POLITICS: Socialists Propose a New Global Consensus

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 28 1999 (IPS) - The Council of the Socialist International (SI) concluded its deliberations Saturday with a call for “linking globalisation’s material advances with social progress.”

“It is urgent to take advantage of the opportunities offered by globalisation in order to eliminate unemployment, hunger and indigence once and for all,” said the meeting’s final document, titled “Buenos Aires Consensus” and signed by over a hundred political parties.

The name of the declaration “is no accident” – it is an attempt to take a stance against the “Washington Consensus,” stated Raimon Obiols, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party’s international relations secretary.

The Washington Consensus covers the multilateral credit organisations located in the U.S. capital, which over the last 20 years has established the recipe for structural adjustments along neo-liberal lines, especially for developing countries.

The meeting in this South American capital brought together delegates from more than 130 socialist, social-democrat, labour and centre-left parties from the five continents with the premise of debating agenda ideas for the Twentieth Congress of the SI this November in Paris.

The SI has doubled its party membership in the last 15 years and its influence has extended beyond the European countries. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union, the SI’s progressive discourse has won non-party followers as well.

SI president, former prime minister of France Pierre Mauroy, stressed at the closing of the meeting that, in addition to Saturday’s declaration, there are great expectations for the report by the Global Progress Commission, headed by Felipe Gonzalez, former president of Spain.

The Commission began work after the Nineteenth Congress to create a socialist platform for the coming century, but several delegates in Buenos Aires expressed their doubts, saying the document will be just another piece of paper.

Porfirio Munoz Ledo, a delegate from Mexico’s Democratic Revolutionary Party and one of the strongest critics within the Council, maintained that “there is not a common project” within the SI, and agreed with Chilean socialist presidential candidate, Ricardo Lagos, about the need to define an agenda.

“There are many parties in the South that look to the Europeans as the upper class,” stated Munoz Ledo, “but the Europeans haven’t defined anything because many of them are not convinced that neo-liberalism is really a bad thing, when for us it has been fatal.”

Munoz also criticised several socialist leaders who, upon being elected to office, “forget to turn the ideas they maintained when they were part of the opposition into government policies,” and added that “the SI has a lot of ‘club’ and little commitment.”

Holding the meeting in a Latin American capital not only helped demonstrate the SI’s openness to parties outside Europe, but also support of the three centre-left presidential candidates of the Southern Cone facing elections this year: Lagos in Chile, Fernando de la Rua in Argentina, and Tabare Vazquez in Uruguay.

In the Buenos Aires declaration, the socialists returned to the idea that politics should prevail over economics – as they had at the last Council meeting in November – and reiterated that the SI “approves of a market economy but rejects a market society.”

The report recognises the various effects that neo-liberalism has had on Latin America, where these reforms often have meant postponing “vital” modernisation in areas such as health services and education.

“We need a new international consensus that transcends the Washington Consensus, which places emphasis on market reforms alone,” says the final document of the SI.

Globalisation and its mostly negative consequences in developing countries was a recurrent theme throughout the meeting, along with debate over the so-called “third way,” the idea of a political road different from communism and neoliberalism.

Both British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder have declared their support for the “third way,” but neither of the two could attend the Council meeting in Buenos Aires.

Among those in attendance were Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, Austrian President of Parliament Hens Sischer, and Albanian Prime Minister Pandelli Mayko.