[Media-watch]

[Iain Campbell]

Lula Raises the Stakes
by William Greider & Kenneth Rapoza


The bearded political leader they call Lula is the new phenomenon of 
globalization, a man with audacious ambitions to alter the balance of power 
among nations. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the new left-wing president of 
Brazil, envisions a united South America that gains economic strength by 
drawing closer together in trade and bargaining collectively, much as the 
European Union does. He wants to create a global coalition speaking for the 
not-rich countries--reminiscent of the "nonaligned nations" that decades ago 
tried to stand between the cold war's two superpowers. And he wants to push 
the IMF, the World Bank and the United Nations to become more democratic.

Lula may well fail. Nevertheless, his aggressive diplomacy looks like the 
most promising initiative to reform globalization in many decades. One sure 
indication that Lula must be taken seriously is that the US government has 
mounted its own nasty, hardball diplomacy to isolate him from potential 
allies and crumple his ideas before they can gain momentum. The United 
States versus Brazil is a most uneven contest, and the smart money will not 
be betting on Lula. But he does not stand alone in the world, and may speak 
more authentically to this new historical moment than Washington does.

Toward that end, Lula became an energetic world traveler during his first 
ten months in office. He has persuaded South Africa and India to join Brazil 
in a new triangular dialogue that will focus on technological alliances and 
social issues like world hunger, and also serve as a unifying opposition 
voice inside the World Trade Organization. Indian Finance Minister Yashwant 
Sinha defined the purpose as promoting the economic and social interests of 
the Southern Hemisphere. "We have thought enough about South-South 
cooperation," he said, "and we have reached this stage now where we want to 
give it a concrete shape." Lula is courting China to become the next big 
partner. China and Brazil have already signed a commercial accord covering 
agribusiness, technology, construction and natural resources. In October the 
two countries jointly launched an earth-monitoring satellite.

In South America, Lula traveled to Peru and Colombia, where he urged closer 
economic relations between the Andean Pact nations and their southern rivals 
in Mercosur (the Southern Common Market), anchored by Brazil and Argentina. 
He offered to mediate talks between the Colombian government and the 
revolutionary guerrillas of FARC. In Venezuela he gave embattled President 
Hugo Chávez a $1 billion line of credit to buy Brazilian exports. In 
mid-October Lula joined with Argentina's President Néstor Kirchner to unfurl 
the "Buenos Aires consensus," a proposed alternative to the much-despised 
"Washington Consensus," which has straitjacketed developing economies with 
its harsh economic rules. The future, they declared, must give poorer 
nations the sovereign space to determine their own development strategies, 
balancing social necessities with economic stability.

Lula was also a hit with delegates at the UN General Assembly, where he laid 
out a visionary proposal for eradicating hunger worldwide and reforming the 
UN itself. Then he was off to tour five Southern African capitals, with a 
December excursion planned for the Middle East and, later, Russia. This past 
summer his travels took him to Washington, where he chatted up George W. 
Bush. "Not the man I would like to see in the White House," Lula allowed 
afterward, but the two "would have to get along."

What Lula has in mind is literally changing globalization as we know it--the 
version led from Washington. A muscular coalition of developing countries 
could block the draconian investment rules that multinational corporations 
and bankers keep pushing for the WTO and the Free Trade Area of the Americas 
(FTAA), set for debate in Miami this month. A convergence of third-force 
nations might also generate more trade and capital investment among the 
developing economies, allowing somewhat less dependence on the wealthiest 
nations. In short, Lula's vision is for a multilateral world, with power 
dispersed from the center, shared more equitably with regional trading blocs 
and alliances. That idea is anathema to Washington (also Brussels, Paris, 
Berlin and Tokyo). But, for many political and economic reasons, this new 
approach might sustain and stabilize the global trading system more 
effectively than the present top-down arrangement.

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