All these themes came together in Seattle when both Kofi Annan and Bill Clinton addressed the demonstrators. Far from rebuking them as opponents of free trade and international cooperation, they praised them for wanting to use free-trade agreements as vehicles for extending labor and environmental regulations to the international level. Annan’s argument was that the WTO was the wrong vehicle for such a regulatory extension; they should seek to create new bodies for this noble purpose (probably bodies controlled by the U.N.) or revive less active existing bodies such as the ILO. This same theme—after globalization, global regulation—was strongly pushed by President Clinton in his Third Way meetings with British prime minister Tony Blair and other social democrats. And it is now the ruling doctrine of the EU and most other international organizations.
Silvio Berlusconi is happy to have saved Italy from Communism. Rightly so. If the careers of Jospin and Fischer are anything to go by, some Italian anarchist, recovering from his wounds in Gothenburg today, may be reimposing a softer version of it in about twenty years’ time. NR
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