AS the great defenders of state sovereignty continue their TV-friendly holy crusades against foreign domination, the voices that seek to expose the actual working of global structures of domination become increasingly marginal.

Very few Pakistanis know that the ninth ministerial summit of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) took place in the Indonesian resort town of Bali this past week. Even if no one else did, those who make their political living by decrying Pakistan’s slavery to the US should have been paying attention to the WTO summit and its implications for us.

While the WTO has lost much of its mojo since the failed Doha summit of 2008, it is still the embodiment of the neo-liberal ‘consensus’ that was fomented after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

The WTO came into being in 1995, some 40 years after the so-called ‘free world’ had fashioned the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to regulate global trade and financial flows.

Of course, during the Cold War trade and finance were not globalised in the sense that they have since become. The WTO’s coming into being signified the structural changes in the global political economy following the end of Sovietism.

As it turned out, very soon after its constitution, the organisation became the lightning rod of the so-called anti-globalisation movement, with the massive protests during the Seattle summit of 1999 triggering a new phase of anti-imperialist politics that was both similar and distinct from that which had prevailed through much of the 20th century.

The primary difference appeared to be that the state was no longer considered the means to challenge imperialist power, with ‘social movements’ widely projected as the new site of popular resistance.

However, the rise to power of leftists in a number of Latin American countries over the past decade — the region in which the anti-globalisation upsurge was at its strongest — suggests that the state is not as obsolete as some might have thought in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet debacle.

Sadly in Pakistan a substantial anti-globalisation movement is conspicuous by its absence. Relatedly, there are no viable contenders for state power on the immediate horizon who might actually be willing to take the proverbial bull by its horns in the manner of the late Hugo Chavez.

Chavez and his allies in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and, of course, Cuba, championed a politics against foreign domination that is much more vigorous than anything we know in Pakistan.

Importantly, it is also a substantive politics that relies not on misleading slogans and distractionary tactics that are standard practice for virtually all mainstream political forces in this country, especially those on the right of the ideological spectrum.

To be sure, the Latin American left is extremely concerned with the question of state sovereignty. It foregrounds much of its political programme on the imperative of ending the historical subjugation of the state to ‘big brother’ Washington.

Indeed, the US has treated the majority of the American continent as its fiefdom since as early as 1823 when then president Monroe infamously warned European powers not to challenge Washington’s hegemony over the Western hemisphere.

Thus Latin American states have sputtered along in the shadow of the American Empire since much before 1954 when our military establishment decided to sell its soul to Washington.

Yes, we have suffered a great deal due to direct and covert military interventions by the US in this region, but Latin America has been no less a victim, with some of the most brutal and violent imperialist incursions of modern times taking place on that continent.

The difference between the politics of sovereignty that prevails in Latin America and that which exists here is that they look to build bridges with all freedom-loving peoples of the world whereas our right-wingers feed us rhetoric about the unbridgeable divide between Islam and the West and the latter’s unending conspiracies to undermine our faith.

There is no question which is the principled anti-imperialist position.

This rather long digression brings me back to the WTO. In contrast to our populists’ convenient neglect of global structures like the WTO, Latin American states have taken numerous concrete steps towards wresting genuine economic and political freedom.

Perhaps most importantly, under the leadership of Hugo Chavez, a Bank of the South has been created to reduce and ultimately eliminate the influence of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

These initiatives will be judged by posterity. In contrast, our right-wingers can be judged in the here and now.

When the religious parties were in power in then NWFP between 2002 and 2008, they were quite happy to sign one agreement after another with the World Bank and IMF. I suspect the trend will be similar for the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf, the PML-N and the Jamaat-i-Islami this time around as well.

That this constituency of self-proclaimed anti-imperialists does not possess the political courage required to defy international financial institutions is one thing; even worse is that they have managed to dumb down our political discourse to the extent that there is complete silence on significant events like the WTO ministerial.

The media and ‘civil society’ are also culpable. The latter in particular should recall its claim to being part of the anti-globalisation movement until not so long ago. The erratic nature of its campaigning lies in stark contrast to the consistent and rooted politics necessary for real change to take place in Pakistani society and the world more generally.

For the record, it was more of the same in the latest WTO round. The Bali Package has further opened up poor countries for penetration by multinationals under the guise of a ‘Trade Facilitation’ agreement, whilst giving the former nothing in return.

The Latin American countries once known as ‘banana republics’ are trying to build an alternative to the WTO and the global trade and financial architecture more generally. Meanwhile our self-anointed leaders are planning their next dharna.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.