25 Years Ago, the Battle of Seattle Showed Us What Democracy Looks Like

November 30, 1999, was supposed to be the first day of the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference in Seattle. Normally, “the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference in Seattle” was the sort of boring phrase I would have heard Jim Lehrer say as my parents watched NewsHour. At age 11, I was more interested in collecting Pokémon cards. But things didn’t go normally. The diplomats assembled at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center were met by at least 40,000 organized protesters from all over the world, including anti-sweatshop activists, unions, environmental organizations, anarchists, Indigenous rights groups, artists, students, farmers, and progressive religious leaders.

There were drum circles and papier-mâché puppets, permitted marches and unauthorized actions. A group of Teamsters danced in the street with a group of environmentalists dressed like turtles. Members of the Rainforest Action Network scaled a crane hundreds of feet high to suspend a giant banner that had two arrows: one pointing toward “WTO,” the other toward “DEMOCRACY.” The next day, a photo of the banner was on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.

Groups of protesters blocked intersections and locked their hands together inside homemade “lockboxes” made of chains, carabiners, and PVC pipe segments. The protests delayed the conference’s opening ceremony, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright got trapped in her hotel room. In order to clear the intersections and get the conference underway, police responded with tear gas, pepper spray, batons, projectiles, and mass arrests. Black bloc anarchists broke windows at Starbucks and set fires at NikeTown. The cops ran out of tear gas, and the National Guard was called in. The city was put under a curfew, and sales of gas masks were banned. The Battle of Seattle, as it came to be called, continued until the conference ended on December 3.

The events produced spectacular imagery of urban warfare. Video footage of raging fires, billowing tear gas, anti-capitalist graffiti, and black-clad anarchists fighting in the street with phalanxes of police in riot gear were shown on the news worldwide. Kids talked about it on the bus to school that week. I don’t know if this was the first time ever that trade policy was discussed by a group of middle-schoolers, but it was a first for me.

“Yo, they were like, setting fires and stuff,” a boy in a Korn shirt announced to his friend with spiked hair. “This one dude kicked in a window at a Starbucks.”

At the time, the scenes from Seattle made me uneasy. Why, I wondered, would anyone vandalize a Starbucks? And what were the protesters so angry about?

“You know that banner that showed, like, capitalism going in one direction and democracy going in the other?” Quinn Slobodian, a professor of history at Boston University and the author of Crackup Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, asked me. “The WTO was supposed to be the embodiment of that. The way that the international trade community saw it themselves was that the WTO and international economic law was democratically legitimate because it had been turned into law by democratically elected governments.”

That all started in 1948. Originally named the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, the organization served as a forum for governments to negotiate trade agreements and settle trade disputes. In the shadow of the Second World War, such an organization served an obvious peacekeeping function. In 1995, the GATT was renamed the World Trade Organization, and by 1995, its numbers had swelled from 23 member states to 135. During that decade, its scope was expanded to cover not only trade in goods but also services, as well as intellectual property, such as patents for seeds, software, or medicines. It also began meeting more frequently—typically every two years, with the first Ministerial Conference held in Singapore in 1996. When it was announced that the next conference would be held in Seattle—a formerly blue-collar town that had recently become the headquarters of Microsoft, Starbucks, Amazon, and grunge music—activists got to work planning a response.

“A lot of the conversation [among protesters] was around how deeply antidemocratic the WTO governing body was,” said Nancy Haque, a founding member of the Direct Action Network (DAN), an umbrella network of affinity groups that planned many of the more disruptive nonviolent actions in 1999, such as blocking intersections. “Having a few judges who are appointed, not elected, deciding these rules which actually matter to people was a deeply unfair system.”

But the way the WTO functioned was not the primary concern of the protesters. The real issue was the role they felt the WTO played in policies that shut down unionized factories in developed countries and outsourced the labor to poor nations with few labor or safety protections, or the way that certain trade agreements priced in environmental destruction as an externality.

A significant number of the protesters in Seattle had gotten their start in the anti-sweatshop movement. Throughout the 1990s, clothing manufacturers started shifting their manufacturing from rich countries with lots of regulations to poor countries with few regulations. As this happened, a series of prominent media exposés brought attention to labor abuses inside these factories. A 1992 Harper’s Magazine article by Jeff Ballinger profiled an Indonesian worker in a Nike factory who worked 10-hour days, six days a week, and yet made only $37.46 a month—half the retail price of a pair of Nike sneakers at the time.

The brand-new technology of at-home Internet allowed people who were outraged by this state of affairs to connect via e-mail, listservs, and websites. Anti-sweatshop activism became popular among college students, and in 1998, the group United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) was founded. This organization pressured universities to purchase their branded apparel from factories with fair labor practices. It also served as an incubator for left activism.

Months before the conference started, groups like DAN and USAS started planning. Activists organized camps up and down the West Coast. They built giant puppets, painted signs, learned how to rappel from tall structures, and held teach-ins. They got large maps of Seattle and planned how they would converge on the convention center where the meeting would be held.

A decade earlier, Francis Fukuyama had famously announced “the end of history.” What he meant was that liberal democracy and an increasingly deregulated free market capitalism were “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and “the final form of human government.” When the Soviet Union fell in 1991 and left the United States the sole global leader, this seemed to confirm Fukyuama’s thesis. Throughout the ’90s, there was a widespread sense that, as Margaret Thatcher had put it, there was “no alternative”—a notion that the late scholar Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism.”

The protests of 1999 were a rejoinder to that consensus. Sweatshops, the protesters argued, had no place in a democracy; nor did closed-door deals that created the rules governing daily life for people around the world. Doug Henwood, who was in Seattle to cover the protests for The Nation, told me that Seattle marked the first time he heard crowds of people chanting the now-ubiquitous protest slogan “This is what democracy looks like.” That slogan gave its name to a 2000 documentary directed by Jill Friedberg and Rick Rowley, consisting of footage from 100 media activists. (In my opinion, This is What Democracy Looks Like is dated and melodramatic, with its POV camera angles and trip-hop soundtrack, but it is a useful primary source.)