Europeans want more than 'Goodwill Party'

Julio Godoy IPS

World Social Forum meetings need to produce more than debates if they are to influence international policies, European activists say.

"The present formula cannot go on for ever," says French publisher Bernard Casse who helped found the first World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre in 2001 along with Brazilian union leaders. Cassen is now among the most influential critics of present WSF processes.

Following the success of three WSF meetings in Porto Alegre and two meetings of the European Social Forum (Florence in 2002 and Paris last year) "we have begun to move in circles," Cassen told IPS. "For most people the forums are a sort of goodwill party."

Organisers are unable to tell at the end of a forum meeting what precisely the outcome was, Cassen says.

Numerous seminars and conferences are due to take place in the Indian city Mumbai in this fourth WSF Jan. 16 to 20. The meetings under the slogan "A better world is possible" include subjects as diverse as public services, genetically modified organisms and the rights of homosexuals.

Thousands of representatives of non-governmental organisations are participating in the WSF.

"But the objective cannot only be to set up everlasting debates on the appalling state of the world," says French union leader Pierre Khilafa, who was among the organisers of the European Social Forum held in and around Paris in November last year.

"Our objective must be to create a point of support for launching political alternatives to neoliberalism," he told IPS.

At the end of the ESF in Paris last year organisers came up with the term "alter globalisation". The term aims to confine opposition to globalisation only to aspects relating to undemocratic and market-led trade and investment. It is also a term that invites the setting of specific aims for the anti- globalisation movement, and not just cries of opposition.

At the end of the ESF that brought together about 40,000 participants in more than 1,200 conferences last November, many participants appeared exhausted and confused.

"We cannot go on denouncing the injustice brought by neoliberal globalisation, because this is well known by now," a Spanish participant at the ESF last year told IPS. "We must think of practical alternatives."

French researcher Isabelle Sommier who is due to publish a book on neoliberal globalisation and its opponents says "the mere diversity of the alter globalisation movement questions its capacity to think of alternative strategies."

Cassen warns of two major dangers to the forums.

"On the one side, these forums face the risk of agreeing generalities which can easily be co-opted by a political party trying to manipulate the alter globalisation movement," he said. On the other, "forums can agree to an extremely precise programme which will very likely represent the most radical factions."

To avoid such dangers the WSF must define a "new paradigm clearly at odds with neo-liberal globalisation, but allowing for a plurality of translations to respect the diversity of the alter globalisation movement and to preserve its possibilities for growth," he said.

This paradigm must represent "a systematic, continuous, reasoned memory of all the forums" that could then constitute a "Porto Alegre consensus" to oppose the neo-liberal "Washington consensus," he said. The "Washington consensus" usually describes economic policies imposed on Latin America and the south by Washington-based international financial institutions and the U.S. government.

*Cassen will be among the main speakers from Europe at the WSF in Mumbai.