|
|
GATS - Service to Whom?
Christoph Strawe
|
6/2001
|
| |
|
Civil Society's Alternatives to
The World Trade Organization's Agreement on Services [1]
Original: http://www.threefolding.net/GATS.htm
Do you know GATS?
An opinion poll certainly would
cause more than 99% of the citizens consulted to shake their heads and
reply: "Never heard of it." And yet, speaking of GATS, we
are dealing with something that will deeply affect all our lives,
much more deeply than what happens on those levels of political decision
making to which our attention is drawn by the media - unless we manage
to implement alternatives to the "General Agreement on Trade in Services"
("GATS") which is presently being negotiated within the World
Trade Organization WTO.
Through the foundation of the WTO in 1995 the principle
of the free movement of goods already proclaimed by the GATT[2]
was supplemented with the liberalization of the trade in services (GATS
agreement) and with the adjustment of the commercially relevant aspects
of intellectual property (TRIPS agreement)[3]
GATS is part of the globalization developments which have been systematically
pushed since the end of World War Two and speeded up dramatically with
the Falling of the Walls in 1989. So it is part of the world-wide linking-up
of the societies and the full establishment of the world market, with
an unheard-of mobility of capital, which has led to the global competition
of the locations.
Former WTO Director-General Renato Ruggiero has said
something quite alarming, namely that the GATS extended the WTO into areas
never previously recognised as coming under the remit of trade policy.
"I suspect that neither governments nor industries have yet appreciated
the full scope of these guarantees or the full value of existing commitments."[4]
Indeed, the agreement's tendency is to include all activities that have
up until now been considered non-commercial ("non-profit-sector")
in the profit-making (i.e. business) sphere. And this whole sphere is
intended to be structured strictly in accordance with the ideology of
neo-liberalism.
Health care and education, the media, child care and
elder care - there is nothing that would not be declared a private-branch
of business. The question of "Cui bono?" is not too difficult
to answer: Over the last few years reference has been made to the so-called
sixth Kondratieff-(conjunctural)-cycle[5],
in which the new mega-trends are set by an increasing demand in the areas
of health, environment and education. If these fields of growth can be
drawn into the sphere of shareholder value economy, there will be tremendous
profits in store for the corporations in the branches of medicine and
biotechnology, but also in the environmental area (alternative energy,
waste disposal etc.).
How far there will be any tolerated exceptions to
this principle of any service being of a private nature is entirely unclear,
even though government representatives reassuringly point to such possible
exceptions. What is clear, however, is that there are to be mechanisms
that will make the observance of the GATS rules enforceable, if need be.
Maude Barlow is right in saying in her article "The
Last Frontier" (published in "The Ecologist" in February
2001[6]) that with this the end of
the very concept of not-for-profit public services could be near. In the
British newspaper "The Observer" of April 15th, 2001 there was
an article which quoted from a confidential document of the WTO
secretariat.. According to that document, the creation of an international
agency is planned which is to have the power of veto against any decisions
of single states or governments concerning environment, health, education
etc., should these decisions constitute a violation of the liberalization
of the trade in services proposed by GATS. This is, says the "Observer",
obviously a plan to abolish the "out-moded political idea of democracy".
In view of such developments large sections of the
organized civil society have woken up. The internet abounds with information
on the dangers of GATS, along with protests about the agreement. Thus
an appeal called "Stop the GATS Attack" has already been signed
by 430 Non-Government-Organizations from 53 countries (by June 2001).[7]
Perhaps it will be possible to call forth a broad movement similar to
the one that brought down the international agreement on the protection
of investments, MAI, and the one that led to the failure of the Seattle
WTO summit.
Escaping from the vicious circle of wrong alternatives
There is wide agreement among "civil society"[8]
that GATS involves a multitude of dangerous regulations hostile to man.
What has to be done now is to enlighten the general public on GATS and
to broaden the front against the agreement.
But at the same time the question arises of civil
society's positive alternatives. If it can be shown how the problems for
whose solution GATS is being praised can be solved in a different way,
the movement of civil society will be greatly empowered.
The strategy of the inspiring forces that stand behind
the WTO is to cause confusion and lead mankind astray by means of pseudo
alternatives. Thus it is suggested that GATS is, so to speak, the logical
conclusion and the only possible consequence of the failure of the attempts
to regulate large areas of social life by way of planned economy and bureaucratically.
Only consequent liberalization and deregulation , they say, sets people's
innovative forces free and finally leads to general social prosperity.
This strategy obviously aims at mentally disarming the opponents of the
present form of globalization, describing them as the last Mohicans of
a quasi stone age bureaucratism, who have slept away the year 1989. What
is public is pretended to be generally identical with sovereign state-controlled
direction and petty-minded bureaucratic regimentation. At the same time
it is insinuated that, as a rule, non-governmental actors become active
in the social context purely out of commercial interest, their free initiative
therefore being essentially "private" (the Latin word "privare",
after all, means "take by force", i.e. appropriate selfishly).
Finally we are made to believe that there is a choice to be made between
the allegedly insurmountable opposites of liberty (along with economic
efficiency), on the one hand, and solidarity (which is equated with planned-economical
inefficiency) on the other. In this one-sided view, liberty, of course,
excludes any system of health care or education which would be financed
consequently on the basis of solidarity.
It is imperative to confront such ideological stereotyped thought patterns
with unbiased observation and appropriate formation of concepts in order
to be able to outline guiding ideas for the development of society which
make real sense. What counts here are not made-up "solutions"
for all social problems, but the question of social structures that give
people on our globe the chance to solve their problems by themselves,
step by step.
"Public" does not necessarily mean "state-run"
One stereotyped thought pattern which has to be overcome
is the equation "public = state-run". By no means is this equation
any longer obligatory in our times. There are many civil society organizations
which work in a self-administered and self-determined manner - referred
to as "in freier Trägerschaft (in independent Œcarriership')"
- in other words, which are not state-run, but independently run, but
which at the same time assume public functions and are therefore rightly
financed publicly, wholly or in part. In many areas such organizations
are entirely indispensable for the functioning of the public sector. This
applies to certain areas of care of the elderly, nursing and therapy,
social work, curative education, and drug therapy among others, partly
also to the educational system, where non-commercial free schools play
an important part in the realization of the public task of realizing the
human's right to education.
Indeed, it complies with the spirit of an age of individualization
and pluralization that solutions born of free initiative can take the
place of state-controlled solutions wherever people want this. Between
the pseudo-alternative of "state-run" and "private"
there is a third option: free initiative for the community, financed on
the basis of solidarity. This third way is a way of balance between liberty
and solidarity. It does not lead to "deregulation", but rather
to an unbureaucratic regulation of problems through a variety of task-orientated
associations and self-governing networks which could simultaneously co-operate
with the state.
What are services?
About the difference between economy, state activity,
and cultural life, respectively intellectual production
GATS being concerned with services, the question must
be raised if the concept of services, which underlies this agreement,
is at all appropriate. Is there, latently, a certain one-sided conception
of man at the bottom of it, and if so - which?
To provide services means to do something for others
- to serve others. Looked at it in this way, any activity in a social
context is a service. In order to be able to do something for others long
term it is necessary to have an income that makes this possible. Income
in the form of money, in this context, means being entitled to use and
consume a certain part of the economic values created. In this respect
everything anyone does for someone else in our modern society necessarily
has an economic aspect. Does this mean, however, that every activity is
an essentially commercially directed economic activity per se? For this
is what the logic of GATS implies!
Economy is primarily the production of goods, ultimately
induced by the pull of the consumers' needs. Goods are material things,
such as food, clothing, housing, means of transport, which are bought
and sold. In order for them to reach the consumer, services are required
that are not material things in themselves, but do call forth material
results and are indispensable for the material goods to reach their destinations.
Here we find the work of the haulage contractor as well as that of the
bank clerk, the wholesaler and retailer, or the telephone company over
whose lines business appointments are made. These kinds of services are
directly marketable, i.e. saleable and purchasable.
It is somewhat different with the services rendered
by the "civil servants" (officials), parliamentarians etc. They
do, indeed, need an income, but they are neither indirectly nor directly
involved in the production of marketable material commodities. They receive
their part of society's wealth by way of tax revenues. It would make little
sense to pay a top government official according to the number of rules
"produced". What matters in government and state is something
qualitatively different from economic goods; what matters is that
everyone, as a peer, receives that which is his inalienable right. Thus
this area ensures (at least this has been its ideal so far) a certain
social infra-structure and social harmony, which is also vital for the
economy. But the state is only capable of doing this if its citizens -
through democratic consensus - are in a position to set certain limits
to the economy by law, regulatory frameworks, with which enterprises have
to comply.
We have to recognize that there are essentially different
kinds of services, which cannot necessarily be equated with each other.
With a building contractor, for instance, we sign a contract for work
and labour, which connects the payment with the result, e.g. the finished
house; with a lawyer - at least in central Europe - we conclude a service
contract, which provides payment irrespective of the result of the case.
In addition, all cultural work, all intellectual production,
in as far as it does not have a purely private leisure-time character,
can only be achieved if it is financially supported. Teachers, doctors,
and university lecturers need an income in order to be able to devote
themselves to their profession. In this respect their work becomes directly
comparable with that of any other occupational category. But they do not
produce any material goods or any accomplishments connected with material
production, either. What teachers help to develop in their students in
the way of key qualifications will no doubt become economically highly
relevant in the future; for the present, however, this relevance rests
completely on the "principle of hope". It is absurd, in fact
contemptuous, to say that pupils are "products". The teacher
does not produce economic goods, but assists in the development of the
individual child by the manner in which he faces him. His work is not
a standardizable performance, but a subtle "relational service"[9],
which requires a space of creativity where it must be possible to individualize.
Similar questions arise when we consider the relationship between doctor
and patient, between geriatric nurse or curative educators and those
cared for.
The activities mentioned need a form of financing
that creates the free space necessary for them. Only when an understanding
of the importance of the cultural sphere prevails in our society will
there be the readiness to place that part of the economic values created
at its disposal which this sphere needs for its development. Wherever
education is viewed only from the angle of economics, the readiness to
ensure the right of being educated to every young person, irrespective
of his parents' purse, will eventually disappear. Something similar holds
for the health system.
Marianne Hochuli has put it in a nutshell: "Sectors
like education and health should under no circumstances be subject to
the same rules as the trade with manufactured goods."[10]
The puppet in the puppet: The concept of man in the GATS ideology
The ideology which is behind GATS obviously leads
to an intellectual blindness to the particular nature of culture and law
as opposed to the economy, absorbing, however, also certain aspects of
economy itself, while distorting others or making them appear oversized.
The neo-liberalism of the WTO ideologists knows and
acknowledges only selfish private interest as the motor of all economic
enterprise. In the neo-liberal ideology, the contradiction between this
"self-interest" and the fact that labour for others is necessary
in our labour-dividing economy, can only be resolved by combining pecuniary
incentives with unlimited competition. For only through this competition
- in their way of thinking - will the opposing egotistical motives wear
each other down, and only the whip of competition is believed to lead
to permanent innovation and hence to an increase in productivity
and a cheapening of the products, so that finally - without the economic
actors' will and intention - a social redistribution takes place behind
their back. In a recent publication the underlying principle is described
as the "Mephisto-principle"[11].
To its supporters, any attempts to infuse the economy with social and
ecological reason, through processes of agreement among the partners involved
- in production, distribution and consumption - are suspected of cartelizing
and are therefore to be prevented by strict application of the competition
law. This gives the competition law priority over the law of contract,
which surely - as an aspect of the general freedom of action of the individual
- is an inviolable human right.
The underlying view is determined by distrust of the
developmental possibilities of man. Its credo reads: Human beings can't
help being as they are. Man's selfish side - undoubtedly existent - is
simply blown up to equate with the whole of man's nature. The fact that
responsibility and social qualities develop only through taking part in
social processes is faded out systematically in this context. This distrust
also explains the seeming inconsistency of the advocates' of elite globalization
insisting on apparently limitless freedom in the economic sphere while
opposing both an extension of the principle of democracy and a consistent
autonomous self-government of a free cultural life. Neo-liberalism does
harmonise well with a "Singaporization" of large parts of the
globe, that is with authoritarian structures.
Economy - servant of society or its master?
The economic sector, thus conceived, is preparing
- through GATS - to make itself irrevocably the master of society.. More
precisely: Money reigns over the economy, and the economy ruled by money
is supposed to rule society. To this economy, for which the principle
of universal saleability does not stop at the goods, but which extends
it also to the factors of production (land, labour, capital), human beings
are necessarily cost factors so long as they cause wage costs or social
costs. The economy, therefore, tends to become anti-human and presumes
to derive law from its feigned inherent necessities instead of yielding
to the law, by which the societies set limits to it.
The state used to raise taxes and social revenues
to be able to finance public services - social systems, culture, but also
the actual state activity itself. Today the economy is evading its grip
by putting pressure on the states in the course of the competition of
the locations with the aim of re-adjusting the social costs and
taxes to a lower level. Eighty percent of the people will be dispensable
to the economy in the future anyway and will at best receive what a former
American safety advisor has called "Tittytainment" - a combination
of covering basic living costs at a relatively low level and cheap entertainment.
Resistance is essential, if this is not to be tomorrow's reality.
Right is what is advantageous to the Global Players
The critics of GATS are therefore justified in emphasising
that the creative authority of the democratic states, that means the law-developing
power of the citizens, which is perforated through globalization, anyway,
will be even further reduced by the agreement. At the same time, so the
critics, the principle of subsidiarity, whose supposed purpose is to permit
the problems to be handled as close to the basis as possible, will be
thus undermined.
An investment, according to the logic of GATS, is
a service rendered - in fact, not only a real-economic investment, but
also one at the financial markets. Thus any independent legal regulation,
which, for instance, provides control of the financial markets, can be
unhinged. What if people advocated a certain level of environmental protection
and social security? The answer would be: This is an offence against the
freedom of the trade in services! - What about imposing regulations on
foreign-based investors? This would be an offence against the freedom
of trade! - What about the state supporting and financing institutions
which are independently run, work community-orientated and do not accept
commercial principles as the basis of their management? Again: Offence
against the freedom of trade! - What if economic partners in a global
chain of economic value added in a certain branch stipulate measures to
safeguard fair prices? This would be a violation of the freedom of competition!
- What about people claiming their freedom of action and of contract making?
Well yes, but only if there is no impingement on competitive freedom!
- And what about promotion of local businesses or publicly set ecological
and social standards in the case of orders placed by public institutions?
This would be a violation of the worldwide obligation of open prize competition!
Particularly affected by such regulations are poorer
countries. Some governments of these countries rightly demand a "protective
clause in the GATS permitting steps to be taken whenever a country is
flooded with services activities that threaten the existing domestic service-providers."[12]
Is acting out of discernment impossible? - The campaign against autonomous man
The attack launched by GATS goes even beyond this,
however: In the Universal Rights of Man the dignity of the individual
is centrally placed and under the protection of the global legal system.
Dignity of man, in its quintessence, is the possibility of the individual
to make use of his own thinking without any direction from outside and
to act out of his own insights. This fact substantiates individual rights
of freedom, on the one hand, and - on the other hand - democratic
rights of participation wherever rules for larger communities of people
sharing a common territory are concerned. Ensuing from this fact are,
at the same time, social rights of man, without which freedom would exist
on paper only and social protection would at best be an act of grace dependent
on the cash balance of the state.
The mode of thought on which GATS is based offends
this concept of human dignity in its very essence. This frequently happens
in a disguised form, though, so that you have to look very closely to
notice it. If everything is economy - and if economy is promoted only
by man's self-interest - then there is basically no practice that flows
out of free insight, out of love of the aim of the action or, respectively,
for the person opposite to whom the action is directed - in no case, however,
a practice relevant for the social sphere. There are only calculating
and selfish actions. For this reason man's capacity to act must be squeezed
into a system. Such a system is the set of rules of competition, supplemented
with the control of a state totally orientated to the economy. The governmental
activity itself is thereby supposed to undergo a transformation, which
is already underway everywhere under the slogan of New Public Management.
This transformation consists in the fact that the governments, in the
first place, are meant to align their own activities to the criteria of
market economy and, in the second place, to enforce the commercial alignment
of cultural life - if need be by creating artificial market-like conditions
in education, social therapy, kindergartens, the public health sector
etc.
At first sight competition between services providers
seems to safeguard the autonomy of the cultural sector at the same
time: anyone may offer now whatever he likes. In reality, though, "solidarity-financing"
of culture as a component of the public sector is weakened without any
achievement other than that "partial autonomy" which, particularly
in education is being invoked as a slogan everywhere in these times of
the New Public Management. Partial autonomy means: Apart from ensuring
freedom of trade the state also sees to the securing of an adequate "output"
of the cultural institutions, the catchwords being: performance orders,
comparability and cost-cutting through standardization and establishment
of "competition-like" conditions, implementation of quality
assurance systems and, at the same time, downward delegation of detail
responsibility. As far as public financing still takes place at all, it
is coupled with the fulfilment of corresponding requirements.
What does it mean to class the activity of a teacher,
a doctor, a researcher in the realm of economics? It means that a certain
way of thinking appears which in the long run cannot but change the quality
of the activity of the teaching, the researching, etc. Research becomes
liable to economically utilizable results, also fundamental research basically
becomes applied research. Liability, warranty and consumer protection
become relevant categories for the tuition. There is a dimming of the
understanding of culture as an antipole of the economy, as a sphere of
inner growth as opposed to outer growth, of meaning as opposed to gratifying
the outer needs, etc. Where everything is buyable, inevitably also the
spirit is for sale. That the other central WTO agreement, TRIPS, ensures
the saleability of intellectual property, including the utilization of
plant species and the patenting of life, is founded on the same fatal
logic.
Orientations for action and alternatives
Regaining the democratic states' capacity to act
What can be done to restore the legal communities'
capacity to act? Certainly: First of all, the crudest assaults against
democracy must be parried , GATS and the foundation of the practically
uncontrollable agency for the monitoring of its observance must be prevented.
But this will not suffice. The powerlessness of the legal community, of
the democratic state has its root in the possibility of the Global Players
to evade any territorial regulation by simply transferring job sites or
to enforce social curtailments using the argument of competitiveness.
At the same time there is a worldwide increase of unemployment through
the very development of increasing labour productivity, and this means
that more and more people can no longer earn their income through gainful
employment and are dependent on "social income". How can the
exclusion of these people be avoided? Moreover, how can the poorer countries
be enabled to build up their own social security systems?
At present the financing of the public sector is mostly
attached to the working income in the form of incidental labour costs
or income tax. This results in the social welfare expenditure of the rich
countries being exported to the south by way of prices and goes hand in
hand with a kind of social dumping through imports (from the south). The
countries of the south cannot build up any social systems without jeopardising
their competitive advantage of low labour costs, while, at the same time,
the social systems of the north are coming under considerable pressure.
If there was world-wide acceptance of the principle that the financing
of the public sector is achieved through taxing the consumption, we would
have a different situation, as consumption is location-bound. The "legal
communities" (i.e. states) would be able again to guarantee a legally
intended protective social level without its discriminating against the
respective home industry in their competition. In future it would be much
more difficult for legal conditions for industry and business to be thwarted
by economic arguments.[13]
For a structural change of the public sector
What matters is to defend the public sector as a sphere
of non-profit services! But don't let us blunder into the trap - let us
not be made to defend the status quo! In fact, in the past there has been
too much petty regulation by the state. The alternative to this, however,
is not GATS, but a structural change in the public sector corresponding
to the inner impulse of civil-society's commitment. The principle of civil
society is the struggle against conformism of any kind, it is diversity
and individuality. For the public sector this would necessarily mean:
moving away from the traditional sovereignty and prerogative of the state,
and moving towards systems of education and health that are funded "in
solidarity", but at the same time also stamped by being independently
run, by diversity, and, therewith, by the respective direction of the
volition of the receivers of their benefits. Let us put a real partnership
between institutions and enterprises which are self-determined and at
the same time obligated to the common interest, on the one side, and the
state-run institutions, on the other, in the place of distorted forms
of Private Public Partnership.
We do not need performance orders given by a government
to cultural institutions dependent on directions and forced into an artificial
ruinous competition, given by a government which on its part is a an order
receiving lackey of an economy soaked with neo-liberalistic ideology,
which defines the "output" expected of the cultural institutions.
What is promising is, rather, solutions where free institutions, in a
self-obliging manner, take over public functions as independent responsible
bodies and enter into contractual relationships with government partners
on eye to eye level.
And as for the government itself, what matters here
is a transformation towards more basic-democratic participation, including
the right of citizens' initiative, popular demand and plebiscite.
Giving a chance to new forms of social economy
The GATS ideologists obviously want us to forget that
there have always been - and still are - attempts to counter the liberal
and neo-liberal economy with an economic system that is polity-orientated
and socially responsible without being planned-economic: The business
enterprises of the Labour movement, Ernst Abbe's foundation idea, Gottlieb
Duttweiler's idea of social capital, the concept of the Grameen Bank,
the initial stages of similar ideas in the Prague Spring, and the
movements of upheaval of 1989 towards a Third Way should be mentioned
here; not to forget either the manifold attempts at cooperating and fair
trading from production to consumption, nor new forms of handling money,
land and capital, nor initiatives for a new agriculture.
Even though many of these approaches failed at first
or presently only have a limited radius of operation - to call them to
mind is enough to refute the thesis that an economic system which is based
on maximum profit of the capital owners is the epitome of economy. Civil
society has no reason to be "anti-business‰, but it does have every
reason to support new approaches of doing business in an ecological and
social manner which might also be capable of forming associations to balance
regional and global interests on a basis of mutual trust and cooperation.
Only such an economic system where services are not
a vehicle of profit making, but where cost-effectiveness and profit are
a means to fulfil social and ecological tasks, can be called humane.
From GATS to "GAFT"?
Let us develop a broad global movement against GATS!
Within this movement and at the round tables of trisectoral partnerships,
let us develop, at the same time, a dialogue on civil society's visions
of a social future stamped by structures that enable people to solve their
social problems more and more fruitfully and to put into practice ever
more freedom, justice and solidarity.
This GATS - we don't need it. What we do need at best
is an agreement which does not yet exist and which we might call "General
Agreement on Fairness in Trade" ("GAFT"). This would be
an agreement which creates global basic conditions for the gradual
development of a global economic life, which is only shaped by the agreements
of the partners concerned and which is efficient and structurally and
regionally well-balanced - in a word, a socially responsible economy,
which is based on the equalization of interests and aims at setting fair
prices.
November 2001. Translation by Wilfried
Hüfler. © Christoph Strawe
|
topics
|
