Gap narrows between free market advocates and its opponents

When the World Trade Organisation (WTO) members met in Seattle two years ago, there were running battles between police and protesters outside, while ministers inside were unable to agree on a new round of trade negotiations. The protesters will be missing next week when the WTO meets next Friday in Doha, capital of the Gulf emirate of Qatar, partly because the Qatari authorities will not let them in.

But their absence from Doha does not mean that the international movement against the present form of globalisation has gone away. And speculation that the events of September 11th would sweep away the budding protest movement has proved to be mistaken.

At a conference on globalisation in the Belgian city of Ghent this week, the critics appeared to be more committed than ever to changing the economic system. And the gap between advocates of the free market and those who want to control it appeared to have narrowed.

Belgium's prime minister, Mr Guy Verhofstadt, who organised the conference in his role as President of the European Council, said it was best to avoid the term "anti-globalisation".

"The discussion is not about whether we should have globalisation but what kind of globalisation we should have," he said.

Ms Naomi Klein, author of best-selling critique of the global economic system No Logo, said that all the campaigners she knew were committed internationalists and that it was time to stop confusing basic principles of internationalism with a particular economic system.

And she condemned the hypocrisy of western governments that have intervened to boost threatened industries since September 11th, while continuing to tell poorer countries to limit the role of government in the economy.

"The type of market intervention we are seeing is the very type of market intervention we were told was not possible," she said.

The most glaring example of these double standards has been the response in the US and Canada to the threat of biological terrorism. In both countries, governments are considering revoking patent rights for treatments for such ailments as anthrax.

But as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, pointed out, these are the same countries that insist that poorer countries ravaged by HIV/Aids must not be allowed to produce generic versions of expensive drugs that can allow people with HIV to live normal lives.

"The response to the anthrax scare has revealed a tendency to have one law for rich countries and another for poor countries with pandemics," she said.

The question of intellectual property rights will be one of the most contentious issues at Doha, not only in relation to pharmaceuticals but also in terms of their effect on the cultural rights of indigenous and local communities.

Anti-poverty campaigners want the WTO to agree trade rules that guarantee poorer countries access to markets in the developed world. The European Union is moving in this direction but exporters from poorer countries are often competing with subsidised industries, both in Europe and the US.

The ministers meeting in Doha, who will include the Minister of State at the Department of Trade and Enterprise, Mr Tom Kitt, are under enormous pressure to agree a new round of trade negotiations. Their failure to do so at Seattle, in conjunction with the demonstrations outside, led some analysts to conclude that market liberalisation had reached its high-water mark and was in retreat.

The attacks in September inspired similar warnings that the world was preparing to withdraw into protectionism, just as it did after the first World War. In fact, although military action highlights the sovereignty of nation states, the crisis has intensified the process of international cooperation. And the government of President Bush has emerged from the isolation of its early months to build a broad international coalition and engage more closely in attempting to resolve such conflicts as that in the Middle East.

Mr Bush's predecessor, Mr Bill Clinton, told the conference in Ghent that economics, science and technology meant that global interdependency was a fact of life. But there was nothing immutable about the moral nature of that interdependency and it was up to richer countries to ensure that the new global order was a just one.

"The great question for this new century is whether the age of interdependency is going to be good or bad for humanity and what those of us who live in better-off countries are going to do about it," he said.

Next week's meeting in Doha will not give a definitive answer to Mr Clinton's question but it will indicate whether governments in the developed world are listening to the voices calling for a new approach to trade issues.

As Ms Klein pointed out, the problem for poorer countries is not so much the trade as the trade-offs that demand the imposition of pro-business economic policies in return for trade access.

"We're creating a template for a 'one-size-fits-all government', what I call McRule. We have to look at who makes the rules and who abides by them," she said.