Can the roots of today’s domestic political upheaval be traced back to one week in Seattle in 1999?

In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, oral historian DW Gibson takes us back to the anti-globalization protests on the streets of Seattle — four days of sometimes violent demonstrations that became, he argues, a harbinger of our current populist era.

Gibson, the author of One Week to Change the World, explains how the tear gas and broken windows marked the moment when anti-corporate sentiment crystallized into a movement that would reshape American politics. From his analysis of the voices of protesters and police, politicians and bystanders, Gibson weaves a tapestry of perspectives that he believes reveals the DNA of modern populism.

He makes the case that there is a direct line from these protests to the rise of figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Donald Trump. One thing becomes clear in our conversation: To understand today’s political landscape, we must first understand Seattle in 1999. This isn’t just history — it’s a roadmap to our present, and perhaps a glimpse into our future.

Apple PodcastsGoogle Podcasts RSS

Full Text Transcript:

(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. If you think about the images and issues that define the end of the 20th century, a few probably come to mind: the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nelson Mandela’s walking free after 27 years in prison, the worldwide web going mainstream. But there’s another thing that belongs on that list, even if it may not be the first thing that you picture: tens of thousands of activists filling the streets of Seattle in protest, a giant inflatable turtle, clouds of tear gas, and a Starbucks window smashed.

This was the Battle of Seattle, the 1999 protest against the World Trade Organization that marked a major turning point, not just for an anti-globalization movement, but for the way we would come to see the world between that protest and the rise of populism in 2015. The direct line between those protests and the election of Donald Trump 17 years later is indelible. It’s a story full of fascinating characters, high stakes, and enduring lessons about people in power in an age of ascendant corporate influence.

To take us back to this time and guide us through its consequences, I’m joined by my guest, D.W. Gibson. He’s an accomplished oral historian whose new book, One Week to Change the World, draws on over 100 original interviews with organizers, officials, observers. and more to bring those momentous days to vivid life.

D.W. has previously written about gentrification in New York City and the impact of the border wall. Now, he has turned to the week in Seattle that set the stage for 21st-century activism from the 2017 Women’s March to Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and the global climate strikes. And it is my pleasure to welcome D.W. Gibson here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast to talk about One Week to Change the World: an Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests. D.W. Gibson, thanks so much for joining us.

D.W.: Thanks for having me, Jeff. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Jeff: Well, it is a delight to have you here. Talk a little bit about the political mood at the time in 1999 that set the stage for what would happen in Seattle.

D.W.: I think there was a mixture of a political mood and a cultural mood, if you will. It’s a very distinct time, 1999, the cusp of a new millennium. I think it’s a moment that’s filled with so much excitement and angst mixed together. A new beginning, it felt like, but also, we were dealing with Y2K: the notion of computers might crash and we might be starting over in some regards. So this strange brew of excitement and angst, I think, was in the air.

And politically speaking, in US context, you have a very big turn going on because the Clinton administration, which is winding down two terms, which have been largely viewed at the time as successful, lots of policies passed; you have a lot of the coalition that helped get Clinton elected worked very hard for that administration coming to realize just how much he and that administration has moved politics and, let’s say, the Democratic Party, rightward into the Reagan space, if you will.

The Democratic Party had existed in this new deal Roosevelt/Lyndon Johnson kind of space for many, many decades. And that had shifted in the ’90s, and people knew it by the time these protests came along in 1999; we were over five years into NAFTA at that point. So you had so many American workers who were already seeing the downside of all the promises the Clinton administration had made in terms of what globalization could bring to our communities.

Jeff: And in many ways, though, what Clinton ran on originally was very much the intent to move the Democratic party towards the center or center-right because of the failures of previous attempts by Democratic candidates.

D,W,: Yes, and people were willing to give him that runway and this experiment, if you will. And I think that what we reach is this point where people are starting to see the effects. So you can spend a long time negotiating something like NAFTA — talking about the promises of it in interviews and press conferences and so forth, but, again, that takes us back to ’94. We’re five years in at this point when we’re planning for when everyone’s getting it together in Seattle in 1999. And that five-year span is enough for a lot of workers to see what was happening.

You had some of the biggest contingencies of protestors were, in fact, labor unions: AFL-CIO, the Teamsters were there in full force. The steelworkers from Kaiser plant had been locked out for months and were looking for something to do with their time to have their voices heard. So there was that sort of timing element of these tried and true spaces for American labor that were suffering to come out in full force in big numbers.

Jeff: And was there a sense that this was about NAFTA, or was it about the broader issue of globalization and really many aspects of globalization that hadn’t quite happened yet at that point?

D.W.: That’s a great question. I think the answer is both, really. So people had seen NAFTA and the effects of it, seen factories start to close jobs, start to go away. That was starting to happen already. But what’s happening in 1999 with the WTO is planning, and you’re right: It was something about seeing some writing on the wall. And so let’s remember that the World Trade Organization, they were new too. It was a very new organization at that point. There had been precursors, some World War II organizations that set the stage for the World Trade Organization, but it was just a few years old.

So what they were trying to do in Seattle was reach a new sweeping agreement where they could set rules for international trade and have the capacity to enforce those rules. Well, what that means is if there’s any nation-state that’s participating in the WTO, and they say, “Hey, listen, we don’t want to have child labor allowed in some of the products we buy,” or “We want to be able to set environmental standards for some of the products we buy,” WTO is coming along and saying, “Look, you can’t do that. That’s a trade barrier. That’s illegal.”

So as much as these were identified as anti-globalization protests, and in some regards, they certainly were, many of the people I spoke to worked hard to emphasize that these were pro-democracy protests. And this is where it taps into what you just asked about in terms of people anticipating what was happening. They didn’t trust what NAFTA had delivered so far, and they didn’t like where the WTO was going with the power it was trying to amass. And they felt like civil society was being kept out of that process.

Ostensibly, civil society, civil society organizations, nonprofit organizations were supposed to be involved in this rulemaking process that the WTO was undergoing. But it became clearer and clearer as they got deeper into it that it was really just this, the biggest and richest nations, and even within that, corporate entities that were having a really big say in terms of how some of these rules would be written,

Jeff: Talk about the forces that coalesce to bring this protest together, 50,000 people that showed up. It’s hard to think about in an environment today, for example, where there’s certainly a lot of passion on extremes but a lot of apathy in the middle. This was a unique coming together of forces. Talk about that.

D.W.: I think that’s one of the ways it’s most interesting for the current environment we’re in. What we see in Seattle is a left-right coalition that is unthinkable today. So you have people like Pat Buchanan there, but you have people like Sherrod Brown and Ralph Nader there as well, Tom Hayden from 1968 in Chicago and those protests. So there were so many ways in for people. So if the WTO is trying to set these rules of international trade, that affects labor, as we just already talked about, in terms of how their power will be considered in terms of establishing those rules.

It affects people who care about the environment: Checking companies as they go about their business and how they interact with the environment. If you care about sweatshops, there were people that had actually worked in sweatshops that were part of the organizing in Seattle. If you cared about food sovereignty because some of the discussions about the WTO even involved patenting seeds and food distribution and those things. So you had a large contingency of farmers. So the point is, there were so many ways in, even priests were there.

Let’s not forget the Jubilee effort right around the year 2000 and a massive effort led by the Catholic church and other churches to forgive third-world debt, to forgive developing nations’ debt. That was a big movement at the time. So you had priests marching side by side with anarchists, environmentalists marching side by side with labor union leaders. That kind of coalition is so impressive. And it’s the result of people having realized that if we don’t defend democracy, we don’t even have the opportunity to have the policy debates we have.

Of course, we have so many arguments between the 50,000 of us that are here protesting; of course, there are many arguments between us, but we realize we can’t even have those arguments if we don’t preserve democracy. And under similar yet slightly different circumstances, we find ourself in a situation like that today: that defensive democracy seems imperative to having any other policy debates we might want to have.

Jeff: To what extent was the idea of populism and a populist message part of this?

D.W.: I think it was a big part of it. You can look back even in Ralph Nader who was there, and his organization, Public Citizen, was a major organizing entity in Seattle. There were so many, but that was just one of them. And the arguments made in the book, and I think it’s accurate that you can argue that Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential bid really was an outgrowth of the work that was done in Seattle. And that was, of course, a very fateful presidential run, and I think, in a lot of ways, a populous one, one of that appealed to these left-right coalitions I’m talking about that aren’t so very siloed within some one corner of one of the parties. And I think that was a very important part of the gathering there in Seattle.

And even again, tapping into the farmers, there was a French farmer there named Jose Bouvier who had famously taken his tractor to a McDonald’s they were trying to build in the French countryside because he found it destructive to his community there. And he came over to be a part of the proceedings, and there were farmers from all around the world that were working together in a way that farmers had never united and worked together across nation-state lines before. Those kinds of widespread efforts were at the heart of what we saw in Seattle.

Jeff: Talk about the leadership of this effort: to what extent was there clear-cut leadership or charismatic leadership and to what extent was it grassroots and the way in which it clearly seemed to have a life of its own, after a while?

D.W.: The question of leadership is so interesting because 50,000 people, you’re bound to have different organizing, traditions, and tactics and approaches. And I think you could evaluate it from various angles, but I think the most illuminating way to think about it is you, by and large, had two camps, if you will, and within those camps, so many different camps. But these two camps, one of them is the D.C. NGO, politically connected big group effort.

And I mentioned Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen; you also had Sierra Club; you had, again, the big unions that had big offices in D.C. They were there as well with their leadership: James Hoffa Jr. and John Sweeney. These union leaders were there, but you also had what became known as the Direct Action Network, and this was something that was formed really in real-time in the months leading up to the protest.

This was a collection of very small grassroots organizations, small community organizations, collective, loose affiliations who had no legal recognition whatsoever but had been working on preserving certain trees in certain forests or in certain communities: very small, very focused tasks. And even individual players, people just simply on their own terms showing up to Seattle and saying, “Hey, I want to get involved.”

So all these small grassroots activists, all these small organizations and individual players came together to form something called the Direct Action Network. They even rented a warehouse in downtown Seattle, and they called it the Convergence Space, to talk about great storytelling and went through months and months of training. And this was a place you could go and meet friends and get food and find a place to stay while you were there because weeks and weeks and months and months went into training for these protests to get ready to know how to be arrested peacefully, to know how to build a 15-foot puppet and put that up in the air as you marched, to know how to help block an intersection nonviolently. All these things were going on for months and months in training within the Direct Action Network.

And this Direct Action Network was finding a way to interface with that other camp —  those D.C.-connected political groups: very different approaches to organizing. And as one person put it, the people in DC, they wanted a seat at the table. Well, we wanted to turn the table over. And so finding a way to let those things interact, and they did: They developed this inside-outside game, if you will, and a lot of the D.C. players were actually in the ministerial trying to, if you will, they use the word monkey wrench, muck things up there and affect negotiations within meetings as best they could and feed off the energy of what was happening in the streets.

I think that’s so important to highlight because again, in today’s environment, I think we often can be pretty militaristic in terms of “Look, we want you to approach this the way we do in terms of the way we organize and our tactical approach, and your approach is different. So it’s incompatible with what we’re doing.” There’s a way to find a bigger tent and let different approaches to organizing work together.

Jeff: Did that make it more difficult, though, to find a single goal for this protest?

D.W.: It didn’t, no. And I think there was some obfuscating on the part of the media in terms of “Well, what do they really want? We don’t really know what they want.” I think the protesters were always extremely clear with what they wanted. Their goal… they had one goal, and it was to shut down the ministerial, the meetings, the WTO meetings nonviolently. So what they did is they had a map of downtown Seattle posted at the Convergence Center, this warehouse that they rented, and they divided up all of the intersections that led to the Convention Center where the WTO was meeting.

They divided up into 13 pie pieces. and they divided into small groups called affinity groups, groups of 15, 20 people, and they all got to decide how they were going to block their intersection. Some of them did it by sitting down and locking arms; some of them did it by having a big, giant marching band blocking the way. The only rule was that it had to be nonviolent. And their goal was to all work together to block path to the Convention Center so that the meetings couldn’t take place, and they couldn’t reach a new agreement.

That was the goal, and they reached that goal. I think that’s really important to point out because you have to go back to the civil rights era to find protests that articulated a goal clearly and achieved that goal. What other protests can we point to in the last 50 years of this scale of Seattle — 50,000 people — that articulated a goal and achieved that goal? That’s really rare. They wanted to shut down the meeting and prevent a new agreement, and they did just that.

Jeff: And that was a short-term goal. That was an immediate goal. Was there a longer-term objective?

D.W.: Absolutely, I think they wanted to keep this going. I think they wanted to continue to protest a lot of the international organizations that were increasingly setting the rules for globalization: so not just the WTO, but the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, these entities that have such a say in how debt is handled for poor countries. And there was so much planning going on throughout 2000. People were riding high on the success of Seattle, and it was a huge boost to the movement, but two things happened, I think. One: 9/11.

This is just a clear thing that happened just over a year later, about a year and a half later, and it really redirected so much of the energy that you saw in the pro-democracy, anti-globalization movement and redirected it into the anti-war movement. And that was really, really, really consequential. But the other thing that I think that happened that prevented this big moment from turning into a more lasting movement, if you will, was a lack of transference of skills and tactics and approaches to protesting from, let’s say, one generation to another, and not necessarily age here. I’m not talking the elders and the young people. There’s a little bit of that, but even just from one movement to the next.

And I talked to Noam Chomsky for the book, and he made this great point about how in the US, there’s no continuing tradition on the left. It’s always starting over tabula rasa, and it’s usually young people trying to just figure out what they can do: “Well, let’s try this, and let’s try that.” And there’s a resistance to listening to generations and movements that have made mistakes already, that have had successes already that you can learn from and some resistance on the part of those earlier movements to hand down all that information don’t want to come off as hierarchical and schooling younger organizers, if you will.

But I think there’s got to be a way to stop this process of starting over again and again and passing on, again, some of the mistakes made, learning from those, some of the tools that were very valuable, learning about those so that you can have more connective tissue between something like Seattle and Occupy and the global climate strikes, all these things that you mentioned. There are threads there, and we can identify those threads, but I think that connective tissue could be so much stronger and these movements could serve each other so much more.

Jeff: You mentioned the movement against the war after 9/11. To what extent did that cause the movement to take its eye off the issue of globalization and to what extent did globalization continue to grow and prosper without opposition because all of these people focused on something else?

D.W.: There was definitely an element of taking their eye off the ball, if you will. I think it was also just about exhaustion. Again, I want to emphasize that part of the amazing part of this story of Seattle is the months and months that went into training and working together; they were so well prepared. They’d even gone out and rented a farm and learned how to scale trees, so they could scale buildings to hang banners: really dramatic stuff and really a sustained campaign of working together. And everyone was exhausted. And when 9/11 happened shortly thereafter, and war started, people felt like they had to put all of their energy into that space.

And I think that made sense. It was a new element that everybody was thrown that hadn’t been there, even just a little bit earlier. It was a very real issue they were dealing with. And I think, to your question about what’s happened in the last 25 years in terms of globalization, sadly, I think the WTO has been slowed in many regards. Look at it this way: They still have never reached that initial sweeping agreement they were hoping to get 25 years ago in Seattle. They’ve reached a few more targeted agreements in meetings since then, but have not reached that sweeping agreement.

There’s been a lot of resistance to the WTO and for different reasons. We saw resistance from Trump largely driven by xenophobic and competitive reasons and nationalistic reasons and isolationist approach to governing, but there’s also been resistance on the part of the Biden administration: prioritizing domestic manufacturing, continuing the tariffs that the Trump administration had put in place and even increasing some of them. I think you do see a hidden continuity there in terms of second thinking, second guessing, and thinking again about the structure of the WTO.

But all of that said, I think we definitely need to note that globalization hasn’t slowed down. We’re looking at it, we’re asking good, hard questions about it, and I think that’s so very valuable because let’s remember 25 years ago, we were talking about Margaret Thatcher’s favorite word — TINA: there is no alternative. The initialization of that, I think we’re out of that space and we’re willing to question it a little bit, and I think that that’s very valuable because what we still see is corporate governance. We see capitalism thriving in an international environment, but democracy is not. And it’s democracy’s job to hold capitalism in check. And if democracy is going to have the courage to do that, it’s going to come from the demos, right? From the people who are encouraging that to happen.

Jeff: How much was there realization among the protestors and even subsequently that the position they were taking was one that was also very nationalistic and would continue to give rise to an ongoing wave of nationalism?

D.W.: I don’t think that sense of nationalism was there because so many of the protestors, I talked to some, many of the organizers: What they mentioned again and again is they were taking their cues from the global South. And what happened in Seattle in 1999 had already been happening around the world. The Zapatistas had been fighting against what was happening in Mexico. And people out throughout Brazil, the World Social Forum was developed as a foil to the WTO.

So there were efforts all around the world, mainly in the global South. And organizers in the US were taking their cues from them. Let’s remember, I mentioned Jose Bove, the French farmer that was there, but also Vandana Shiva was there, an Indian activist who’s been working with farmers for decades around food sovereignty and seed patenting issues. You had Colin Hines there, who was part of the group from the UK that wrote the initial draft of what we now know as the Green New Deal. So there was a great notion of collaboration that superseded nation state lines.

And I think, again, that’s another difference we see between now and 25 years ago, this international collaboration. And, again, that’s why it’s important to identify the protest is pro-democracy because some of the protestors, they definitely wore the badge of anti-globalization, absolutely. But some of them said, “No, it’s not about not wanting globalization; it’s about wanting to make sure that whatever iteration we have of globalization, whatever globalization looks like, we want to make sure we have a say in it.

“And by we, we mean this town in this county, or this state in this country, or this country: all of those concentric circles of governance, of civic engagement. We want those to have real legs and real meaning, and not just in the US, but in Korea for Korean farmers, in India for Indian farmers.”

This inside out game I described earlier with some protestors in the ministerial and then thousands outside on the street; it was the African delegations, and the Caribbean delegations, the developing nation delegations that ultimately pushed back in the meetings against the more powerful nations: the EU, the US, Japan, so forth. They pushed back and that’s why the agreement wasn’t reached because they fed on that energy that was in the streets, and they said, “You know what? No, these aren’t fair agreements; we’re not going along with them.” So this international quality was there. And that nationalism wasn’t what was driving so much of the energy.

Jeff: Is there a sense, though, in talking to these people 25 years later, did you get a sense of realization that some of it has really backfired, that what they got was nationalism and less democracy?

D.W.: Yes, absolutely, 100%. And I think this is where the left has really fallen down. Think about it: During the Clinton administration, like I said, you had these left-right coalitions that were so sweeping, but what does the left critique of globalization look like in 2024? It’s hard to really identify it. I mean, there are threads of it out there, but it’s, by and large, been usurped by the right. And with that usurpation, you have this emphasis on nationalism, as you pointed out, and isolationism. And I think that turn is really dangerous.

And it’s anti-globalization that’s really driven more by fear and xenophobia as opposed to a desire to make sure that people, that the citizens of countries around the world are included in the process.

And that failure of the left is not only a political failure, but it’s also a messaging failure. Because think about how good the right in the US has become a messaging with its media empires. From cable news to print journalism to podcast, anything that the left can present as a foil to the years of Rush Limbaugh or what we have now with Fox News is not the same measure in terms of the expanse across all mediums: again, radio, television, and print. And I think that’s worth noting.

And there was a time when the Jim Hightowers of the world and Amy Goodmans and Air America, it seemed like that effort was there to build something up like that, but it never really came to fruition. And I think that’s another ingredient with this sort of right-wing view of anti-globalization that’s, again, nationalistic and xenophobic, taking over the airspace.

Jeff: And when you look at this retrospectively, and you talked to all the people that you talked to, would they consider this effort in 1999 a failure?

D.W.: Nearly everyone I spoke to spoke about what they accomplished in 1999 as a defining moment in their life and a moment of great pride: again, months and months of work, no sleep, around the clock, truly putting their bodies on the line in the street. Putting their bodies on the line, that’s very real. Getting arrested, pepper sprayed to the eyes, this stuff; people survived all of that, and it led to the outcome they wanted: shutting down their meetings.

Now, where people express regret and disappointment, I think, deals with the long game. And we’ve spoken to that here, and that ability to put something together, a movement that can really last past a generation. And again, I think the regret that I heard from people was in the fact that they weren’t able to communicate what they had accomplished in Seattle and how they had accomplished it to organizers who were now working hard in the world to make a difference.

Jeff: D.W. Gibson, the book is One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests. D.W., I thank you so very much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

D.W.: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure to be here.

Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.

Comments are closed.