No Globalization Without Representation

U.S. Activists and World Inequality

Paul Adler

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780812253177, 9780812253177
• eBook ISBN: 9780812299663
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

How consumer and environmental activists became significant players in U.S. and world politics Amid the mass protests of the 1960s, another, less heralded political force arose: public interest progressivism. Led by activists like Ralph Nader, organizations of lawyers and experts worked "inside the system." They confronted corporate power and helped win major consumer and environmental protections. By the late 1970s, some public interest groups moved beyond U.S. borders to challenge multinational corporations. This happened at the same time that neoliberalism, a politics of empowerment for big business, gained strength in the U.S. and around the world. No Globalization Without Representation is the story of how consumer and environmental activists became significant players in U.S. and world politics at the twentieth century's close. NGOs like Friends of the Earth and Public Citizen helped forge a progressive coalition that lobbied against the emerging neoliberal world order and in favor of what they called "fair globalization." From boycotting Nestlé in the 1970s to lobbying against NAFTA to the "Battle of Seattle" protests against the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, these groups have made a profound mark.This book tells their stories while showing how public interest groups helped ensure that a version of liberalism willing to challenge corporate power did not vanish from U.S. politics. Public interest groups believed that preserving liberalism at home meant confronting attempts to perpetuate conservative policies through global economic rules. No Globalization Without Representation also illuminates how professionalized organizations became such a critical part of liberal activism—and how that has affected the course of U.S. politics to the present day.

PART I

Don’t Buy Nestlé

CHAPTER 1

Of Big Business and Baby Bottles

October 1979, Geneva, Switzerland. Sitting in a meeting hall in the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO), Doug Johnson, Leah Margulies, Andy Chetley, and Anwar Fazal made for a ramshackle team. Johnson, a former Boy Scout; Margulies, a firebrand from New York City; Chetley, a Canadian journalist-activist; and Fazal, a pensive internationalist from Malaysia, were in Geneva to discuss breast-milk substitutes and global economic governance.

Reaching this metaphorical (and literal) table required years of mobilizing against a behemoth of multinational private enterprise: Nestlé. To this day one of the world’s richest companies, in 1978, Nestlé reported annual sales larger than the annual gross domestic products of more than one hundred countries.¹ Meanwhile, the principal U.S. activist group confronting Nestlé had $9,685.13 in the bank.²

Despite these resource imbalances, in October 1979, the activists were winning. At the close of this WHO- and UNICEF-sponsored meeting, the two U.N. agencies agreed to create the International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes. The meeting also left activists with an established role in global governance. Thierry Lemaresquier, who worked as an NGO liaison with the United Nations, stated that the meeting confirmed “the very real sociopolitical power” of NGOs, while Artemis Simopoulos of the U.S. National Institutes of Health praised activists for being “most eloquent and very well versed.”³

Margulies, Chetley, Fazal, and Johnson traversed a difficult path to reach this moment. They experimented with different forms of political mobilization and action. They went from novices to experts in everything from public health policy to the United Nations’ inner workings. They confronted many hurdles and made many mistakes. They also achieved many successes. At the time of the Geneva meeting, activists had forged an effective international boycott, an accomplishment that, decades later, author and activist Naomi Klein anointed the “granddaddy of modern brand-based actions.”⁴

Indeed, the breast-milk substitutes marketing fight played an important role in the histories of U.S. and global activism on Global South-North economic affairs in four main ways. First, the campaign saw public interest groups bring the attention of fellow NGO advocates, bureaucrats, politicians, and publics to the importance of multinational enterprises in shaping international economics and society. Second, the campaign forced activists to learn how to navigate across local, national, and global terrains to exert maximum influence. Third, the experiences accrued and the connections made by activists built linkages that blossomed into a multi-issue, global justice network. Finally, while the campaign started as a standard consumer boycott, over time it morphed into something grander. As activists plunged deeper into the world of international advocacy, questions of global governance became ever more prominent. In this brief moment during the late 1970s and early 1980s, discussions of governance took on a different tenor than that found in most of our story. Rather than combating what advocates saw as institutions and ideas that intensified inequality, progressives imagined something else: global economic governance in the service of the people.

* * *

More than perhaps anyone else in the United States of America, Leah Margulies brought the mixture of strategic savvy and systemic thinking that gave rise to and propelled the Nestlé boycott. Born in New York City on April 12, 1944, Margulies seemed destined to become a left-wing activist like her parents before her. Her father worked for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union; he and Leah’s mother met and fell in love as members of the Young People’s Socialist League.⁵ Growing up in this milieu, Margulies became an activist at a young age; by middle school, she was churning out essays on the crimes of the Ku Klux Klan. Attending Boston University in the early 1960s, she marched in picket lines against racist hiring practices at Woolworth’s department stores and other actions in support of the Black freedom struggle.⁶

As the years passed, Margulies began encountering a problem common for women involved in civil rights and anti–Vietnam War activism: sexism from some male comrades. While activism permeated her days, she also felt “pretty out of it, in large part because women were just not really valued in the movement.”⁷ In 1968 Margulies relocated to New Haven. She had recently married and moved to be with her husband, a PhD economics student at Yale University. In New Haven, Margulies’s activist fire began to rekindle. She jumped into a multitude of feminist activist projects—from helping to organize consciousness-raising groups to playing flute in the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band.

The following year, while at home one day, Margulies picked up when the phone rang. On the other end was Yale economics professor Stephen Hymer, calling to recruit Margulies’s husband to be his research assistant. Margulies immediately declared Hymer’s question “the most sexist thing I’ve ever heard: he doesn’t want a job and I’m the one who needs one.” Hymer’s response: “Okay Leah, you’re hired.” This brief conversation set the course for the rest of Margulies’s life.

By the late 1960s, Hymer had earned the reputation as the “father of international business theory.”⁸ In her role as his assistant, Margulies learned how to research multinationals, picking up tips such as “read specialized business journals and not academic articles,” while also developing a deep understanding of international business operations. Her curiosity was piqued when examining corporate activities in the Third World. The amount of raw information Margulies learned overwhelmed her. She could soon think of little else than multinational corporations and how “these people are taking over the world!”⁹

These interweavings of First World companies and Third World societies were in and of themselves nothing new. As modern corporations arose in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century, some businesses turned their sights abroad, investing in cash crops, mining, and transportation, particularly in Latin America.¹⁰ These trends intensified in the wake of World War II and the collapse of formal European empires. Accounting for 8 percent of the total gross national product in non-Communist countries in 1950, multinationals accounted for 22 percent by 1974.¹¹ As a U.N. report concluded, “The value-added by each of the top ten multinational corporations in 1971 was … greater than the gross national product of over 80 countries.”¹²

Though most multinational investment occurred among Global North companies and countries, by 1973 “about a third of the total estimated stock of foreign direct investment” went to the Global South. Certain sectors received the most attention: resource extraction accounted for 50 percent of multinational investments in the Third World, with a significant additional portion going to agriculture.¹³ However, economic growth in parts of the Third World during the 1950s and 1960s attracted multinationals not just to the possibilities of producing goods in the Global South but also of selling consumer products.

For nationalist and leftist intellectuals, political movements, and governments across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, multinationals’ investments were, in the words of Chilean president Salvador Allende, “undermining the genuine interests of the developing countries.”¹⁴ As many leftists argued, multinationals acted like imperial governments: they extracted the wealth found in the Third World and exported it, engorging the wealth of the affluent and impoverishing the deprived. As Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah wrote in 1965, the “result … is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than the development of the less developed parts of the world.”¹⁵

Building on such assessments, a network of economists and sociologists, many hailing from Latin America and Africa, produced a body of scholarship known as dependency theory. According to these thinkers, the structures of global capitalism perpetuated and deepened inequalities, both within individual nation-states and between the “core” of the First World countries and the “periphery” of the Third World. Taking a historical view, they attributed this state of affairs to the social, economic, and political structures built by colonialism and continued by forms of neoimperialism.¹⁶ These factors explained why many countries’ entire economies—their transportation systems, labor forces, and so on—revolved around the production and export of a few products such as sugar or bauxite. In trying to comprehend the persistence and growth of inequality, dependency theorists looked to multinationals as “institutional structures … which underlie and reinforce the mechanisms of dependence.”¹⁷

Dependency theory added intellectual weight, analytical precision, and linguistic framing to sentiments flowing around the world, including in the late 1960s United States. Some intellectuals and progressive activists in the United States read dependency theory thinkers and started incorporating those analyses into their own worldviews.¹⁸ At the same time, anticorporate sentiments were on the rise during the 1960s, from Black freedom activists targeting Woolworth’s, to environmentalists confronting Union Oil, to consumer groups blasting General Motors. Coupled with rising labor unrest in the early 1970s and critiques of companies as promoting social conformity, big business’s popularity plummeted in the United States. Whereas in 1966, public “confidence in the heads of large corporations” stood at 55 percent, by 1975 that number had dropped to 15 percent.¹⁹

Margulies entered this ferment pondering how U.S. activists could confront globe-spanning corporations. During the first years of the 1970s, she worked with grassroots projects to educate activists, especially in the feminist movement, about multinationals.²⁰ She and her husband divorced, leading Margulies to return to New York City. After again working as a researcher, in 1974, she accepted a job with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR). A public interest nonprofit, ICCR channeled the moral and financial power of Catholic orders and mainline Protestant churches to press large corporations to embrace social responsibility.²¹ ICCR hired Margulies to build a program dealing with multinationals and global poverty.²² She tested several campaign ideas with ICCR member congregations, such as ones challenging the ecological and social effects of the Green Revolution.²³ She also explored an issue familiar to her from past research: corporate marketing of breast-milk substitutes in the Global South.²⁴

The question of breast-milk substitute marketing spoke directly to an interlocking set of inequalities. Breast-milk substitutes, like infant formula, arose as one of many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attempts coming from white Europeans and settlers to “improve” human lives through technology. The desire for human betterment was often quite genuine. For instance, Justus von Liebig, who invented the first br...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Prologue. The Good Parts of the System to Beat the Bad
• Part I. Don’t Buy Nestlé
• Part II. A New International Regulatory Order?
• Part III. Revolution Within The World Capitalist System
• Part IV. We Fought Big Against Nafta and Lost
• Part V. Rebuilding to Victory in the 1990s
• Part VI. You Must Come to Seattle!
• Coda. A Multiheaded Swarm of a Movement
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments