So, from 15-17 October 2004, the
third annual European Social Forum roadshow at last rolled into the most Eurosceptic,
and arguably least socialist, country in Western Europe. What would happen?
The run-up to the London ESF had been so dominated by bitter and acrimonious
splits within the British left (anarchists versus unions and SWP over the role
of Ken Livingstone, and so on) that anyone seeking something constructive to
come out of it was bound to be a little apprehensive. Would another world really
be possible with this lot? But since this was my first ever Social Forum, I
wanted to appreciate it for the exciting event it was, rather than focus on
the negatives. I decided the wisest course of action was to avoid the big set-piece
plenaries on the burning issues of the moment, likely to attract the usual fruitless
shouting, in favour of supporting more obscure but no less worthy initiatives,
and learning from international experiences by prioritising sessions with less
British involvement. This is after all meant to be a European Social
Forum, in which storms in British teacups should not take on an exaggerated
importance. Therefore, at the risk of stretching the patience of time-poor Turtle
readers, I have provided fullish summary reports on the less publicised sessions
I went to, a first draft of history if you like, for the benefit of those who
were not there.
Friday
A good place to start, then, was
For a citizenship of residence, which judging from its entry in the
programme should have won the prize for greatest number of organisations calling
a meeting, known and unknown outfits from civil society ranging from 'Coup de
soleil en Rhône-Alpes' to 'Souriez vous êtes filmés' totalling
94, a figure which unfortunately well outnumbered the audience present. Barely
had I sat down than I was signed up as the British contact of the Collective
for a European Citizenship of Residence by an excited activist keen to meet
someone from this side of the Channel for what is essentially a French-based
campaign, with some interest in Spain, Italy and elsewhere. Basically the idea,
outlined in the session by its chief proponents Pierre Gineste, Paul Oriol and
Saïd Bouziri, is that Europe cannot be built in a just way by attributing
European citizenship, as has been done since the Maastricht treaty, only to
nationals of member states, which excludes some 15 million people. They therefore
aim to get one million signatures on a petition to ask that EU citizenship be
granted to all residents of Europe. This is combined with a call to equalise
voting rights in local and European elections for all residents across the EU,
replacing the current hotch-potch of arrangements which are considerably more
generous in some member states than others. As Filippo Miraglia of the ARCI
cultural organisation in Italy argued, this would avoid the danger of a 'separation
wall' between nationals and what the Italians call extracomunitari.
Carlo Cartocci of Rifondazione Communista's immigration commission called for
a Europe-wide migrants’ confederation and newspaper. Manuel Delgado Cabeza
of the Andalusian Association for Human Rights outlined progress so far in Spain.
This bright idea combines utopianism
and practicality in the best spirit of the movement, since it builds on existing
provision in some member states and seeks to apply it universally. It would
have the merit of distinguishing nationality (which would remain for individual
states to apportion) from citizenship, open equally to all residents of Europe.
However, the reasons for the lack of interest in Britain are not hard to see:
the existence of automatic voting rights even in national elections for people
from Commonwealth countries, not to mention the fact that most members of ethnic
minorities in Britain are British citizens, make the right to vote for immigrants
- on which there has been a passionate debate in France for 25 years - a relative
non-issue here (though as was pointed out to me, there are also many residents
of Britain who do not fit this category). And, given the level of europhobia
even on the Left in Britain, campaigning around the theme of European citizenship
will be an uphill struggle. Europe - usually identified with fortress Europe
- is usually seen as a problem for those campaigning in favour of immigrants
in Britain (in a mirror image of the Daily Mail thundering about Brussels
taking control of our borders), rather than as a possible part of the solution.
There was some dispute from the floor even from a French Socialist Party regional
councillor of North African background, on the grounds that being in favour
of granting the vote for foreigners did not necessarily mean that one was in
favour of an EU constitution; but other speakers argued that voting no to the
constitution as it currently stands was not incompatible with arguing to get
better political rights put in it. Closing comments by panel speakers emphasised
the need to get committees, petitions and conferences on this issue going in
the twelve out of 25 member states where there are presently none.
After lunch, a timely debate organised
by New Left Review, with the shortest title in the programme: UN=US?
I had been preparing to feel this was going to be a bit indulgent and ultra-leftist:
at a time when Bush has demonstrated contempt for the authority of the UN in
the most naked way with his doctrine of preemptive war, the priority should
be to defend the UN, despite its faults, against the greater danger of US unilateralism.
(Oh, and I always get moved by that bit in Tony Benn’s antiwar speeches
where he reminisces about, as a recently demobbed ex-RAF officer in 1946, hearing
the UN Charter promising to free succeeding generations from the scourge of
war). However, a posse of middle-aged academic types, Peter Gowan, author of
the article in NLR of this title, Perry Anderson, Bernard Cassen of
Le Monde Diplomatique (the organ partly responsible for the birth of
the World Social Forum) and Luciana Castellina of La Revista, disabused
us of our illusions. The UN has a record of rubber stamping imperialist ventures,
Gowan argued: the Korean War, the 1960 intervention in the Congo which killed
Patrice Lumumba, the 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent twelve years of sanctions
on Iraq. Only the Soviet bloc veto prevented such occasions in the intervening
years between 1960 and 1991.
Anderson disagreed, however, with
those in the audience who argued something along the lines of, "Why bother
with the UN, it just reflects the power relations between states?". It
is because people look to the UN to provide an alternative, Anderson suggested,
that, it needs to be viewed critically. Was it a coincidence that the non-UN-backed
2003 Iraq war aroused mass opposition in the West, whereas the preceding, UN-approved
decade of sanctions (which killed far more Iraqis than the war itself) did not
and the now UN-backed occupation has not? He had a point: I can recall attending
a meeting of a handful of people at Speakers’ Corner in 1999 to see off
George Galloway’s red London bus (now converted into the European Creative
Social Forum, hosting impromtu rapping amidst the burger vans outside Alexandra
Palace) on a sanctions-busting trip to Baghdad. That gathering had been called
to show that the British people cared about the plight of the Iraqi people under
sanctions, but the pitifully low turnout sadly suggested otherwise. As for solutions,
panelists called for the abolition, not reform, of the Security Council, to
be replaced by a power of decision over the use of force to the General Assembly.
They also demanded that the UN leave New York for a venue in the global South
(the Venezuelan capital Caracas being suggested by one bright spark). One small
problem, though: if all this happened, and the UN became genuinely independent,
wouldn’t the US simply leave the UN, thus leaving the world with even
less control over US unilateralism?
Off then for a session on Our
world is not for sale (remember that was what the movement was meant to
be about?). Gus Massiah - who has been around on the thirdworldist end of the
French alternative left since the 70s - and now head of CRID, a group of NGOs,
hailed five years of social forums (fora?) as achieving "le refus de la
fatalité": no longer is there a consensus that There Is No Alternative.
Nevertheless, he urged realism: we are still in a conservative period and cannot
be too satisfied with our achievements. Raoul Mark Jennar of Oxfam, author of
a recent book, L’Europe, trahison des élites, denounced
EU policies as, far from being a rampart against neo-liberalism, agressively
pursuing them. He quoted the late Pierre Bourdieu: "Europe does not do
what it says, does not say what it does, says what it does not do, and does
what it does not say" (hope I’ve got the right permutation of does
and says, anyway it sounded better in French). He had begun his speech, however,
with the caveat, that, speaking in the country of Euroscepticism, he must add
that the solution is not less Europe but more "Europe sociale". His
complaint about the EU constitution was that rights such as the right to housing
and the right to work, which feature in the constitutions of countries like
France, Belgium, Spain and Denmark, are absent from it. The implication was
an argument sometimes heard on the French Left: that a better Europe can be
built by levelling up to the best social provision in member states, rather
than levelling down to the worst as often happens at present.
This, then, is a critical but constructive
attitude to the EU, distinct from the purely negative denunciation of a "bosses’
Europe" - sometimes accompanied with abstract invocation of a united socialist
states of Europe, without any indication as to how we get from here to there
- that often passes for a European policy on the British hard left. A similar
contrast could be found on the pages of that day’s Morning Star,
where on the same page the international secretary of the German Party of Democratic
Socialism argued that "drawing back to one’s own national quarters
cannot be the left’s answer to the ongoing process of internationalisation",
as against the general secretary of the Irish Communist Party calling, absurdly,
for the break-up of the EU (I can just see John Redwood and UKIP hailing that
as a great victory for communism). Seeing the plaque on the side of Alexandra
Palace in memory of its use as an internment camp for Germans during World War
One, can’t we be just a little positive about the achievement of a largely
peaceful Europe?
I confess I then became a little
consumerist in my approach to the ESF, trawling the competing cacophony of stalls
(this was truly a leaflet-collectors’ paradise), before settling to catch
the end of the flagship plenary on What future for Palestine?. A range
of figures from Palestine, Israel and Europe, and the novelist Ahdaf Soueif,
came together to agree on an international boycott of Israeli goods. This featured,
amongst other things, an emotional embrace between Mustapha Barghouti, a leading
figure in civil society in Ramallah, and Yonathan Shapira, former pilot in Israeli
helicopter assassination units turned refusenik and peace activist. Barghouti
- banned from entering Israel - and Shapira - banned from entering the Occupied
Territories - promised to meet each other again illegally. Such moments allowed
for some rare hope for the future, before the debate opened to the floor, free
for the British shouters to do their usual predictable rants. Then a visit to
the fast-food vans outside - pausing to reflect that guests from some European
countries were likely to be disappointed with the typically British, functional,
joyless and overpriced catering arrangements on offer. Why no big tents with
Slow Food, eaten communally and convivially? No self-respecting French or Italian
anticapitalist would have organised a gathering with lunch breaks as short as
half an hour! By this point, after a day inside Alexandra Palace, a brisk walk
through the rain in search of a nearby pub holding an advertised social with
European Jews for a Just Peace, was welcome.
Saturday
On the Saturday morning, I decided
to see whether this ESF had managed to do something about the imbalance between
Western and Central/Eastern Europe at previous events by attending the session
on Democratic Challenges in East and West Europe. Honourable mention,
therefore, to Hilary Wainwright of Red Pepper maagzine for arranging
this initiative, and providing an exception to the rule of insularity on the
British left. It had its origins in a visit that Wainwright made to Prague in
1989, at which she was amazed to discover the sudden predilection for Hayek
and Thatcherism of people she considered as fellow comrades fighting for civil
rights. This led to a long attempt on her part to understand why, culminating
in a recent journey through Russia and search for a way of bringing lefts in
East and West together after so long apart. This is an important point, for
Western leftists too often fail to learn from Eastern Europe, behaving as if
socialism had never been tried before, and that all that is necessary is to
a revive and implement a pristine classical Marxism unsullied by its undoubted
perversions under Stalinism. It has to be asked, doesn’t it, whether the
complete and total abolition of all capitalism is really feasible without an
unacceptable degree of state coercion: after all, small-scale capitalism was
under way within the ESF itself, with the sale of Che T-shirts, newspapers,
books, peace flags at varying prices and so on.
Clearly
the principal danger in Eastern Europe today is not a resurgence of Leninism
but the excesses of neoliberalism, amply documented by a range of speakers in
this session. A grinning Boris Kagarlitsky, of the IPROG globalisation research
institute, after hailing the increased Russian presence at this ESF, called
for a new democratic struggle in both East and West to stop the democratic structures
now achieved from losing their democratic essence: at the moment democratic
spaces are shrinking, as privatisation excludes the whole economic sphere from
democratic supervision. Even Weber, he noted, had recognised that capitalism
and democracy could be in contradiction. Kagarlitsky powerfully conjured up
a dystopian image of where we are headed: the current situation in Romania and
Russia, where the rich and powerful simply do not respect the law, is the West’s
future too unless we do something to stop it. Hilary Wainwright, though, offered
a note of optimism: the Russians she has met recently are thinking together
about deeper forms of democracy in a more sophisticated way than in the West.
She plugged her new series of booklets Eurotopia, which aim to stimulate
these kinds of debates across Europe. Incidentally, her answer to "why
did Eastern Europeans turn to Hayek?" was that the appeal lay in the recognition
that the party/state can’t know everything, people have their own "tacit
knowledge" from experience – not a million miles from the do-it-yourself
ethos of the 70s New Left and feminism in the West.
Peter Damo of the Romanian Social
Forum pointed out that the key difference between East and West remains the
historical legacy: in the West, the Left emerged democratically from within
society, whereas in the East the ‘Left’ was imposed by Red Army-imposed
totalitarianism, thus 1989 created the false impression that all Lefts were
necessarily wrong. In Romania, the old Communist oligarchy, now in liberal,
social democrat or Christian Democrat clothing, was imposing extreme neoliberalism
using doublespeak. Andrei Zhbrovsky from Poland outlined the mass disillusionment
now with post-1989 ‘shock therapy’. We used to think everything
in the West was more modern and democratic, but now we blame western institutions
like the World Bank. The antiwar movement in Poland, though small by Western
standards, is much bigger than it used to be, though subject to government repression:
one demonstrator was recently fined for holding a placard calling the prime
minister and president ‘lapdogs’. The meeting also heard a speaker
from Transform Italy call for "diverse forms of radical social disobedience";
Huseyin Avgan, a German-Turkish trade unionist, outline current disillusionment
in both his countries of birth and of residence; and a representative from the
Russian provincial city of Ivanova speak on experiments there – one key
dilemma being that while big property is a crime, there can be no freedom without
(small) property.
I did slip from my original plan
by attending the start of a plenary on Challenging US Imperialism,
tempted for historical reasons by the prospect of seeing the legendary former
Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella and Che Guevara’s daughter Aleida.
But I was soon turned off by the style and content of the aggressive, militaristic
and simplistic support for the Iraqi insurgents to be heard from the first speaker.
There was something a little distatesful about this vicarious incitement of
violence by people one has never met against other people one has never met:
how many people in the room, I wondered, had ever seen a gun fired in anger,
or felt the human cost of war at first hand? To exclaim "They’ll
fight by their rules, not ours" was both amoral and patronising, because
it wrongly implied that somehow respect for the lives of non-combatants was
an exclusively Western concept. Meanwhile those attempting to hold a session
on the equally urgent issue of For asylum, refugee and migrant rights
– against fortress Europe on the other side of a thin partition in the
same hall found their voices completely drowned out.
Go to Part Two of this article
