5 - The Anti-Globalization Movement and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment

Summary

The anti-globalization movement claimed a great victory when, at the end of 1998, negotiations among the twenty-nine member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to secure an agreement to be known as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) were abandoned. The MAI would have established rules defining and limiting the policies a host government could impose on direct foreign investment (Graham 2000, 2). The proposed agreement had become a priority concern for anti-globalists in April 1997 when, as Lori Wallach and Ralph Nader write, “a coalition of international citizens' groups managed to liberate a draft, text and had it posted on the internet” (Barlow and Clarke 1998, x). This coalition was composed of many of the same groups that had unsuccessfully opposed NAFTA in 1993 and had successfully fought fast-track legislation for trade agreements in 1998. Prior to the posting of the MAI draft, the OECD negotiations had gone on for two years, largely without attracting public attention. Thus Destler and Balint write of the “the astonishment of its drafters” that the MAI had become “the target of a virulent campaign by an Internet-linked coalition of NGOs, with Public Citizen and a group called the Preamble Center playing lead roles” (Destler and Balint 1999, 35, 34).

THE MAI AND THE OPPOSITION

If the MAI text had been agreed to, signatory countries would have been bound by four fundamental principles.