Opposition to War Dominates the Forum

By Walden Bello (*)

The World Social Forum has become the prime organisational expression of a surging movement against corporate-driven globalisation. Since the events of September 11, 2001, it has also acquired a strong anti-war dimension, and opposition to US plans to launch a war on Iraq will dominate this year's proceedings.

The Porto Alegre phenomenon has had its share of critics, even among progressives. One prominent American intellectual has characterised it as a gathering mainly of people who want to ''reform'' globalisation. Another has blasted it as a forum dominated intellectually and politically by Northern political and social movements.

These criticisms have not, however, deterred the WSF from drawing widespread adherence globally.

This year's meeting is the culmination of an exciting year-long global process. A number of cities, including Buenos Aires and Caracas, have held Porto Alegre-style social forums. It was, however, the regional social forums that were the exciting innovation of the year.

The European Social Forum (ESF), held in Florence, Italy, on November 6-9, 2002, drew over 40,000 people, more than three times the expected number. Even more amazing was the ESF-sponsored million-person march on november 9 against the planned us war on Iraq, which took place with not one of the incidents of mass violence that scaremongerers like Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci had predicted.

Equally impressive was the Asian Social Forum (ASF) that took place in the historic city of Hyderabad, India, from January 2 to 7, which drew over 14,400 registered participants, mostly from the host country, though there was representation from 41 other countries. Topics included resistance to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Dalit (outcaste) rights, the threat of fundamentalist movements, women's empowerment, food sovereignty, big dams, the Palestinian struggle, natural resource theft, and alternative economics.

Former president of India K.R. Narayanan characterised the message of the ASF as a ''voice for human rights, against violence, and against imperialism, and it is only right that it has come from India because it was India that sounded the death knell for an empire on which the sun was never supposed to set.''

One of the main reasons the Porto Alegre process is gaining such momentum is precisely that is provides a venue where movements and organisations can find ways of working together despite their differences. While the usual ultraleftist groups remain defiantly outside it, the Porto Alegre process in Brazil, Europe, and India has brought to the forefront the common values and aspirations of a variety of political traditions and tendencies.

The Porto Alegre process may be the main expression of the coming together of a movement that has been wandering for a long time in the wilderness of fragmentation and competition. The pendulum, in other words, may now be swinging to the side of unity, driven by the sense that in an increasingly deadly struggle against unilateralist militarisation and aggressive corporate globalisation, movements have not choice but to hang together or they will hang separately.

There is another development that is equally significant. Since Seattle, the anti-corporate globalisation movement has attained critical mass globally, in the sense that its ability to mass forces at significant junctures, such as the December 1999 Seattle WTO ministerial and the July 2001 Genoa meeting of the G-8, enabled it to effect international developments and acquire a high ideological and political profile globally.

Yet being a global actor did not necessarily translate into being a significant actor at the national level, where traditional elites and parties continued to be in a commanding position.

Over the last year, however, the movement has achieved critical mass at the national level in a number of countries, most of them in Latin America.

Not only has espousal of neoliberal policies been a surefire path to electoral disaster, but political parties or movements promoting anti-globalisation policies have achieved electoral power in Ecuador and Brazil, joining the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela at the forefront of the regional anti-neoliberal struggle. Perhaps most inspiring is the case of Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, who won 63 per cent of the presidential vote last October. Lula is the prime figure in the Workers' Party (PT), and as everyone knows, the Workers' Party is the main pillar of the WSF.

Not surprisingly, many of those trekking to Porto Alegre this year came with one question uppermost in their mind: What can the victory of Lula and the PT teach us about coming to power in our countries? This year's meeting is, in many ways, a celebration of a movement that, by achieving a remarkable measure of political unity amidst diversity, has changed the face of Brazilian politics.

(*) Walden Bello is professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines and executive director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South.