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An Open Letter from the Quebec Contextual Theology Group to all Christians on the Occasion of the April 2001, Quebec City Summit of the Americas and the Peoples' Summit
Translated from French by Michael Flynn
From next April 20th to 22nd, the Summit of the Americas will be held in Quebec City. This gathering will bring together 34 Heads of State from the three Americas (excluding Cuba) with the goal of re-energizing the negotiations around the creation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). These discussions began in 1994. Once completed the resulting pact is expected to be the most comprehensive such agreement ever. It will incorporate and extend existing agreements on a Pan-American basis, specifically the 1989 Free Trade Agreement between the US and Canada, the 1994 US, Canada and Mexico NAFTA agreement, and other Latin American agreements. As well, these negotiations are taking place in a context where America is already involved in negotiations within the World Trade Organization (WTO) [1].
The fundamental logic of these agreements is to overcome all barriers to the free circulation of capital, goods and services. However, it excludes population movements, as the people must remain in place if northern business interests are to have continued access to cheap labour through which to increase profits! Under the FTAA, the Americas would become one vast investment, production, and trade zone, an area devoid of economic borders and lacking national safeguards or protections for local business. The United States, which already controls more than 69% of the hemisphere's GNP, is keenly interested in seeing included sectors like health and education and collective resources like cultural services, water, the environment and plant genetic material (and why not human genetic material?). Up until now, these resources have been publicly controlled. However, under the FTAA these could be privatized and subjected to the same free trade and investment regulations as any other commodity. In effect, the US hopes to ensure that these resources do not escape the opening up of markets, and that ultimately[2] they will cease to be exempted from free trade regulations. Mr. Percy Barnevick, the President of ABB industrial group, appropriately, if provocatively, summarized this view in defining neo-liberal globalization, "as the freedom for my group to invest where it wishes, when it wishes and to produce whatever it wishes, while facing the minimum level of labour or social constraint."[3] As a Christian group very much committed to supporting society's most vulnerable members and groupings, we have been reflecting on the state of democracy in today's world for some time now. For this reason, we hope to share our concerns about the agreement that will be discussed in Quebec City. Our questions and criticisms focus on the implications of three
aspects of the proposed agreement: the place and role of the State,
the notion of the economy and that of the civil society. In light
of the experience with similar agreements and in the current neo-liberal
atmosphere, we will offer a view that is rooted in our Judeo-Christian
traditions[4].
Should we not be concerned that since 1994 900 trade negotiators from 34 different countries have met repeatedly in any number of Committees and in different countries at taxpayers expense and in great secrecy to discuss the future of the 800 million citizens of the Americas? All of this has occurred without public debate and without our elected representatives or parliaments having any access to the draft documents or any kind of information that would help them understand what was happening in these discussions. However, there is one key exception to this critique: the American Business Forum (ABF) was able to intervene at will at both the political (Trade Ministers meetings) and technical levels of the discussions. While Members of Parliament were being excluded, big business was seated in the "driver's seat and was even able to draft some of the actual texts", as David Rockefeller all but frankly admitted at a gala hosted by President Clinton on the occasion of the first Summit on the integration of the Americas in December 1994[5]. Is this not the equivalent of the privatization of the legislative arm! The very process of these negotiations speaks to the questionable character of its goals. Is not the strategy of gagging democracy equally evident in the very costly steel "barricade" and ring of police that surrounds the venue for the coming Summit and protects it from citizens' voices, which have been deemed "illegal" while private interests have access to all of the Summit's social events? This "wall" of exclusion highlights the frontiers of a debate that is no longer taking place between countries, but on the one hand between a few decision-makers acting at the behest of large companies which they serve and to whom they "have surrendered", and on the other the rest of the population. How can anyone be expected to take seriously the promised discussions on democracy, prosperity and social development in such a framework? This is particularly true, as these issues will not even be included in the economic agreement itself[6]. Does not one suspect that real power lies with the few high-level government officials that have monopolized and manipulated democracy in order to lend legal force to the transfer of public wealth to private investors? They accomplish through privatization, clauses that allow businesses to be compensated for all failed transactions or lost profits due to environmental or health considerations or as a result of labour, consumer or tax legislation, etc.[7] or by virtue of the expert (i.e. non-elected) make-up of national panels established to legally arbitrate trade disputes, etc.? In this context, the State is abdicating its own role as protector of the common good and abolishing the means for protecting its citizens. In denying its sovereignty, the State places our citizenship at risk, as citizens' rights are premised on the very sovereignty of the State to which citizens belong. While democratic institutions may well remain in place, they will be essentially decorative facades. In this context, the clause linking a country's entry into the pact to its establishing democracy and respecting human rights seems a cynical contradiction, or at best, a wavering and pathetic endorsement of the principles involved. In 1996, a French trade unionist participating in the Davos Forum concluded: "public authorities are no better than subcontractors to business. The market will govern while the government will manage"[8]. As for the notion of democracy as a right vested in the citizens themselves, neo-liberal governments are in the process of substituting this ideal with the right of multinationals and investors to control the people! Is this not a new form of tyranny?! Our sense of the Judeo-Christian tradition is offended by this turn of events. For too long we have ignored the fact that the roots of democracy stretch back to the original Israel. The Israelites were liberated from Egypt and granted lands by a different god, the God Yahweh. A God that defended the poor and other victims of injustice, a God to whom the people owed their only allegiance, a unique God whose image was to be translated into the establishment of an egalitarian society based on a confederation of tribes, clans and families. Their political assembly would bear the name ecclesia (in Greek). Their God did not claim exclusive sovereignty, except to reclaim it from the arbitrary powers or idols that would claim it unto themselves. He gave sovereignty to all of the people in the form of a responsibility to create a just society where there would be room for everyone. Later on, the Israelites would fall to the temptation to have a king like other peoples. However, their king was to be different. Their king was expected to act as Yahweh, to defend all of the people and particularly the most vulnerable. The majority of their kings proved unequal to the task: they were unable to control officials, large landowners, the military or traders that punished the people with taxes, duties, brutality, unfair trade, usurious interest on loans, etc. The prophets protested in the name of Yahweh, but the blindness of the powers that be would break the peoples' unity and lead to their defeat and exile. Following the cleansing reflection of the exile, the Israelites would return "converted" to a new political vision for managing their society. This tradition, combined with that of Greece, is at the origin of present-day secularized Western democracy. A society that is the precious fruit of a social contract that is in the process of being stolen by the very people elected to oversee and develop it. The FTAA would bless and legalize this fraud.
All evidence suggests that on an economic level the FTAA will simply accelerate neo-liberal trends and turn all economic activity over to the exclusive jurisdiction of a totally free market. However, the FTAA would be even more aggressive in dismantling existing safeguards and laws that establish some controls over the marketplace. Are we to believe that individuals, individually pursuing their self-interest without the counterbalance of government intervention, are the only route to the common good, as was the argument for 19th-century savage capitalism? Without the boundaries imposed by regulation and the social order, would not the advantages of trade be quickly transformed into instruments for ruthless exclusion? There is no such thing as natural social equality, be that between individuals or groups; equality can only be the by-product of common political will, of policy and of a vision of society. If conscious measures are not taken, inevitably the strong will eliminate the weak. Can we subscribe to a "laissez faire" strategy when we are dealing with the essentials of life? This is particularly a concern if the state is abandoning its social policies and, for example, leaving health or education to the mercy of economic competition. As Lamennais rightfully observed in the 19th century: "In the context of inequality between the strong and the weak, unbridled freedom oppresses while limits and laws liberate". This is the exact opposite of the ideology of the Afree fox in the liberated chicken coup"! The FTAA is far from the new economic constitution that the people of the Americas badly need. The addition of a few social or environmental clauses, without real teeth, will not suddenly make acceptable an agreement that cannot be ratified democratically. In the economic jungle that FTAA promises, the people are expected to sacrifice their living and working conditions to become more competitive than people elsewhere. This is already the case in Mexico, where due to NAFTA nothing impedes transnational companies from the "quasi-dumping" of maize (corn), the peasants' main cash crop, and flooding local markets with maize that costs less than the peasants' costs of production. Once the peasants have abandoned their lands and are condemned to unemployment in the slums of the cities, these same interests will buy the peasants' lands for a "handful of tortillas" and then sell maize at impossible prices! There are also very real consequences for Chiapas with its majority indigenous population. If the Mexican government does not guarantee communal lands, the product of land reform, within the Constitution, multinationals will be free to purchase these lands directly (even more eagerly where oil reserves are suspected). However, if the government even attempts to protect these lands, they might very well be sued under the terms of NAFTA or the FTAA! This represents quite a dilemma and illustrates the difficulty in the negotiations between the Mexican government and the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Are labels of barbarous or "economic Nazism" too strong? Perhaps the term "crime against humanity" is more appropriate. Dare we ask these questions of the Latin Americans for whom the conquest that began 500 years ago continues daily? In the North as in the South, the "laissez faire" logic of these agreements and neo-liberalism in general threatens life by tending to impose its logic on everything and on everybody. In this context, preserving natural resources and environmental protection are seen as contravening the principle of economic competitiveness and can be declared illegal! In addition, everything can be bought or sold: land, water, the right to pollute and perhaps in the not too distant future the rights to the very air that we breathe! What is a Christian perspective on this chain of logic or events? The neo-liberal ideal seeks to conquer our spirit. It argues that the market would spark a "spontaneous order", an order that is infinitely wiser than all plans to organize society. It alone can be relied upon to orchestrate millions of individual decisions. Consequently, we are not to interfere with the market. Rather we must free it of any impediments to its free operation. Adam Smith, an eighteenth century English capitalist theoretician went so far as to compare the market to Divine Providence in his naive vision of a magical society functioning perfectly thanks to the "invisible hand of the economy"! On the contrary, our Judeo-Christian faith calls us more towards "political" intervention than it does to passiveness. In Egypt, Yahweh "heard the cries of his people" and intervened to liberate them. Later on, the prophets intervened to protect the weakest. The Jubilee came about to regularly correct social inequalities through laws: a law on the forgiveness of debt and on release from servitude, a law on the return of lands that had been lost, a law on leaving the land fallow and leaving work before exhaustion. The Jubilee tradition enabled society to self-correct; it recognized that any social order has a tendency to backslide, unless it is regularly adjusted and brought back to its real reason for existence, in this case the common good. It recognized that there is always a gap between that which is and that which could or should be. Despite this, neo-liberal capitalism paints itself as "the end of history", the greatest system ever created, practically heaven on earth! Why correct something that is perfect: all we need to do is to remove the obstacles in its path! As in the Israel of old or in Jesus' time, when the system reached its extreme, or today when neo-liberalism threatens the universality of access to the basic requirements for life; nothing is put aside for the losers. Nothing saves them, be they investors, labourers or consumers, they have become "disposable". Are we going to allow things to happen Alaissez faire@ or as they will? Jesus never ceased to intervene and to go against the grain. He stood against the money changers that turned the Temple from its mission into a place of "business", against the authorities that expelled the poor and the sick, the Lord's damned, to the margins of society having labelled them "impure". Christ called them: "Happy - happy are they". The powerful ended up by acting against Him, by excluding Him, by crucifying Him outside of the walls. But the Father intervened on his behalf with the resurrection and declared just all of those who acted on behalf of the smallest of these little ones. Is this not what we celebrate throughout Lent and at Easter? Like the Levite who passed by the robbery victim on the roadside, belief in laissez faire ideals misrepresents the very nature of God. The Christian faith is not removed from the essence of economic life, nor is it neutral with respect to economic conduct. The Eucharist regularly brings together our communities and calls upon each of us to enter into a movement of the Spirit, a movement to "renew the face of the earth" in collaboration with the spirit of the people. It is not by accident that the Lord selected bread and wine, the "fruits of human labour"-- that is economic as opposed to purely natural products-- to signify his presence with us. Are we not equally called to organize the economy in a way that reveals God's paternal and maternal image to all, rather than hiding it? Are not these precisely the issues underlying the FTAA? Our Judeo-Christian tradition is founded on the logic of an eruption of grace and giving in human affairs. It is offended by any vision that seeks to limit our horizons or to enrol us into a purely market logic.
Beyond these reflections on the State and the economy, we need to ask ourselves: AWhat type of society does the FTAA offer?@ It is the fulfilment of a particular view of being human and of the social contact championed by an Anglo-Saxon tradition that has finally triumphed in the form of neo-liberalism. Under it, the person is viewed as an entity "without doors or windows" entirely focused on his or her own self-interest, divorced of any fundamental relationship with others. In this context, society cannot but be seen as simply the exterior reflection of individuals, a purely mechanical calculation and certainly not the product of a people's common will. This is the world of the market a place where social relationships are equated to business (property, contractY) arrangements that are to be managed by market rules. This vision leaves no room for the common good. There is no "social we", only interests and private advantage. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that such a society aspires only to the private appropriation of the world. In opposition to this, the notion of citizenship is based on the recognition of a human community that nonetheless relies on individuals. Free and enjoying equal rights, these individuals participate in the definition of communal life and define its regulations, its social contract. As responsible beings, each submits to the implications of this contract and each accepts to limit their individual liberty out of respect for the rights of others. Such a social contract is forged in the subjectivity of each individual. If there is a "social we", a real society, there can be a common good[9] and measures can be taken to preserve it for future generations. This process is called democracy and it makes us subject to laws. The alternative view is a throwback; under it we are no longer subjugated by kings but by the rules of the market and by economic despots. At this juncture, these two logics are in open confrontation: if there is no social responsibility by what right do we impose limits on the ambitions of the strongest? With its steadfast refusal to place limits on the market, the FTAA stands firmly in this camp. From a citizenship perspective, social responsibility (much as in a family or between friends ...) is based on a selfless logic that beyond all reason imposes limits on behaviour specifically to guarantee that our social link remains viable and even to expand it. By way of principle, such a social relationship is based on a fundamental selflessness and not on tabulating self-interest (even where the latter is understood in its broadest sense). Without a minimum of selflessness, nothing has any meaning. Once again, our Christian faith can inspire and support us in navigating our way through the present confusion. In our tradition, God's invitation is directed to preserving the community. This is why the Lord stands with those who are the most threatened with exclusion. By the same token, the Bible presents numerous stories of the faith experience of communities and not stories of an individual faith that isolates the one from the others. We have come to recognize God as a Trinity, a community in solidarity, a "We", the Father, Son and Spirit. Despite their differences, all human beings, reflections of the "image of God" are equally called to community. To put people in a virtual state of permanent and unequal "economic warfare" is to reject God and the Lord's communal project. Many millennium ago, Yahweh commanded the Israelites "That there be no poor among you" (Deuteronomy 15, 4), and left human creativity to achieve this "mission". The early Christian communities reflected this preoccupation through their commitment to sharing, so that "none among you will be in need" (Acts 4, 35). Later on, the Fathers of the Church established the doctrine of the universal destination of goods, a doctrine that guarantees everyone the rights to all that is needed to support life by virtue of their very dignity as people. Private property, to be acceptable was seen as being at the service of solidarity (koinonia), and thus subjected to the "social hypothesis" so often referred to by Pope John Paul II. There can never be ownership that "deprives" or takes from others that which they need to live. Are not current notions of neo-liberalism and its accompaniments in the ongoing FTAA negotiations in direct contravention of this tradition to the extent that they widen the gap between the rich and the poor and even dare to suggest that we go further in this direction?
Here in Quebec a number of civil society initiatives have chosen another route to building the future. Among these, we must stress the proposed law on the elimination of poverty, an idea that began with small groups of Christians throughout Quebec working with CAPMO (Carrefour pastoral en monde ouvrier), a Christian workers= pastoral grouping. David against Goliath perhaps, but the process surrounding the action gathered 215,000 signatures and more importantly gave rise to a very dynamic exercise of rebuilding public conscience and building the "social we". The government was forced to listen. What is more, similar experiences have been in the process of coming together at a global level for the past several years. At a time when the economic powers are annexing the nation State, civil society is mobilizing as the defender of our humanity. Civil society blocked the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investments and the World Trade Organization (WTO) conference in Seattle. The World Social Forum was founded in Porto Alegre (Brazil) with the specific intent of identifying alternatives to the current order. Civil society brought the FTAA to public attention on the occasion of earlier summits in Santiago and Toronto. And now, it will be meeting in Quebec, for the "People's Summit". Will we be there? In heart and in spirit at least? The Quebec Contextual Theology Group: Michel Beaudin, Claude Boileau, Richard Chrétien, Guy Côté, Claire Doran, Roger Éthier, Gérard Laverdure, Lise Lebrun, Jean Ménard, Patrice Perreault, and Nelson Tardif.
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