There was a mood of hope, tempered by sobering realities, as more than 100,000 activist critics of existing global economic rules and institutions rallied in this “happy port” in sunny southern Brazil.
It was the third year for this growing international conclave, the World Social Forum, created mainly by European and Brazilian progressive groups as a counterpoint to the longer-established January meetings of business and political elites at the World Economic Forum in snowy Davos, Switzerland.
Their hopes were partly symbolized by the newly elected President of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former union leader who campaigned for a “decent Brazil” as candidate of the leftist Workers Party. He has long argued that contemporary globalization has delivered little for the world’s poor.
“For me, Lula represents hope,” said Ubajara Paz de Figueiredo, a priest from the Brazilian countryside, as he joined the throng. “He comes from the lower class, from the people. He will try to take Brazil on a new social way.”
For the thousands of activists from around the world, including an estimated 1,000 from the United States, Lula also represented hope that “another world is possible,” the mantra of the World Social Forum.
The activists at Porto Alegre said that the failures of global institutions like the International Monetary Fund were widely recognized and that even the global elite were increasingly forced to confront their criticisms. The World Trade Organization has, for example, billed its current negotiations as the “development round.”
With the conviction that the legitimacy of the existing global rules was now in question, they were intent on providing alternatives that would make a more intimately linked world work better for the poor, workers and the environment.
Yet the way to move forward was not clear. As many shouted for him to stay, Lula spent much of his speech to the banner-waving crowd explaining why he was about to leave for Davos, where he said he wanted to be a voice for the world’s poor and for a fairer sharing of the world’s wealth. Lula’s dialogue with the rally reflected a recurring theme in the debates at Porto Alegre: Can the existing rules and institutions governing the world economy be reformed, or should they simply be scrapped?
Although often characterized as “anti-globalization,” the varied movements gathered in Porto Alegre — including campaigners against poor country debt, farmer and peasant groups, environmentalists, trade unions and peace advocates-represent a globalization of citizen politics. They recognize global linkages as an inevitable, often positive, development.
“Now all problems are global,” argued Pierre Calame, representative of a French organization, “and our world is a domestic problem.”
The Forum organizers invited representatives of several UN institutions, such as the International Labor Organization, to debate with activists, though they did not include the primary targets of criticism, such as the IMF or the WTO.
At one conference in a large sports stadium, Mark Weisbrot, an economist with a Washington research group, the Center on Economic Policy Research, argued that globalization had contributed to the dismal economic conditions in Latin America. Over the last two decades, as most countries have opened their borders to trade and financial transactions, there has been a growth of only about 7 percent in income per person in Latin America, compared with a growth of 75 percent in the previous 20 years, when the economies were more closed.
Fighting poverty
Poverty has increased dramatically in many countries, especially crisis-ridden Argentina. He argued that it was time for more countries to return to national development strategies. “The idea that institutions of empire will change,” he said, referring to organizations like the IMF and World Bank that are heavily influenced by the U.S. government, “I don’t think that will happen.”
Ugandan activist Yashpal Tandon, from a non-governmental organization called Socrine, went even further. “The only answer for Africa is to withdraw from the global system and build African unity,” he argued.
Even the representatives of global institutions offered few apologies for the way the world works today. In remarks that might not please many of the corporate and governmental leaders at Davos, Eveline Herfkens, the executive coordinator of the Campaign for the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations, argued that the world faces four major deficits — of regulations on the global economy, of democracy, of coherence among the global institutions (with the WTO and World Health Organization, for example, at odds over how to provide AIDS drugs to poor countries), and with financing. “Let’s deal with these four deficits, or globalization will not work for the poor,” she said.
Repeatedly conference participants were reminded by Herfkens and others that only a few Nordic countries came close to the modest goal for development aid of 0.7 percent of gross domestic product agreed on 30 years ago (the U.S. provides roughly one-fourth of its quota). Likewise, only $40 to $50 billion a year, a tiny fraction of what rich countries spend annually on commercial advertising, would guarantee basic education, health care and clean water to every poor person in the world, according to the United Nations.
Jose Dirceu, Lula’s chief of staff, struck a strategic balance, arguing against disengaging from the world economy and in favor of a strategy of national self-interest, global solidarity and a judicious challenge to the power of the United States to dictate the rules for the rest of the world.
“We cannot lose sight that for the first time in the last 100 years we have a situation in the world with the hegemony of a single power,” he said. With economic and military dominance, the United States also controls global institutions, he argued, but “the Washington consensus and neo-liberalism”–shorthand for strong policies of unregulated markets and privatization of government functions — “have been defeated, they have lost legitimacy.”
Need for allies
But in order to create alternatives, the proponents of a new globalization must make allies. For Brazil, that meant reaching out not only to the country’s middle class — which can go either way, with neo-liberalism or an alternative — but also to the people of the United States, especially its citizen movements.
Brazil must both pursue national development and links with the wider world market, he said. “I see now [a] way that we can ignore the fact that we must take on national development,” that is, using government policies to create jobs, he argued. “But I do not think you can de-link from the world economic project. It is dangerous.”
The strategic debates, which ran through Tuesday, will remain unresolved, partly because the Forum does not make policy decisions or take actions.
Labor unions, for example, continued to argue for including more protections for labor rights and the environment in international agreements, such as the rules of the WTO. But many non-governmental groups from developing countries and critics from rich countries oppose the WTO’s effort to reduce regulations and expand market principles to govern agriculture, services, government purchasing, provision of water, education and health that are traditional public functions in most countries. They object to any expansion of the WTO, even for goals they might favor.
But there was never any intention of reaching agreements. With more than 1,700 conferences and workshops, and an atmosphere that ranged from craft fair and pop music festival to sober conferences with attentive audiences of several thousand participants, it would be difficult to find much agreement beyond the shortcomings of the present system.
The groups at Porto Alegre undoubtedly represent mainly a varied political left, even if many were disenchanted by existing political parties of all stripes. But there is a popular base of support for much of their criticism. In a survey conducted by Environics, a Canadian polling firm, and released at the Forum, a strong majority of citizens in 25 countries felt positively in general about globalization but also believed that globalization did not serve the poor well, increased inequality, cost jobs in their countries and concentrated wealth more than it created opportunities for all.
With its growing emphasis on pragmatic political strategy and proposals for alternative models of globalization, the movement may be able to build on those popular sentiments. “Another world is possible,” activist Susan George told a cheering crowd of several thousand. “Let’s make it.”
