key finding is that the least skilled are almost invariably the most opposed and the most skilled the most in favor.
The kind of environmental and human rights concerns raised by the protesters do not enter into it. One reason for this, the study says, could be that the less skilled have seen their wages stagnate for two decades and blame it on globalization - even though many economists say globalization bears only a relatively small part of the blame, compared, for instance, to technological innovation.
Other economists contest that explanation. When non-wage benefits and inflation are properly calculated, incomes in U.S. manufacturing industry have risen steadily over the past 20 years, according to a recent study by the Manufacturers' Alliance/MAPI, a group promoting U.S. technology and economic growth.
What's more, this study says, only 3 percent of U.S. manufacturing workers face substantial competition from imports, and job expansion from exports outnumbers losses from imports. Globalization, in fact, has a positive net impact on American jobs and wages.
So how to convince globalization's opponents, given, as Ms. Aaronson writes, that street protests against trade have been going on since the Boston Tea Party? Ms. Aaronson wants trade agreements to be seen primarily as an issue of global governance; the Manufacturers' Alliance wants to make the facts known; the Institute for International Economics wants better-organized aid for those who lose their jobs to trade.
Most free-traders would like politicians to speak out much more loudly, given that people are less inclined to listen to economists. But the backlash is not going to disappear quickly, and it could worsen if unemployment rises. Mr. Moore may yet get the chance to improve on his effigy-burning record.
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