Lula Raises the Stakes By William Greider &
Kenneth Rapoza
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031201&s=greider
The bearded political leader they call Lula is the new
phenomenon of globalization, a man with audacious ambitions to alter the
balance of power among nations. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the new left-wing
president of Brazil, envisions a united South America that gains economic
strength by drawing closer together in trade and bargaining collectively, much
as the European Union does. He wants to create a global coalition speaking for
the not-rich countries--reminiscent of the "nonaligned nations" that
decades ago tried to stand between the cold war's two superpowers. And he wants
to push the IMF, the World Bank and the United Nations to become more
democratic.
Lula may well fail. Nevertheless, his aggressive diplomacy
looks like the most promising initiative to reform globalization in many
decades. One sure indication that Lula must be taken seriously is that the US
government has mounted its own nasty, hardball diplomacy to isolate him from
potential allies and crumple his ideas before they can gain momentum. The
United States versus Brazil is a most uneven contest, and the smart money will
not be betting on Lula. But he does not stand alone in the world, and may speak
more authentically to this new historical moment than Washington does.
Toward that end, Lula became an energetic world traveler
during his first ten months in office. He has persuaded South Africa and India
to join Brazil in a new triangular dialogue that will focus on technological
alliances and social issues like world hunger, and also serve as a unifying
opposition voice inside the World Trade Organization. Indian Finance Minister
Yashwant Sinha defined the purpose as promoting the economic and social
interests of the Southern Hemisphere. "We have thought enough about
South-South cooperation," he said, "and we have reached this stage
now where we want to give it a concrete shape." Lula is courting China to
become the next big partner. China and Brazil have already signed a commercial
accord covering agribusiness, technology, construction and natural resources.
In October the two countries jointly launched an earth-monitoring satellite.
In South America, Lula traveled to Peru and Colombia, where
he urged closer economic relations between the Andean Pact nations and their
southern rivals in Mercosur (the Southern Common Market), anchored by Brazil
and Argentina. He offered to mediate talks between the Colombian government and
the revolutionary guerrillas of FARC. In Venezuela he gave embattled President
Hugo Chávez a $1 billion line of credit to buy Brazilian exports. In
mid-October Lula joined with Argentina's President Néstor Kirchner to unfurl
the "Buenos Aires consensus," a proposed alternative to the
much-despised "Washington Consensus," which has straitjacketed
developing economies with its harsh economic rules. The future, they declared,
must give poorer nations the sovereign space to determine their own development
strategies, balancing social necessities with economic stability.
Lula was also a hit with delegates at the UN General
Assembly, where he laid out a visionary proposal for eradicating hunger
worldwide and reforming the UN itself. Then he was off to tour five Southern
African capitals, with a December excursion planned for the Middle East and,
later, Russia. This past summer his travels took him to Washington, where he
chatted up George W. Bush. "Not the man I would like to see in the White
House," Lula allowed afterward, but the two "would have to get
along."
What Lula has in mind is literally changing globalization as
we know it--the version led from Washington. A muscular coalition of developing
countries could block the draconian investment rules that multinational
corporations and bankers keep pushing for the WTO and the Free Trade Area of
the Americas (FTAA), set for debate in Miami this month. A convergence of
third-force nations might also generate more trade and capital investment among
the developing economies, allowing somewhat less dependence on the wealthiest
nations. In short, Lula's vision is for a multilateral world, with power
dispersed from the center, shared more equitably with regional trading blocs
and alliances. That idea is anathema to Washington (also Brussels, Paris,
Berlin and Tokyo). But, for many political and economic reasons, this new
approach might sustain and stabilize the global trading system more effectively
than the present top-down arrangement.