LATAM-EU: Another Summit in Vienna

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

VIENNA, May 11 2006 (IPS) - A little more than 190 years ago, from September 1814 until June 1815, European political powers gathered in Vienna to redraw the map of the continent, based on “the principle of legitimacy” rather than rights derived from war.

This week, some 60 heads of state and government from Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean, hundreds of executives of transnational corporations operating in both regions, and thousands of representatives of civil society organisations will gather in Vienna. They have conflicting objectives: to consolidate, or to redraw the map of economic power in Latin America.

The Congress of Vienna, as the 1814-1815 summit was called, was the outcome of Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat in the Battle of Nations in 1813 around the German city Leipzig. Napoleon later escaped from exile in Elba and made a brief, unsuccessful comeback as French military leader in the spring of 1815. But his, and French, authority over Europe was over.

On June 9, 1815, nine days before Napoleon’s troops were defeated at Waterloo for good, the European powers signed the closing act in Vienna that restored the territories France had conquered to their formers owners – from Russia to Spain, from Italy to Norway, and up to Cape Colony (as today’s South Africa region was then called), Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) and Tobago in South America.

This week at the fourth EU-Latin America/Caribbean (EU-LAC) summit, the stakes are not as high as in the Congress of Vienna. Now officials speak of consolidating economic and cultural relations between the two continents, and of cooperation in the fight against organised crime, drugs trafficking, terrorism, and migration.

This is a quite different gathering. Today, most of the people taking part in the deliberations in Vienna do not represent governments, but non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

While the political leaders attending the official summit are keen to approve several free trade agreements between the two regions, the NGOs’ main goal is to end what they see as the economic hegemony of European corporations in Latin America – the redrawing of the economic map in European-Latin American relations, so to speak.

At the alternative summit ‘Enlazando Alternativas’ taking place in Vienna, NGOs are challenging the governments’ very legitimacy, arguing that official actions tend to support corporate interests in Latin America to the detriment of the peoples’ most fundamental rights such as decent jobs, access to public services and protection of the environment.

“EU rhetoric about political dialogue and development cooperation cannot hide the fact that European governments are in Vienna to push a free trade agenda,” said Brid Brennan of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, one of the Enlazando Alternativas summit organisers.

“By contrast, Enlazando Alternativas shows that genuine solidarity is possible – linking alternatives from the ground up, from peasant farmers’ struggles in Latin America through to campaigners against the EU constitution..”

It is unlikely that the alternative summit will redraw the economic power map in EU-Latin American relations. Instead, it will have to do with an inconsequential condemnation by the so-called People’s Tribunal of European corporations for violation of human, economic, and environmental rights in Latin America.

But the official summit is also unlikely to fulfil its goals of consolidating the conquests made in trade and foreign investment. The several free trade agreements with Latin America and the Caribbean region that the EU is trying to push through will not be signed in Vienna – the map will remain as it is.

“We will not achieve the breakthrough in the free trade agreements with the Mercosur region we have hoped for,” Austrian foreign minister Ursula Plassnik said at a press conference in Vienna May 11. The four Mercosur countries are Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

In other issues to come up at the summit too, such as immigration, cooperation in the fight against organised crime, drugs trafficking and terrorism, and in science and technology, the achievements are likely to be negligible.