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Commentary
Porto Alegre Social Summit Sets Stage for Counteroffensive against
Globalization January 31, 2002
By Walden Bello
Porto Alegre is not
exactly a Third World city. Located in one of Brazil's more prosperous states,
Rio Grande do Sul, and populated by people mainly of European stock, this city
of 1.2 million people is First World when it comes to infrastructure and social
services. In fact, it ranks near the very top of the country's "quality of life"
index.
"Another World is Possible"
Yet Porto Alegre, site of the
World Social Forum (WSF) last year and again this year, has become the byword
for the spirit of the burgeoning movement against corporate-driven
globalization. Galvanized by the slogan "Another world is possible," some 70,000
people are expected to flock to this coastal city from January 31 to February 4.
This figure is nearly six times that for last year.
Fisherfolk from
India, farmers from East Africa, trade unionists from Thailand, indigenous
people from Central America will be among those making their way to Porto
Alegre. But there will also be a sizable contingent of people from the Northern
countries.
And the place will be graced by personalities who have come
to exemplify the diversity of the movement against corporate-driven
globalization--among others, activist-thinker Noam Chomsky, Indian
physicist-feminist Vandana Shiva, Canadian people's advocate Maude Barlow, and
Egyptian intellectual Samir Amin.
Counterpoint to Davos
The World
Social Forum emerged as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum, the annual
gathering of the global corporate crowd in Davos, Switzerland.
Proposed
by a coalition of Brazilian civil society organizations and the Workers Party
that controls both Porto Alegre and the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the idea
triggered strong international support from organizations such as the French
monthly Le Monde Diplomatique and Attac, an influential Europe-wide organization
supporting a tax on global financial transactions.
It also received
financial support from progressive donors like Novib, the Netherlands
Organization for International Development Cooperation.
Driven by this
energy, the first WSF was put together in a record time of eight
months.
A televised trans-Atlantic debate between representatives of the
WSF and some luminaries attending the WEF was billed by the Financial Times as a
collision between two planets, that of the global superrich and that of the vast
marginalized masses.
The most memorable moment of that confrontation
came when Hebe de Bonafini, a representative of the Argentine human rights
organization Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, shouted at financier George Soros
across the Atlantic divide: "Mr. Soros, you are a hypocrite. How many children's
deaths are you responsible for."
Since its first meeting the stock of the
WSF has risen while that of the WEF has fallen. Already put on the defensive as
a gathering to "discuss how to maintain hegemony over the rest of us," as one of
the debaters on the WSF side put it, the WEF received a further blow when it was
forced to hold its 2002 meeting away from Davos since the Swiss government could
no longer guarantee the security of its corporate participants.
Providing protection for the WEF 2001 had forced the government to mount
its largest security operation since the Second World War, and this had provoked
cries of protest from within Switzerland.
Thus, the WEF has moved to New
York for 2002, and it is not clear when and if it will return to Davos. But as
observers point out, a great part of the attraction of the WEF is the "ambience"
of Davos as a retreat high up in the Swiss Alps. Without this, it is headed for
oblivion.
The centerpiece of this year's gathering in Porto Alegre are 26
plenary sessions over four days structured around four themes: "the production
of wealth and social reproduction," "access to wealth and sustainable
development," "civil society and the public arena," and "political power and
ethics in the new society."
Around this core will unfold scores of
seminars, a people's tribunal on debt sponsored by Jubilee South, and about
5,000 workshops. Marches and demonstrations of workers and peasants are also
expected, led by the Brazilian mass organizations CUT (Central Union of Workers)
and MST (the Movement of the Landless) that are among the key organizers of the
WSF.
Tumultuous Year
The anti-establishment forces gather in Porto
Alegre after a tumultuous year. Perhaps the apogee of the anti-globalization
movement came during Group of Eight Meeting in Genoa in the third week of July,
when some 300,000 people marched in the face of police tear-gas attacks. Shortly
after the Genoa clashes, in which one protester was killed by police, there was
speculation in the world press that elite gatherings in non-authoritarian
countries might no longer be possible in the future.
And indeed,
Canada's offer to hold the next G-8 meeting at a ski resort high up in the
Canadian Rockies in the province of Alberta seemed to confirm the fact that the
global elite was on the run from the democracy of the streets.
Then came
September 11, which stopped a surging movement in its tracks. The next big
confrontation between the establishment and its opponents was supposed to take
place in late September in Washington, DC, during the annual fall meetings of
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Unnerved by the
prospect of a week of massive protests that were expected to draw some 50,000
people, the Bretton Woods twins took advantage of the September 11 shock to
cancel their meeting. Without a target and sensitive to the sea change in the
national mood in the US, organizers cancelled the protest and held a march for
peace instead.
The establishment followed up on the unexpected
opportunity to reverse the crisis of legitimacy that had been wracking its
system of global governance prior to September 11 by pressing the developing
countries to approve a declaration launching a limited set of trade negotiations
during the Fourth Ministerial of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Doha,
Qatar, in mid-November.
Third World governments were told that unless
they agreed to talks leading to greater liberalization, they would have to take
responsibility for worsening a global recession that had been accelerated by the
World Trade Center attack.
Taking no chances, the WTO secretariat and
the Qatar monarchy had worked to limit the number of legitimate NGO's attending
the meeting to about sixty. This ensured that the massive demonstrations in the
streets that characterized Seattle, which had served as a context for the famous
developing country revolt at the Sheraton Convention Center, were not present in
Doha, and under these circumstances, developing country opposition collapsed.
Reversal of Fortune
Had the WSF meeting been held in late
November or December, the mood of people coming would have been different. The
Bush administration would have been riding high after its devastating triumph in
Afghanistan. However, in the last few weeks, history, cunning as usual, has
dealt Washington two massive body blows: the Enron debacle and Argentina's
economic collapse.
Enron has become the sordid symbol of the volatile
mixture of deregulation and corruption that drove the US' "New Economy" in the
1990's and helped lead it to what is possibly the worst global recession since
the 1930's.
Burdened with an unpayable $140 billion foreign debt, its
industry in chaos, and 2,000 of its citizens falling under the poverty line
daily, Argentina serves as a cautionary tale of the disaster that awaits those
countries that take seriously the neoliberal advice to liberalize and globalize
their economies.
As the WSF opens, these twin disasters have brought back
with a vengeance the global elite's pre-September 11 crisis of legitimacy. Porto
Alegre provides the perfect site and the perfect moment for the counteroffensive
by the forces that believe that "another world is possible."
*Dr. Walden
Bello is the executive director of the Bangkok-based policy and advocacy
institute Focus on the Global South and professor of sociology and public
administration at the University of the
Philippines.