1999 Seattle WTO protests

The 1999 Seattle WTO protests, sometimes referred to as the Battle of Seattle, were a series of anti-globalization protests surrounding the WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999, where members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) convened at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle, Washington on November 30, 1999. The Conference was to be the launch of a new millennial round of trade negotiations.

The negotiations were quickly overshadowed by massive street protests outside the hotels and the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. The protests were nicknamed "N30", akin to J18 and similar mobilizations. The large scale of the demonstrations, estimated at no fewer than 40,000 protesters, dwarfed any previous demonstration in the United States against a world meeting of any of the organizations generally associated with economic globalization, such as the WTO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.

The protests marked the reappearance of anarchism as a significant force within the Western far left, influenced subsequent social movements by spreading the black bloc strategy and drew widespread international attention to the anti-globalization movement. Locally, they led to the resignation of Norm Stamper, Seattle's police chief.

History

Background: Fall of the USSR, rebirth of anarchism, birth of anti-globalization

From the 1970s onward, and even more so following the fall of the USSR and the 1990s, the anarchist movement underwent a rebirth in the West. Several factors drove this resurgence, including the evolution of capitalism at the end of the 20th century (offshoring, etc.), the end of state-communist support for Marxist–Leninist parties, and the fact that state-socialist and communist movements were increasingly discredited within the far left.

The anti-globalization movement formed during the same period and was influenced by the anarchists who joined it from the very beginning.