Today's issue is corporate globalization. Whether people are fighting to protect the environment, workers' rights or peace, corporate globalization makes it that much harder. Many peace groups do not yet 'get it', and so we are simply not at the table where these vast global social movements are being built. The result is a lack of understanding of who or what the peace movement is. People perceive the peace movement as old hippies who are 'soft' and apolitical, who spend too much time lobbying the United Nations, and who do not deal with the tough issues that affect all of us.
People tend to equate pacifism with being passive.
These misconceptions about the peace movement and the military combine to create a situation in which the anticorporate globalization movement does not take the peace movement seriously. Not having peace groups at the anti-corporate globalization table combined with peace groups not having a globalization analysis means that many social justice, labour and environmental groups are not getting a full understanding of global militarism. The outcome is that they support military actions, like the war against Yugoslavia, because it is outside their domain of research and understanding. For example, many people and organizations that should be natural allies of the peace movement supported the war against Yugoslavia because they did not have someone who was ready to quickly explain to them that the war was simply part of the corporate globalization agenda. These groups relied on the media and upon the social democratic leaders, e.g. the German Greens, for analysis.