Geography Reference
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beyond Washington and in the global South in particular, these
American-led global power brokers were seen as willing partners and
promoters of the United States' geo-political, commercial and corporate
interests, both at home and abroad.
Eventually, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, economists
and critics of the Washington Consensus' self-serving agenda and of its
many unfortunate consequences, would argue in favour of a new
approach to global governance in a collection co-authored by Narcis Serra
and Joseph Stiglitz entitled The Washington Consensus Reconsidered
(Serra and Stiglitz 2008) . The contributors to this 'Barcelona Development
Agenda' encouraged consensus-building to forge future macroeconomic
strategies that would achieve more equitable growth globally. They
sought macro-structural policy shifts that would bring about sustainable
development and environmental sustainability (see Chapter 2.5).
Grassroots Anti-globalization Movements, Targeting Global
Institutions: the World Bank, IMF, WTO, WEF
Beginning in the late 1990s, there was an upsurge of grassroots move-
ments, national and regional activism which came together as a global
coalition of opposition - a 'globalization from below' - to counter
the immensely powerful, yet selfish agendas of global capitalism's
'establishment' - the Washington Consensus (Brecher and Costello, 1998).
Unanticipated activism in the streets of Seattle in 1999 thoroughly
derailed the comfortable consensus that the World Trade Organization
(WTO) appeared to be enjoying until that moment. This 1999 'Battle of
Seattle' signalled the growing strength of cooperative activism (Smith,
2001) and a convergence of popular views that was always strongly
anti-establishment, anti-corporatist, anti-capitalist, anti-elitist, and
anti-neoconservative. In succeeding years, further mass demonstra-
tions against globalization, the WTO, the IMF and the Washington
Consensus, took place in Genoa, New York and Washington DC,
thereby keeping the momentum going.
There was also a growing progressive confluence around the common
values of social democracy (as a replacement for economic democracy),
environmental conservation and societal sustainability, global justice,
equality, and worldwide solidarity. As a consensual and enduring 'glo-
balization from below', this global grassroots uprising was not so much
'anti-development' as a positive advocacy of 'alternative globalization'
(International Forum on Globalization, 2002), and of 'fair globalization'
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