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It’s time to blow the whistle
 A
version of this piece was published in the Independent
on the 22nd June 2002, under the headline ‘World
Cup referees should now move on to world trade’.
Nowadays it is routine for marketing people to claim
the earth, but this World Cup seems to be living up
to its title. It has brought us together in an almost
unparalleled way. On its level playing fields there
has been a peculiar equality between rich nations and
poor nations, large and small. Saudi Arabia got no advantage
from its oil, nor China from its weight of numbers.
France was humbled by a former colony. England took
on Brazil, who now face Senegal – it would be hard
to think of another context in which those three names
might sensibly appear together. Setting aside the luck
of the original draw and the occasional linesman’s
lapse, whoever wins the trophy will deserve to win it.
And they could yet be young Turks.
International football is still, as the aphorism goes,
a substitute for war, as it provides a way to prove
ourselves (vicariously, of course) against the best
of other nations. Yet even in the heat of competition
there is mutual respect. We appreciate the skill and
courage and commitment of foreign players as much as
our own, and we are disappointed if they don’t
play well. In many cases – assisted by the global
reach of close-up television – we share the emotions
of their fellow-countrymen. Maybe the day has not yet
come when the English will mourn when German hopes are
dashed, but even for the devastated Argentinians some
of us felt a twinge of sympathy.
For many hundred millions of people, there is in this
perhaps a glimmer of a world it would be good to live
in every day: a world of rivalry but not ruthlessness,
of accepted rules and common values. Sadly, this is
not the world they actually inhabit. Global competition
there may be, but there the similarity would seem to
end.
Three days ago, in the largest mass lobby of Parliament
in British history, an estimated 12,000 people formed
a queue from the Palace of Westminster across Lambeth
Bridge to the Millennium Wheel to demand justice in
international trade. Unlike the World Cup, the World
Trade Organisation is associated by much of humankind
not with fair competition and mutual respect but with
an oppressive imposition on the planet of rules that
favour the already rich and powerful at the expense
of everybody else.
‘World’ in this context suggests not so much
a coming together as a whipping in. And, unfortunately,
for all the scant attention that we give to its deliberations,
the impact of the WTO’s decisions is rather greater
than that of Fifa’s referees. As Sergio Cobo, of
the Mexican pressure group Fomento, said on Wednesday,
‘Football is just a game, but trade is a matter
of life and death.’
For one month every four years the World Cup creates
a brief rapprochement between our self-interest and
our appreciation of our shared humanity; but when it
comes to international trade we seem still to be stuck
in a relentless pursuit of our own, parochial advantage.
We can understand the misery of Portugal’s ‘golden
generation’ of footballers when their own stupidity
got them beaten, or the rage of the Mexicans when they
realised that the ‘Yanquis’ had (quite fairly)
won the game; but somehow the despair of Haitian farmers
whose livelihood is destroyed by heavily subsidised
European rice dumped on their local markets, or of Columbian
labourers whose jobs disappear, without warning or redress,
when a multinational company decides to move production
to another country, fails to affect us. Here, foreigners
revert to being merely foreigners, and their concerns
are not our business.
Moreover, the suspicion sneaks into our minds –
isn’t this what global competition means? –
that any improvement to their lot would have to be at
our expense. Wouldn’t it destroy British jobs,
or something? Perhaps the referees are fair in international
football only because the outcome never truly matters.
In trade, justice is a more costly commodity.
Yet this is another arena where we could strive to
prove ourselves the best in the world. In the end, what
does it matter whether Englishmen can kick a ball as
well as men from South America, West Africa or Asia
Minor? Yet what a difference it would make if the values
of the world the World Cup fleetingly creates could
be exported to the enduring world most men and women
actually inhabit! Indeed, trade can go one better than
football. In the World Cup, only one team can win, and
everyone else must be losers. But fair exchange, as
the proverb says, is no robbery. Global trade has the
potential to enrich everyone who is party to it. It
is unfair trade that grinds our fellow human beings
down.
The new round of negotiations over world trade regulations
began in November last year in Doha and will be high
on the agendas of this summer’s various summits.
Their outcome will affect the lives of billions of people.
This is an arcane game, in which only a few people can
be players – but all of us have the right to cry
‘Foul!’ If we want to live in a world in which
anyone, English or Brazilian, Turkish or Senegalese,
can make a decent living, perhaps we should be ready
to blow our whistles.
© The Independent 2002
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