The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Political Fabric

Abstract

The primacy of the nation state is being challenged from both above and below. From above, after the Second World War, the growth in the power and scope of supranational institutions--from multinational corporations to the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund--have gradually usurped national sovereignty in both economic and political matters.(1) More recently, from below, the increasingly active role of regional and city governments in foreign trade, immigration and political issues have challenged national governments' constitutional monopoly over foreign affairs.(2) Simultaneously, there has been tremendous growth in cross-border networks among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the hundreds that mobilized against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Not only do such networks outflank national government policymakers; they often work directly against their policies.(3) In the last few years, governmental concern with the ability of NGO networks to mobilize opposition to the policies of national governments and to international agreements has grown--both during the period of policy formation and after those policies have been adopted or agreements signed. In part, this concern is derived from the growing strength that such networks gain from the use of international communications technologies. The rapid spread of the Internet around the world has suggested that such networks and their influence will only grow apace. No catalyst for growth in electronic NGO networks has been more important than the 1994 indigenous rebellion in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico. Computer networks supporting the rebellion have evolved from providing channels for the familiar, traditional work of solidarity--material aid and the defense of human rights against the policies of the Salinas and Zedillo administrations--into an electronic fabric of opposition to much wider policies. Whereas the anti-NAFTA coalition was merely North American in scope, the influence of the pro-Zapatista mobilization has reached across at least five continents. Moreover, it has inspired and stimulated a wide variety of grassroots political efforts in dozens of countries.(4) Today these networks provide the nerve system for increasingly global organization in opposition to the dominant economic policies of the present period. In the process, these emerging networks are undermining the distinction between domestic and foreign policy--and challenging the constitution of the nation state. For reasons outlined below, it is not exaggerated to speak of a Zapatista reverberating through social movements around the world; an effect homologous to, but potentially much more threatening to ,the New World Order of neoliberalism than the Tequila Effect that rippled through emerging financial markets in the wake of the 1994 peso crisis. In the latter case, the danger was panic and the ensuing rapid withdrawal of hot money from speculative investments. In the case of social movements and the activism which is their hallmark, the danger lies in the impetus given to previously disparate groups to mobilize around the rejection of current policies, to rethink institutions and governance, and to develop alternatives to the status quo. REPRESSION IN CHIAPAS The voices of indigenous people in Mexico have been either passively ignored or brutally silenced for most of the last five hundred years. Indigenous lands and resources have been repeatedly stolen and the people themselves exploited under some of the worst labor conditions in Mexico. The official policies of the Mexican state have been largely oriented toward assimilation, with only lip service given to the value of the country's diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic heritage.(5) The result has been a long history of fierce resistance and recurrent rebellion, first to Spanish colonization and then to the dominant classes after independence. …