Citizen Agendas:
New Directions for Global Affairs

Tom Barry

Mail this page to a friend.

What is a citizen agenda?

It is a grassroots agenda, one that arises from citizens' concerns and becomes part of the policy debate. Under democratic governance, this percolation of grassroots issues into policy debates is a normal part of the political process. Citizen agendas, mediated by politicians, can thus be translated into policy. The extent to which this happens depends on the degree of citizen support for these agendas, the strength and political skills of the grassroots organizations promoting these agendas, and the power of affected established interests. Although rarely approaching the ideal--of the people, by the people, for the people--citizen agendas advancing everyday, domestic concerns (gun control, campaign finance reform, gay rights, etc.) routinely shape national political debate.

What's new is the upsurge of citizen agendas that advance a new vision of global affairs. Foreign policy, even in the most democratic nations, has traditionally been the purview of a narrow policy elite. In the United States, a self-selected core of congressional representatives, high administration officials, and analysts associated with the major think tanks and universities has constituted this foreign policy establishment. With little public input or review, this elite circle set the directions and crafted the implementing legislation for U.S. foreign policy during the cold war era. At both regional and global levels, representatives of national governments functioned as the sole legitimate actors during this same period. The more powerful the government, the more influence its representatives have historically wielded in international negotiations.

However, the emergence of transnational citizen movements and strong nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with global affairs has altered this framework for foreign policy decisionmaking. Although the traditional foreign policy establishments are still central to foreign policy debates on the national level, their ability to dictate the terms of these debates has markedly diminished. Among the factors contributing to this more complex foreign policy process are an end to the ideological character and security implications of all aspects of foreign policy, and the intersection of domestic and international issues, particularly regarding the global economy and environment. Paralleling the new influence of nontraditional foreign policy actors on a national level is the expanding influence of NGO networks in domains of global governance historically controlled by governments. Writing about this "power shift" in global governance, scholars refer to a new global structure of "complex multilateralism," referring to nongovernmental involvement in affairs heretofore managed by governments alone.

There is widespread agreement that transnational citizen networks and movements are altering the conduct of international affairs. But this is not to conclude that nongovernmental organizations and citizen movements are for the first time making their presence felt in the international arena. Citizen groups, sometimes national and sometimes international, were instrumental in establishing the humanitarian and relief dimensions of global governance. In the U.S., citizen groups were key elements in advancing the idea of establishing the United Nations, and religious and peace groups have long promoted agendas for nuclear nonproliferation and other forms of arms control.

The end of the cold war, the advent of a new era of communications technology, and the integration of corporate marketing and production have given rise to new citizen concerns about the conduct of international relations, while creating new opportunities for citizen action and networking. This is happening on three broad fronts: 1) security/political, 2) environmental, and 3) global economy.

Success in advancing citizen agendas can be noted on all three fronts. Campaigns led by citizens (or with strong citizen involvement) have been instrumental in raising international concern--and in some cases formulating new international norms--regarding deactivating landmines, establishing an international criminal court, and banning the use of child soldiers. Most notable has been the success of such groups as Amnesty International in expanding international monitoring of human rights in the past three decades. Although long-term trends of international environmental deterioration have not been halted, three decades of activism have netted great successes in expanding environmental norms and improving environmental monitoring in multilateral institutions during the 1990s.

The recent insertion of citizen agendas into U.S. foreign policy and international decisionmaking has, however, revealed itself most dramatically in efforts to influence the management of the global economy. It did not emerge full-blown on the streets of Seattle, but rather has deep roots in the citizen movements active on the security/political and environmental fronts.

Political/Security: In the United States, citizen groups in the 1970s and 1980s questioned the political uses of U.S. economic and military aid. This criticism of U.S. foreign policies oftentimes led to solidarity networks with countries and societies adversely impacted by U.S. programs, U.S. corporations, and U.S. military intervention. Largely in this political/security context, campaigns emerged to improve bilateral and multilateral aid, cancel third world debts, and create more equitable North-South terms of trade (mostly concerning commodity exports). Two driving forces of these citizen campaigns were humanitarian/ethical activism (usually with significant involvement by religious communities) and ideological activism (by socialists and anti-imperialists). Outside of the national arena, this strand of political/security activism steadily escalated its critique of multilateralism. In the 1970s this occurred in alliance with countries of the nonaligned movement and supporters of the new international economic order within the United Nations. In the 1980s, the critique was increasingly directed at the policies of international financial institutions (IFIs), principally the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Environment: Today's citizen movements analyzing globalization also have strong roots in the environmental reform efforts of the 1970s and 1980s. Activists concerned with global environmental deterioration did not overlook the environmental impacts of U.S. aid and other overseas programs, but instead largely and appropriately focused on creating new international environmental norms (usually under the auspices of the UN) and halting the destructive environmental impacts of the IFIs
--especially the World Bank and regional multilateral banks. In its evolution from promoting conservation to defining environmentally sustainable development, in the 1980s the environmental community found itself increasingly engaged with the instruments of global economic governance, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

Emergence of Global Economy Activism

International trade and investment relations received little citizen attention until the 1990s. In the 1980s a few prescient NGOs recognized that the most powerful structural feature of international affairs was neither the bipolarism of the cold war nor North-South politics. Rather it was economic globalization facilitated by new communications technology. Activism spread amongst religious activists in the 1980s around third world debt issues. Environmental, farm, and consumer safety groups began to organize against the main multilateral instrument for restructuring the global economy, the proposals during the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations to expand the GATT. Although formally a trade agreement and not an institution, GATT was nonetheless a powerful instrument of global governance and was the exclusive domain of trade bureaucrats and corporate consultants. In the 1980s, GATT not only doubled its country members but also took decided steps to expand its rules beyond trade in manufactured goods to agricultural trade, services, intellectual property rights, and investment. Moreover, by the end of the Uruguay Round, GATT members had created a new institution of global economic governance. The World Trade Organization (WTO) not only boasted a secretariat and a greatly expanded set of rules, but also a dispute-resolution mechanism.

Out from under the shadow of the cold war, the attention of a critical mass of progressive international activists shifted to the perils of globalization. This focus on the global economy had great domestic resonance in Northern countries like the United States, whose industrial base was in turmoil as production transferred to new locations that offered cheaper, nonunionized labor. The main catalyst of the activist upsurge in north America was the proposal, launched in 1990, for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Suddenly, American workers felt their country's main competition was not the Soviet Union or even Japan, but $1-5/day workers on the other side of the border and elsewhere overseas. Even as job productivity increased and the economy boomed, wages remained largely stagnant. Thus a pervasive sense of economic insecurity spread through Northern societies in the 1990s.

The U.S. labor movement also recreated itself, once free from the political imperatives of the cold war. After World War II, organized labor joined the U.S. government and corporate elites in an alliance perceived to be mutually beneficial. What was good for General Motors was thought to be good for labor (as profits expanded and foreign sales grew, so did wages). With federal government economic assistance, the AFL-CIO spread U.S. cold war politics to workers throughout the "free world" with its promotion of "free trade unionism"--often just another name for business unionism. Although organized labor never fully endorsed the free trade agenda of the U.S. government and transnational corporations, neither did it offer strong ideological opposition. When U.S. jobs were threatened by foreign imports, two American unions (Unite and the UAW) responded in the 1980s with "Buy America" campaigns and Japan bashing. However, organized labor (AFL-CIO and international trade secretariats) did play a critical role in alerting U.S. activists to the changing rules and structures of the global economy.

The initial wake-up call to the foreign policy establishment in the U.S. that trade and investment relations were for the first time being subjected to close public and congressional scrutiny came during the NAFTA negotiations. A reminder came when citizen opposition played a significant role in halting negotiations for an international investment agreement called the MAI. As the 1990s ended, what is now called the Seattle Coalition delivered another wake-up message that could not be ignored. It was this: the rapid pace of economic globalization and the new rules of the global economy (NAFTA, Uruguay Round, Maastricht Agreement of the European Union (EU), Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the IFIs, etc.) have created a citizen backlash that will mount in intensity as corporate-driven globalization deepens.

The "Turtles to Teamsters" movement that manifested itself in Seattle included a wide range of progressive activists and demonstrated that the long-guarded distance between citizen activists and organized labor was narrowing, at least in the United States. The most prominent voice in this informal coalition was that of the Citizens Trade Campaign (a coalition led by Public Citizen, housed at Friends of the Earth), whose anti-free trade and anticorporate agenda represented the antithesis of the economic liberalism and business-enhancing agenda of the WTO.

Need for New Thinking and New Institutions

With disastrous consequences, the U.S. government has squandered the post-cold war opportunities. Citizen movements, in contrast, have successfully seized these same opportunities, and in the process formulated the outlines of a new global affairs agenda. Typical of the way foreign policy has traditionally been conducted, the elite has failed to make the essential connections between domestic and international affairs--and, as a result, there is often little support for U.S. involvement abroad. In marked contrast to official foreign policy doctrine, a citizen-based agenda embodies a bottom-up approach to policymaking that advances a new view of global affairs. In this view, U.S. national interests are more broadly conceived, U.S. national security designations are more narrowly conceived, and the national interests and national security of all countries increasingly depend a system of global governance (norms, treaties, international cooperation, and institutions) that furthers global peace, prosperity, and environmental sustainability.

U.S. national security and U.S. national interests need to be redefined in keeping with a world in which the global economy and global environmental conditions inextricably link national policies.

There is clearly a need for fresh thinking and for new institutions and actors to advance alternative approaches to the challenges and conundrums of our present era. The good news is that there is a bounty of creative thinking around the world about how to address persistent and emerging crises in global affairs. In the United States, there is a surge of new ideas about what constitutes U.S. national interests and U.S. national security. In large part, this analysis is coming not from the traditional centers of foreign policy decisionmaking but from citizen groups, a modern breed of scholars, and alternative citizen-based centers of research and analysis.

In 1989 when citizens, east and west, spontaneously tore down the Berlin Wall, they were at the same time laying the foundation for a new structure of international affairs. Acting together across borders, public citizens promote human rights, respond to humanitarian crises, halt environmental deterioration, ban land mines, set social rules for the global economy, end the tyranny of the IMF/World Bank's structural adjustment programs, set corporate codes of conduct, grant debt relief, advance women's rights, and ensure that institutions of global governance are transparent and accountable. As a result, civil society movements have set the agenda to which governments must respond, and are establishing the terms of debate and signaling the directions of global affairs for the 21st century. The emergence of transnational citizen movements and strong nongovernmental organizations concerned with global affairs is challenging some of the most powerful international institutions, opening domains of decisionmaking traditionally controlled by governments, and altering the conduct of international affairs.

Although each international citizen movement has its own special focus, they are all products of a new epoch and a new world. With the end of the cold war, the old ideological camps have faded, creating enormous possibilities for an international re-visioning of the norms and structures of global politics. Advances in communications and computer technology have, together with the rapid pace of economic integration, eroded the prevailing concepts of national borders and national sovereignty.

Back to Citizen-Based Global Affairs Agenda Index