[FT] A new era of protest Rallies in New York and Porto Alegre are giving the anti-globalisation movement a chance to re-establish its credentials in the post-September 11 world, writes James Harding Published: February 1 2002 19:41 | Last Updated: February 1 2002 22:46
In Porto Alegre this weekend, the critics of global capitalism will set out to show they are recovering their voice. More than 40,000 people are expected to gather at a conference-cum-carnival at the southern end of Brazil dedicated to the idea that "another world is possible". The World Social Forum, a sprawling summit of non-governmental organisations, protest groups and activists stretching across 28 separate conferences and 700 workshops, is meeting for the second year to develop an alternative agenda for the world. In New York, meanwhile, thousands of demonstrators plan to protest against the World Economic Forum meeting of chief executives and political leaders - the movement's first large-scale US march against corporate-led globalisation. Both events are intended to mark the anti-globalisation activists' return to form. In New York, David Levy, a Washington-based campaigner, says: "The real question is going to be whether activists can take their message and present it in a militant and non-submissive manner." In Brazil, Njoki Njoroge Njehu, the Kenyan executive director of the 50 Years is Enough Network, which is seeking to bring down the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, says: "The great news here is that it is a larger event. More people. More diversity. People are excited about the opportunities to share strategies and consider what our struggle is all about." With more than double the number of delegates making the trip to Porto Alegre this year and the summit attracting people from across Africa, Asia, Europe and the US, Ms Njehu says, perhaps as much to anti-globalisation's supporters as its enemies: "The movement is alive and well. Reports of the death of the global justice movement have been greatly exaggerated." And yet, if the regrouping of the movement shows that the anger at free-market liberalism has not dimmed, the events in New York and Porto Alegre also highlight two challenges facing the anti-globalisation movement since the September 11 attacks on America. First, how much public support will there be in New York for the street demonstrations? Today's march is expected to be big, as the anti-war coalition has called its supporters to rally just an hour before the anti-globalisation camp has arranged to mobilise its people. And, while this is not the first anti-globalisation protest in North America since September 11 - there was a voluble one in Ottawa - the highly conspicuous demonstration will test the public's appetite for the anti- globalisation message and its messengers. Not that the demonstration is likely to trouble delegates to the World Economic Forum, which has moved for the first time to the Waldorf- Astoria hotel from the concrete nuclear bunker that serves as the conference centre in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos. The police have arranged for the rally to start at the corner of 5th Avenue and 59th Street, a fair way from the Waldorf. (For the activists, the only real "landmark" on the march route is the office building of Citigroup, the giant American bank that finances targeted logging companies and hydroelectric dam projects, among other things.) In anticipation of a scarred New York's wariness of any kind of protest similar to the battles seen on the streets of Seattle in late 1999 or the riots around the Group of Seven summit in Genoa last summer, the organisers have sought to tread carefully. Some groups that help organise non-violent direct actions have chosen to stay away. There may be some isolated civil disobedience, organisers expect, but not a return of the Black Bloc tactics of arson and property damage. As one protest organiser acknowledges: "It is easier for our opponents to lump us into the same camp as people who fly airplanes into buildings. Even though that is absurd, we are fighting a massive public relations machine now. The movement has to change its strategies in the post-September 11 world." In the seminars, workshops and informal sessions in Porto Alegre, the activists are facing up to precisely this, their second post-September 11 challenge: the need to articulate a manifesto and methodology of protest that distinguishes them from terrorists, bloody revolutionaries and bomb-throwing malcontents. Candido Grzybowsky, the director of the Brazil Institute for Social and Economic Analysis and one of the organisers of the World Social Forum, cautions that the summit is about a process, not a single end-product. "We are a fragmented movement, maybe a disunited movement, and here we are trying to build a dialogue between ourselves and our networks," he says. "We are a big bunch of different groups with different tactics, different pressures, different passions. We are trying to understand our goals." The intellectuals and NGO workers from France and Brazil who created the World Social Forum see the summit partly as an attempt to take the "anti-" out of the anti-globalisation movement. Bernard Cassen, is the director of Attac, the Paris-based group that has won more than 30,000 people across Europe over to its campaign for a tax on foreign exchange transaction to be levied and paid out to the world's poorest countries. He has been a champion of the World Social Forum, arguing that the summit shows "a positive movement working on its own articulate and specific programme of policy recommendations. We want another kind of globalisation." A bunch of France's establishment politicians seem keen to give the impression that they would too. No fewer than six cabinet ministers as well as aides to President Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin, the prime minster, have travelled to Porto Alegre in what is being portrayed in France as an attempt by the politicians to boost their anti-globalisation credentials just three months ahead of elections. By comparison, the World Economic Forum has only attracted three French cabinet ministers - albeit with the finance, defence and foreign affairs portfolios. But then, the anti-globalisation movement was always - and, perhaps, is again - good at pulling in the numbers.
