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Magazine
A carnival of ideas
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Porto Alegre was recently host to a confluence of alternative ideas on how to shape a better world. C. RAMMANOHAR REDDY describes the content and the ambience of the second World Social Forum.
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Jugglers perform as night falls on the inauguration of the World Social Forum... a shadow event to the World Economic Forum.
IF the 32nd World Economic Forum (WEF) in New York got all the attention, it was the second World Social Forum (WSF) meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which drew the strength of numbers.
Compared to the 3,500 delegates who made it to the heavily fortified Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York, the campus of the Catholic University on the outskirts of the southern Brazilian city attracted 15,000 delegates from 5,000 organisations in 123 countries. In addition some 5,000 students, workers and just interested residents of the city who came to listen to the deliberations. Activists from other parts of Brazil, from Argentina, Uruguay and elsewhere in South America took out a noisy, but entirely peaceful, march of 35,000 on the opening day of the meeting. If this show of strength was not enough, there were parallel events — a youth camp with 15,000 participants from 52 countries, a parliamentarians' forum, a judges' meeting, and a forum of mayors ... There were some 51,000 people who were involved in the WSF, which as in 2001 was very pointedly held at the same time as the Davos event moved to Manhattan this year.
Jostling for space and attention... a performer on stilts.
Size matters, but it is not the only thing. What more then is the WSF, which in Portuguese has a less bland sound to it: "Forum Social Mundial''? Its better-known counterpart, the WEF, is where the movers and shakers of the world gather to set the agenda for the future. The participants of the WSF too had big ideas, except that their dreams were the stuff of idealism, captured in the motto: "A Better World is Possible".
A number of global strands evolved into the WSF. Small meetings in Europe in the late 1990s to contest the idea of globalisation — including one well-known seminar in Zurich in 1999 that was organised by the European group CETRI — formed the germ of the idea of a larger meeting. In 2000, a coalition of Brazilian non-government organisations, trade unions, political parties and research institutions announced that they would hold a global forum to specifically contest all that the Davos WEF had come to represent. The WSF was born in January 2001 at Porto Alegre, as the organisers knew they could bank on the support of the left Workers Party Government, which was in office. If the first meeting was a success, attracting nearly 5,000 delegates, the second one was a phenomenon.
The serious work was conducted between February 1 and 4. The innumerable subjects gave everyone who was curious about exploring alternatives a wide choice — 28 conferences, 100 seminars and 700 workshops — with some extending late into the night. The discussions were organised under the rubric of four broad themes: economic production, access to wealth, civil society and the public arena, and, political power and ethics. Some of the conferences had sweeping themes like "Combating Discrimination", "Globalisation and Militarism" and "Food Security". While the conferences and seminars attracted hundreds and more, the workshops had a more compact number of participants.
Noam Chomsky... one of the stars.
There were some workshops that offered specific alternatives or discussed alternative ways of looking at the world. Many had sessions devoted to considerable discussion on a Tobin Tax on global currency markets that would bring more stability to capital flows (www.attac.org) . One workshop saw NGOs from around the world launch a new global campaign to draw up a world treaty on the "global commons" to protect and harness genetic resources as part of a global heritage. Another saw economists from Asia, Africa and the Americas explore alternative perspectives on the global economy to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy (www.networkideas.org) . Not to be excluded were esoteric topics like the samba as a medium of resistance!
The most distinctive aspect of the WSF was that it took place in a carnival-like atmosphere. At the main venue, groups would occasionally march through the campus waving banners and chanting slogans to the rhythms of makeshift and real musical instruments in what, to the visitor, was a uniquely South American practice. There were Argentines with their pots and pans, Brazilian landless workers demanding redistribution, workers from Uruguay and even a few Palestinians, who garnered much the largest support on the campus. And all this even as mime artists, performers on stilts, dance groups and musicians jostled for space and attention with pavement-sellers of handicrafts, books and music. The WSF was, by coincidence, held on the eve of the annual samba of Brazil. By all appearances, that carnival had been brought into the forum.
What was remarkable was that with all the crowds and overflowing halls, barring a couple of minor incidents, the event went off peacefully. The commitment of the organisers, the enthusiasm of the hundreds of paid and voluntary staff and the dedication of the hundreds of interpreters could teach a lesson or two to the organisers of the "official" global conferences. The carnival had its odd moments, a small group of Anand Margis were never short of attention occasionally displaying a peculiar brand of yoga in a country where curiosity about India and all things Indian is far more than what even middle-class Indians show about Brazil.
Commitment, dedication and enthusiasm everywhere.
While tens of thousands of people participated in the WSF the larger representation was naturally from South America as it required financial support of a considerable amount for delegates from North America, Europe, Asia and Africa to be able to travel to southern Brazil. The WSF had its share of stars of the movement for alternatives. There was Noam Chomsky from the U.S.; the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchu (Guatemala); Medha Patkar (India); Walden Bello (the Philippines) and Martin Khor (Malaysia). But it was not the celebrities who made a success of the WSF, it was the delegates who brought with them their ideas from home and the visitors who came to share these experiences who contributed to the occasion.
A "non-official" meeting organised on this scale inevitably attracts questions about funding, though it is strange that similar questions are not asked about the privately owned and organised WEF that has had its share of brushes with the Swiss tax authorities. Committed and enthusiastic as the people behind the Porto Alegre meeting were, it was apparent that the event could neither have been held nor organised so well if it were not for the support of the Porto Alegre and Rio Grande du Sul Governments. Besides the logistic support, funds were substantial. According to a member of the organising committee, the two governments met 60 per cent of the $2 million that the event cost. The rest came from global NGOs and Brazilian civil society.
On the whole a peaceful event.
What was Porto Alegre all about? The forum defies easy description, or as one Brazilian journalist using the language of a newspaper said: "With so many things happening, there is no single lead here." The best description of the WSF is that it was a part meeting, a part gathering and now a part institution itself. It was an international meeting in that it was where political and NGO activists, academics and the interested citizen from across the globe discussed alternative ways of seeing the world and constructing a different one. It was a gathering in that it brought together tens of thousands of people with similar (but not identical) views about globalisation and demonstrated to each other that they were not working in isolation. And with the interest in the WSF having increased phenomenally, it appears that the forum is also becoming a global institution where dissent and alternatives are freely articulated. So far the "anti-globalisation" protests have been associated with official summits. This was so of the 1999 marches in Seattle [a World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting] the 2000 protests in Prague [a World Bank - International Monetary Fund (IMF) conference] and the 2001 demonstrations in Genoa (a G-7 summit). The WSF, on the other hand, stands independently and on its own as a space for alternatives.
The diffuse nature of the forum meant that it was possible to use the occasion for one's own ends. The French socialists actively campaigned for the Tobin Tax, with their eye on the presidential elections later this year. Less organised were the Workers' Party of Brazil. Taken by surprise over the success of the WSF, the Brazilian party took time to realise that with its candidate, Lula da Silva, currently leading in Brazil's own presidential election race, it too could derive some advantage.
A music group performing outside a seminar hall at the WSF.
The many voices at the WSF also meant that there were the occasional tensions. There was no shortage in criticism from anarchists and even some radicals that the WSF was a "reformist" meeting which did not fundamentally question the system. Yet, the differing voices heard at Porto Alegre did not make up a cacophony, but were perhaps more revealing of a richness of perspective.
A couple of years ago the Financial Times of London called the participants of the Davos meetings "Masters of the Universe", a description that Noam Chomsky recalled with some sarcasm in Porto Alegre. That phrase can be adapted for the WSF. "Masters of the Social Carnival" would be the perfect description that conveys both the effervescence and the seriousness of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2002.
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