9
technology, of communications, and of access to information, as well as from the international
flow of goods and finance.”
23
Quoting Bill Clinton, Director General Michael Moore affirmed
that “[g]lobalization is not a proposal or a policy choice, it is a fact.”
24
Although it has
sometimes been conceded that “government policies…can speed-up, slow down or even reverse
progress on global integration,” it has more often been asserted that “[t]he process of
globalization will not be reversed—it will accelerate.”
25
This understanding of economic
globalization lends credence to the WTO's institutional mission. By naturalizing the structures
and processes upon which economic globalization depends, dominant actors within the WTO,
again, have effectively detached themselves from a process that has created considerable social
and political turmoil. The WTO is not responsible for economic globalization or its outcomes; it
simply harnesses some of globalization's potential while it manages and mitigates its negative
effects. It is thus that Ruggiero was able to argue that “free trade cannot be responsible for the
distribution of wealth it generates.”
26
Even following the Asian financial crisis—when the
assumptions of naturalness and inevitability seemed to be called most directly into question—
Ruggiero stated that “globalization is not a policy...to be judged right or wrong. It is a process—
driven by the realities of economic and technological change.”
27
Third, in addressing the concerns of discontented groups, dominant actors have
consistently painted a dichotomous picture in which a world of free trade was situated in
opposition to a chaotic one of rampant nationalism. Individuals who challenged the cause of
multilateralism were, in the early years of the WTO, dismissed out of hand. They were lumped
into one undifferentiated category, and written off. At one point, Ruggiero referred to anti-
globalists as “those who peddle[d] the quack remedies of protectionism and xenophobia.”
28
In a
later statement, Ruggiero suggested that “[t]here is an artificial, even surreal, quality to the
current debate over globalization—a yearning for a past which cannot be recreated and a
stubborn refusal to embrace a future which offers so many people so much hope for a better
23
WTO 1996d.
24
WTO 1999a.
25
WTO 1995c; WTO 1997b.
26
WTO 1996b.
27
WTO 1998a.
28
WTO 1996c.
Convention