The World Trade Organization Battle in Seattle, Nineteen Ninety-Nine

The World Trade Organization chose Seattle to host its ministerial conference in November of nineteen ninety-nine partly because Seattle seemed like a safe, manageable, West Coast city of moderate size. The choice turned out to be wrong in the most spectacular possible way.

On November thirtieth, nineteen ninety-nine, the opening day of the conference, an estimated forty thousand or more people filled the streets of downtown Seattle. The demonstration had been months in planning by an coalition so unusual it defied easy categorization: the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions; Sierra Club members in rain gear; representatives from developing-world agricultural organizations; and a contingent of black-clad protesters who came ready to break windows and belonged to no organization. They were united on one thing: they believed the World Trade Organization, an institution founded in nineteen ninety-five to enforce international trade rules, was making decisions that displaced workers, degraded environments, and concentrated power in wealthy-nation corporations without meaningful democratic accountability.

The coalitional diversity created a genuine tactical problem for the city. Seattle Police had prepared for a large demonstration. They had not prepared for fifty thousand people who simultaneously blocked every intersection leading to the convention center. Delegates from member nations, including the United States Secretary of State, could not reach the conference floor. The opening ceremonies were canceled. Police deployed tear gas and rubber bullets. The mayor imposed a curfew and a no-protest zone covering much of downtown. Washington's governor activated the National Guard. For two days, the convention center was effectively inaccessible.

The World Trade Organization talks collapsed. The ministerial ended without a new trade agreement, which its organizers had expected to produce. Whether the collapse was caused by the protests or by fundamental disagreements among member nations that would have doomed the talks regardless is a question trade economists have argued for twenty years. The street-level answer is simpler: tens of thousands of people created conditions under which the conference could not function on its first day, and it never recovered.

The phrase "Battle in Seattle" passed into the vocabulary of global economic protest. For the labor, environmental, and anti-corporate-globalization movements, the events of November thirtieth demonstrated that their coalition could be larger and more effective than any of its component parts had individually imagined.