WASHINGTON ARRIVED with all the winning cards in the hands of that “poker of liars” that is the summit of global commerce, America had deluded itself of being able to take the pot and to give to Bill Clinton the last triumph of his presidential twilight. It’s not happening, it will not happen. WHY it is true that the United States has in hand the cards that dominate the game of globalization – the currency of reference, the lingua franca of the economy, the white gold of cyber-technologies, the control of mass culture and the last (and only) planetary armed force – the others, the weakest and most confused players like Europe, brought the joker who froze his hand. They have dropped the card of the fear of American arrogance translated into the transparent and effective metaphors of the new anti-Americanism that are transgenic foods, the hormone steaks, the debts of poor countries, the aversion to Gates-Microsoft and the fear of cultural hegemony of Hollywood and TV Yankee. The first disappointment, for the America of this Clinton, which reigns and consumes itself in the sunset in state journeys to seek the “place in history” that washes Monica’s stain, has been the desertion of the leading political leaders. From Chirac to Prodi, from D ‘Alema to Castro to Blair, all the “owners” of the world have rejected the American invitation to the council of the WTO, of the world organization of commerce in Seattle, siding instead the second teams, diplomats , ministers and undersecretaries. So Clinton spoke yesterday to an assembly of respectable people who had, in practice, only the power to listen to him, but certainly not to politically engage the 135 nations that they represent. The only sure way not to lose a game is obviously not to play it. But the second, and more substantial American defeat, was the ability with which the opponents managed to completely overturn the terms of the clash: from a summit on the advantages of free world trade, a risk summit was reached, thus forcing – as demonstrated by the words “defensive” pronounced by Clinton – the American team to defend themselves, and not to attack. The strange but formidable alliance of ecologists and European ambassadors, of blue jeans and double-breasted jackets, of mothers against the “Frankenfood”, genetically altered food, and of European agricultural interests has put in difficulty the American team that had gone to Seattle to launch a new round of tariff liberalization called, according to the rhetoric of the moment, the “Millennium Round”.
What is indignant and (secretly) raging American players beaten even before they can drop the cards, is that their European opponents have managed to wear the shoes of the victim and protectors of international health when they are the Europeans, according to the Americans, the real big dam that prevents the world trade from egoism to bring the benefits of the market everywhere, from China to Rwanda, from Belarus to Burma. The reduction in tariffs and customs, imposed almost half a century ago by the first agreement imposed by the US and called Gatt, “has multiplied 15 times the world gross product and 3 times the average per capita income of every inhabitant of the planet” he said Clinton. And if to make an average between the earnings of Bill Gates and those of a Mongolian pastor makes little sense, Americans are right when they say, in private, that Europe rejects American agricultural products and bombards McDonald ‘s restaurants not because it has fear of “Frankenfood” or hormone steak, but to defend its antiquated agriculture, paid dearly by European consumers. Eating in America costs a third of the cost to an Italian family. But this in Seattle is, in fact, a “poker of liars” where everyone, young and old, lies and nobody can claim to be “right”. Bara Washington, supporting its civil aviation industry with military orders, a form of state subsidy similar to the more explicit one, which gave rise to the Boeing competing Airbus with public funding. For 50 years Europe has been dragging on the enormous and very heavy straw protectionist tail of its superprotected and always unbalanced agriculture in favor of the French and Germans (see the tractor parades in Veneto). But the American Treasury that protests then debts 20 thousand billion lire a year to reduce agricultural production in the US and to support prices and profits.
The new agrotechnologies, behind horrifying images of tomatoes with fish skin and corn kernels with a pig heart promise, if they are safe, those productivity jumps that must feed the six billion inhabitants of the planet, for which today’s hunger it is more urgent than tomorrow’s anxieties. But behind the right search for new richer and more resistant pest crops, we can see the profiles of the great American conglomerates of agribusiness, certainly not Caritas Internationalis. And it is not the fault, rather it is merit, of American creativity if the world devours his films and TV series, preferring the “Simpsons” and “X Files” to provincial promotions produced by RAI and Mediaset or the literary onanism of French TV. When Europeans know how to offer quality products, from shoes to Benigni’s films to our big football teams, now popular in New York or Milan or Rome, those products cross the borders without difficulty. Fortunately, the defeat of America in this “liars poker” tour will not be the defeat of commercial liberalism that survives the fears and lies, but only a temporary block to the frenetic, and often blind, chasing the “new” always seen , from the Americans, as the “best”. Not for cultural nobility, but for trivial interests, Europe functions as a limiter of revolutions for America as well as America must continue to serve as an accelerator to shake up the sclerosis of the old world. Like the millennia, the “New Millennium” needs dialectics, opposing pushes, synthesis, and not one-way blind races. There are 100,000 protesters, in Seattle at this time, against world free trade, but there are a billion and a half of Earth dwellers who dream of being admitted into the prosperity circle by trade. The worst outcome, to the poker of the rich liars, would be to reserve the dish for those who already have too much to eat.