The democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 were heralded as marking the unambiguous triumph of both the capitalist system and bourgeois liberal democracy. Francis Fukuyama famously argued that the battle of ideologies was over. The age of radical protest, and its corollary of radical, politically motivated anti-Americanism, seemed to be at an end.

Yet by the end of the 1990s a new and voluble protest movement had emerged. These new protesters have been variously styled, both by outside commentators and themselves, as the anti-globalization, anti-corporate, or anti-capitalist movement. It entered mass public consciousness through the huge coverage of what has become known to the protest community as “the Battle for Seattle,” the large and sometimes violent protests against the World Trade Organization’s summit in late 1999. These scenes reminded television viewers of nothing ...

This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase