The colapse of Soviet-Type regimes in 1989 sent the left into a dramatic period of self-reflection. Writing then, one could be forgiven of speculating whether there was a future, any future, for leftist politics. Still, the books were written, the disillusioned expressed their melancholy, the debates took place, and new forms of leftism ended up emerging by the middle of the 1990s. These new forms took two main shapes: the new Social-Democratic approach of New Labour (and many other center-left parties in Europe and the Americas), and the “Seattle people”, the network of small social movements that converged during anti-WTO demonstrations.
These two alternatives died in 9/11.
On the one hand, New Labour persevered in the transatlantic alliance that was forged during the Clinton years. It is easy now to say that supporting the Iraq war was wrong (I’ve been against it from the start), but this was not so obvious, then; and historians will debate whether a less pathetically-managed post-Saddam transition might have been attempted, if the White House had better tenants at the time. Nevertheless, it is clear that Iraq was New Labour’s end. Blair’s power to inspire the international left was reduced to nothing, and that despite many important results achieved by his domestic policies.
On the other hand, the Seattle people fell into the hands of the old left, the oldest, in the worst possible sense, left. That was always a risk: there is no way we could say that ATTAC, for instance, was completely free of old-left prejudices. But that was not all the story. The Seattle people produced many young, cosmopolitan miltants of quasi-anarchist bent, and these kids were only as incoherent as one could expect from people their age. It was easy to picture them, or at least a majority among them, maturing into sensible politicians with a fresh outlook.
But that was not to be. After 9/11, the main question became opposing Bush and the Iraq war. A good cause in and of itself, if was kidnapped by the likes of Galloway, the most abject thing to be expelled by the leper bowels of stalinism’s corpse in a long time. In anti-war demonstrations, there was a very dangerous contact between the still-to-take-shape grassroots movement and radical Islam. In an ironic twist that escaped many observers, the next WTO round took place in an Arab nation where no street protests were possible. It is hard to find anyone, these days, that nurtures much rope for the alter-mundistas.
The collapse of the left says a lot about the point of the globalization process at which 9/11 exploded. What Blair learned, in the hardest possible way, is that the cosmopolitan consensus of the Clinton years was, in fact, much weaker than it seemed. Large parts of the world’s elites, in America of all places, did not share the international outlook that would make possible dealing with Iraq through the UN, or handling the climate crisis, or building a solution for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The war in Iraq was conducted incompetently, the decision to dissolve the Iraqi army proved amateurishly arrogant, and the US ignored the UN in Iraq right until the point when disaster had already set in. Through all this, Bush called Sharon a “man of peace”. The chauvinistic victory in the US was reflected in the strengthening of Blair’s rivals in the EU, such as the much reviled Jacques Chirac. By the end of the process, the UN was in shambles, and “global governance” ceased even to be a buzzword.
The Seattle people, on the other hand, had to pick sides when they were still a loose network of movements with vague demands. There was always a tension they would have to solve: if one cared about global poverty, the environment, or the preservation of local cultures, there was no alternative, on the long run, but to fight inside the system of global governance. For who would tell America and China to clean up their act, if not the UN? And what else could be better for the poorest nations than the removal of trade barriers in Europe and America, and where could that be done if not in WTO rounds? When these institutions collapsed (for that they did), they missed champions who would defend them, and a grown-up version of the Seattle people would have been perfect for the job – especially because they would then acquire the credibility for demanding that these institutions be reformed.
1989 was euthanasia; a brain-dead carcass finally collapsed, finally setting free leftist energies that were repressed for decades. 2001 was an abortion, asking too much of new forces that had just entered the stage, and, ultimately, leading to their demise. This time, speculation on whether there’s a future, any future, for the left, is easier to justify.
