Alter-Globalization

Becoming Actors in a Global Age

Geoffrey Pleyers

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745646763
  9780745646756
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745655086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Globalizzazione

Contrary to the common view that globalization undermines social agency, 'alter-globalization activists', that is, those who contest globalization in its neo-liberal form, have developed new ways to become actors in the global age. They propose alternatives to Washington Consensus policies, implement horizontal and participatory organization models and promote a nascent global public space.

Rather than being anti-globalization, these activists have built a truly global movement that has gathered citizens, committed intellectuals, indigenous, farmers, dalits and NGOs against neoliberal policies in street demonstrations and Social Forums all over the world, from Bangalore to Seattle and from Porto Alegre to Nairobi. This book analyses this worldwide movement on the bases of extensive field research conducted since 1999.

Alter-Globalization provides a comprehensive account of these critical global forces and their attempts to answer one of the major challenges of our time: How can citizens and civil society contribute to the building of a fairer, sustainable and more democratic co-existence of human beings in a global world?

Part 1: Alter-Globalization – Becoming Actors in the Global Age

Introduction

Bangalore, India, 2 October 1993

Half a million Indian farmers march against proposals included in negotiations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the precursor to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The farmers claim that the GATT will have devastating effects on their livelihoods and particularly on their control over seeds. In May, the global network of small and medium-sized farmers, Via Campesina, is constituted. It soon gathers over 100 national and local farmers’ organizations, totalling more than 100 million members in fifty-six countries. It promotes ‘social justice in fair economic relations; the preservation of land, water, seeds and other natural resources; food sovereignty; sustainable agricultural production based on small and medium-sized producers’. Via Campesina also seeks to put into practice viable and sustainable alternatives grounded in the idea of food sovereignty. The farmers’ network is prominently involved in many demonstrations against the WTO as well as in most World Social Forums and alter-globalization networks.

San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, 1 January 1994, 0:10 a.m.

On the day the Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, the United States and Canada enters into force, an army of indigenous people assume control of seven towns in Chiapas, one of the poorest states in Mexico. The movement does not seek secession, but demands ‘a Mexico in which indigenous people have their place’. The struggle is also for democratization of the country and against neoliberalism and domination by the market. Rejecting a system based on profit, they demand a world which ‘puts people at the heart of its concerns’ and which respects differences. After a few days of fighting, hostilities cease and the word becomes the only weapon of the Zapatistas. In 1996, they convened the first Inter-galactic Gathering, bringing together hundreds of supporters from all continents. This was the beginning of the international People’s Global Action network and one of the principal antecedents of the World Social Forums.

Birmingham, UK, 16 May 1998

Here, 70,000 people form a human chain around the Conference Centre where the G-8 summit is taking place. On the initiative of the international campaign Jubilee 2000, they are calling for the cancellation of third world debt. Among the participants are many ‘ordinary citizens’; belonging to no particular political organization, they are simply concerned with world affairs. In the morning, scholar–activists hold several workshops to explain the implications of the debt issue. Somewhat later in the same city, the international activist network ‘Reclaim the Streets’ launched its first Global Street Party, closing roads to all but pedestrians and cyclists. This action will be replicated around the world and its festive nature will be encountered at innumerable actions against international summits over the years to follow.

Paris, France, 27 October 1998

Following mobilizations by a coalition of more than eighty organizations, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announces to Parliament that France is withdrawing from negotiations of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). The decision terminates a long series of negotiations aimed at liberalizing trade, services and international investment. In June of the same year, following an editorial by Ignacio Ramonet in Le Monde Diplomatique, ATTAC¹ is born. Its members will eventually number 27,000 in France alone, and it will have local chapters in over forty countries.

Seattle, Washington, United States of America, 1 December 1999, 6.00 a.m.

Here, 50,000 protesters block access to the conference centre. The failure of the WTO negotiations will catapult this young movement into world news. All elements due to make the alter-globalization movement a success are already present in the Seattle mobilization: network-based organizations and affinity groups; use of the internet and new communication technologies; a festive and carnivalesque atmosphere; images of broken windows; workshops where scholar–activists break down the discourse of WTO experts; and a broad convergence of civil society actors, including labour, black blocs, NGOs, green activists, experts and artists. Many other counter-summits and protests will follow, unfolding according to the same model, although without achieving the same success as Seattle: Washington DC, Prague, Sydney, Nice, Brussels, Quebec, Seville, Evian, Cancún, Mar del Plata, Hong Kong, Gleneagles, Heiligendamm, Pittsburgh and many more. Every time the ‘masters of the planet’ meet, tens of thousands of alter-globalization activists will converge.

Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, 25 January 2001

In this city in southern Brazil, the first World Social Forum convenes, simultaneously with – and in opposition to – the thirty-first World Economic Forum in Davos. After the counter-summits, alter-globalization activists want to ‘move from opposition, to the construction of alternatives’. Between 12,000 and 15,000 activists from around 100 countries come together to insist that ‘another world is possible’: a fairer world, with greater solidarity, and greater respect for differences.

As the first global protest movement since the fall of the Berlin Wall, alter-globalization came to public attention through a series of global events which erupted into the world news. Far from opposing globalization, its activists strive to contribute to the emergence of an international public space to solve the major problems of our era (Kaldor, Anheier & Glasius, 2001–3; Held, 2007), be it climate change or financial transactions. Alter-globalization activists aim to ‘contribute to the development, in each citizen, of the international disposition which is the pre-condition for all effective resistance strategies today’ (Bourdieu, 2001: 20). International mobilizations and the World Social Forums in particular have allowed thousands of activists to live a global experience and encounter people from all continents on the basis of common issues and struggles. Participation in such events strengthens the ‘global consciousness’ of each participant and a sense of her own globality (Albrow, 1996): ‘When I participated in this forum for the first time, I felt that I was of this world for the first time’ (African activist, WSF 2003); ‘As an individual, I felt that I took part in the life of this world far more after having participated in the forum. There was a really different feeling than the one I had at other international gatherings’ (Indian activist, WSF 2005).

The term ‘anti-globalization’, bestowed on the movement at its inception, was quickly recognized as inappropriate for a movement which endeavoured to ‘globalize the struggle and globalize hope’, to borrow the slogan of Via Campesina. However, it wasn’t until 27 December 2001 that the neologism ‘alter-globalization’ appeared for the first time, in the context of an interview with A. Zacharie, a young man from Liège (Belgium), published in La Libre Belgique. He argued that the prefix ‘alter’ conveys both the idea of ‘another globalization’ and the importance of constructing alternatives (interview, 2003). This term rapidly became widespread in francophone circles. Diverse variations then began to be employed in Latin America in 2003;² while the term ‘alter-global’ gained currency in Italy. In the English-speaking world, the movement was first qualified as ‘anti-globalization’, then ‘anti-corporate globalization’ and eventually ‘the global justice movement’. A significant number of scholars and activists have, however, come to adopt what had already become the most current terminology worldwide: ‘alter-global’ or ‘alter-globalization’ – which appeared in Wikipedia in March 2009 – terms already adopted by Korean, Brazilian and German activists and analysts.

From the first uprisings to the global crisis

Three major periods can be distinguished in the short history of the alter-globalization movement.

The first is marked by the formation of the movement out of diverse mobilizations against neoliberal policies in all regions of the world. The globality of the movement became increasingly apparent, particularly during mobilizations around global events, the most commented on in the press being the Seattle protests. The alter-globalization movement was thus organized around expert meetings and counter-summits which launched the movement internationally, but also around movements which, like Zapatism, understood themselves as helping to challenge the dominant global ideology at the local level.

During this first phase, engaged intellectuals played an important role in attracting public attention to the issue of globalization and in challenging neoliberalism, at the time the uncontested hegemonic ideology. These intellectuals also initiated numerous civil society organizations and networks – which remained a feature of the alter-globalization movement until the end of the second phase – such as ATTAC, Global Trade Watch, and Focus on the Global South.

The first World Social Forum, held in Porto Alegre in January 2001, marked the beginning of the second phase, which was dominated by social forums, gatherings oriented less towards resistance than to bringing together alter-globalization activists from different parts of the world and, in some cases, elaborating alternatives. Although many columnists proclaimed the movement dead in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, maintaining that the ‘war against terrorism’ had replaced economic globalization as the central issue,³ this period can in many ways be considered the golden age of the alter-globalization movement. It was then recognized as a new global actor.

From 2000 to 2005, the movement grew rapidly on every continent. There were 50,000 protesters in Seattle in 1999. A year and a half later, 300,000 marched against the G-8 in Genoa in July 2001; the same number in Barcelona in March 2002 at a European summit; a million in Florence in November 2002 at the closing of the first European Social Forum (ESF); and 12 million worldwide against the war in Iraq on 15 February 2003, a global day of action initiated by alter-globalization networks. The number of participants in the yearly World Social Forum climbed from 12,000 in 2001 to 50,000, 100,000, 120,000 and 170,000 successively until 2005. After its success in Brazil, the World Social Forum moved to India in 2004, and the Social Forum evolved to spawn many hundreds of forums at the local, national and continental levels.

The alter-globalization movement emerged at the pinnacle of globalization in the second half of the 1990s, in a context dominated by economic issues, international trade liberalization and the rapid spread of new information and communication technologies (Castells, 1996–8). However, the global context changed at the beginning of the new millennium. Before the first World Social Forum took place, George W. Bush replaced Bill Clinton in the White House and the WTO had been subjected to its first failure in Seattle at the end of 1999. The internet speculative bubble burst in the spring of 2001, throwing into question the euphoria of economic and financial globalization. At the same time, fraud and the collapse of major global companies, such as Enron and Worldcom, tarnished the image of the financial sector. The Bush administration started wars against Afghanistan and then Iraq. Opposition to war was integrated as a major theme at the 2003 and 2004 Social Forums, but subsequently declined in importance. The 2005 WSF was focused chiefly on global governance and economic issues: third world debt, fiscal justice, reform of international institutions and global regulations, etc. After a slow-down between 2001 and 2003, international trade resumed, with markets regaining their vigour post-2003 and enjoying a period of exceptional growth until mid-2007. China’s entry into the WTO in 2002 and its rising power represented a new advance for economic globalization and trade liberalization.

The alter-globalization movement managed to win over a large part of public opinion in several countries. In 2001, a survey was published showing that 63 per cent of the French population agreed with ‘civil society organizations which demonstrate against neoliberal globalization during global summits’ (Le Monde, 19 July 2001). From 2002 to 2005, even right-wing politicians and representatives of the World Bank wanted to take part in the WSF. The 2002 European Social Forum in Florence and the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre marked two high points of this period of alter-globalization – remarkable for their size (respectively 50,000 and 170,000 participants), their openness to very diverse political cultures, and the active involvement of grassroots activists in their organization and in the discussions which took place.

Between 2002 and 2004, the war in Iraq became a major concern among the alter-globalization activists. During this period of the movement, several anti-imperialist thinkers rose in popularity as they did in the 1970s. Their conception of war as the ‘ultimate stage of neoliberal globalization’ (Ceceña⁴ & Sader, 2003; Chomsky, 2003) was widely popular among the activists: ‘The militarization of globalization is now the sole means of imposing neoliberalism’ (a panel at the WSF 2002, see also Klein, 2007). The alter-globalization movement globally tried to mobilize against war the same strategies and tactics they had developed to confront international institutions. As they had done against the Washington Consensus, activists strove to break the consensus in the US administration, media and most of the population, and to cast the political decisions into debate. But in the face of fundamentalists and war-mongers, their denunciation of the irrationality of the war in Iraq as a risk management strategy appeared to have no echo until the end of 2006, long after the strong mobilizations against the war in 2003.

After an impressive ascendant phase from 1995 to 2005 – though not without its setbacks and retreats – the international movement experienced several less than successful events and entered an irresolute phase. However, the decline of some of the major European alter-globalization organizations and networks does not diminish the fact that the movement achieved fundamental success on two levels: geographic expansion and the end of the Washington Consensus. The WTO trade liberalization process was hit by a series of setbacks and the Washington Consensus was massively discredited. The 2008–9 global financial crisis vindicated much alter-globalization analysis, demonstrating that it had been correct on many points. The global crisis was taken to confirm many alter-globalization analyses and some of the movement’s ideas were even adopted by heads of state. The right-wing French President Nicolas Sarkozy didn’t hesitate to appropriate alter-globalization slogans – ‘the ideology of the dictatorship of the market and public powerlessness has died with the financial crisis’⁵ – and the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown became a defender of a taxation on financial transactions.⁶

Paradoxically, many actors of the alter-globalization movements appeared to have a difficult time adapting to a new ideological context it had helped to bring about. However, chapter 10 will show that, in this third phase, this does not reflect a decline in the movement so much as a reconfiguration at three levels. The movement became more oriented towards obtaining concrete outcomes which its activists hope will emerge out of the crisis of neoliberalism. It is increasingly structured around networks and individualized commitments rather than rooted in activist organizations. Moreover, its geography has evolved considerably. The movement has declined in some of the former strongholds in Western European countries while the social forum dynamic has been reinforced in regions which are symbolically or strategically important (North America, the Maghreb, Africa). Besides, the infatuation with alter-globalization’s ideas and with its forums has not diminished in Latin America, as the adoption of anti-neoliberal policies by several heads of state in the region and the participation of 130,000 activists at the WSF in Bélem, Brazil, in January 2009 can attest.

A global movement

From Porto Alegre to Mumbai and Dakar, from Seattle to Genoa, Hong Kong and Pittsburgh, a long series of mobilizations have been conceptualized and lived as steps in the same movement. On what basis can one refer to a single, integrated movement, unifying events and actors as heterogeneous as retired scholars, rebel students, US trade unionists, Indian dalits, self-organized neighbourhoods in Argentina, indigenous communities, Korean and Brazilian farmers, artistic happenings in Italian cultural centres, Whitechapel squatters, actions against transgenic cornfields, and workshops in which retired people become familiar with macroeconomics?

First of all, the unity of the movement should not be confused with the existence of a single organization encompassing its various components. On the contrary, the existence of such a structure would risk paralysing the movement. The unity of the movement relies rather on social meanings⁷ shared by the actors who embody them (Touraine, 1978; Melucci, 1996) and on the major challenge they face – asserting the importance of social agency in the face of global challenges and against the neoliberal ideology: ‘Citizens and social movements can have an impact on the way our common global future is shaped.’ This has been the central message of demonstrations around the world carried out under the banners of this movement, which has declared that ‘another world is possible’. This central meaning is the starting point of the unity among alter-globalization actors and events on all continents, though neither individuals nor organizations are identical.

From this perspective, the unity of the movement is not in the least incompatible with a heterogeneity of its actors. A. Touraine (1978: 124) reminds that ‘we sometimes forget, in speaking about the workers’ movement, that it is embodied by unions, parties, cooperatives and mutual aid organizations...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Foreword by Alain Touraine
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Alter-Globalization – Becoming Actors in the Global Age
• Part 2: The Way of Subjectivity
• Part 3: The Way of Reason
• Part 4: Confluence of the Two Paths
• Bibliography
• Index