Many, including those on op-ed pages around the country, dismissed the tens of thousands of people protesting the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF) earlier this month as misguided, anti-globalization, flat-landers. This would be a mistake. Instead, the pro-globalization crowd should take heed. The protests in Seattle over the WTO, and more recently in Washington over the World Bank/IMF, are revealing the cracks in the foundation of outdated, undemocratic, and increasingly ineffective global institutions.

Suprisingly, the defenders of globalization often readily acknowledge its weaknesses - that it has been detrimental to the environment, labor rights, consumer rights, and even national sovereignty. But their response, echoed by leaders at the WTO, the IMF, World Bank, is remarkably fatalistic – globalization is inevitable, and the undesirable by-products of globalization are also inevitable.

But are these undesirable outcomes of globalization really unavoidable? Is the debate as simple as being for or against globalization? Or, should the discussion be about whose interests should public global institutions serve?

Those protesting in Seattle and Washington, DC represented a much broader collection than a few anarchists clashing with police. In fact, it stretched far across the liberal-conservative divide, including everyone from religious right-wingers to union members, farmers to environmentalists. In all cases, the target of the opposition were global institutions that have repeatedly represented not the broad interests of people, but the narrow interests of a few huge corporations.

The WTO process has been criticized as undemocratic for years, both from the "inside" by national delegates and from the "outside" by non-governmental organizations. The protests in Seattle were at their core a response to the undemocratic WTO negotiation process, which has a long track record of pushing the agenda of global corporations (i.e. knocking down their barriers to trade) at the expense of laws passed by democratically-elected governments.

Like the WTO, the World Bank and IMF have been criticized for not working on behalf of citizens, but instead on behalf of global corporations. The World Bank and IMF have manipulated the economies of developing countries by pushing them to privatize social services and focus economic development on exports, particularly to developed countries. The result has been to increase ownership of their economies by foreign multinational corporations and, in many cases, a marked deterioration in living standards for citizens. Developing countries around the world have seen IMF riots as a result of these policies.

The protests at the WTO may have made the old process – whereby the US and European Union cut a deal and imposed it on everyone else – a thing of the past. At the Seattle WTO meeting, national governments defended their own interests. Other WTO members demanded a more inclusive and democratic institution.

Fifty years ago, the victors of World War II gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to put together global institutions designed to help address global problems – the World Bank, IMF, and GATT (trade treaty which laid the foundation for the WTO). But over the last half century, the three pillars of the Bretton Woods economic system have evolved beyond what was originally intended. In fact, they have become dramatically more powerful, almost completely undemocratic, and tools to benefit private corporations – often at the expense of the citizens of the world.

Global institutions are too important to be left up to unresponsive national governments, global bureaucracies, and global corporations. It would be a mistake to dismiss protests challenging these institutions as simply attempts to kill them. Instead, they should be seen as a clear sign that these institutions cannot, and should not, exist in their current undemocratic form.

It is not surprising that institutions created 50 years ago might not be the most effective avenues to address the needs of a dramatically changed international landscape.

What is needed is a "new architecture" of the global system. It requires the involvement of citizens and governments to find forums for global cooperation to address a variety of critical issues – including loss of species, hunger, child labor, essential medicines, climate change – all directly related to global commerce. To begin, we must rearrange the table of global governance.

It is time to start asking the hard questions about globalization – namely, does it have to be this way? If global leaders continue to stubbornly cling to a limited view of what globalization must be, the cracks may widen, and these global institutions may start to crumble.