Social Activism and the Internet. (Review Essays/Notes Critiques).

Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, Global Showdown: How the New Activists Are Fighting Global Corporate Rule (Toronto: Stoddart, 2001)

Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith, Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000)

Craig

IT WAS NOT SO LONG AGO that globalization had only one face, that of a restructured capitalist economy employing new informational technologies to network and operate on a global scale. Globalization, in this form, seemed unstoppable, out-flanking the nation-state, labour, and popular movements, pushing aside anyone or anything that stood in its way. Today, however, that one-dimensional view no longer holds sway. Protests over the meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999, the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas in Quebec in April, 2001, and the G-8 in Genoa and Kananaskis in 2001 and 2002, speak to a new activism that has brought another face and dimension to globalization. Increasingly economic globalization from above is being challenged by globalization from below. Yet, while different, these competing visions of globalization have common features. Both rely heavily on new technologies and means of communication to operate on a global scale within organizational contexts that incr easingly take a horizontal and networked form.

Each of these books makes a distinctive contribution to understanding the rise of anti-corporate forms of globalization. Collectively, the books also offer the reader a grasp of changing concepts of politics and the political. Until recently the state was seen as the territorial space, the place of politics, and international relations were a state-to-state affair. The new politics speaks not of parties and obtaining state power, but of global civil society, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and social movements.

Of the three books, Warkentin's is the most academically detached, written not so much to exhort and motivate as do the other two, but to assist the reader in understanding the veritable explosion of NGOs and the challenge they pose to conventional state-referential theoretical frameworks used in the study of international relations. Indeed, rare is the international issue that does not attract a transnational network of NGOs organizing and mobilizing to express their point of view. The author places a special emphasis on the role of the Internet and NGOs in creating a global civil society. While all three books stress the importance of the Internet in the growth of global civil society, only Warkentin offers a detailed discussion of the development of the Internet, its inherent characteristics, and its transnational reach. He argues that the Internet is an "effective tool for establishing and maintaining social connections that contribute to global civil society." (33) He also explains how the Internet facil itates the ability of NGOs to pursue their organizational goals by, for example, facilitating internal communication, disseminating informational resources, and encouraging political participation.