"People's UN" Marches to Beat of New Drum
Hilary Wainwright
The Guardian, 25 January 2003
The nearest thing to a people's United Nations, the World Social Forum (WSF), opened yesterday in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. For four days the city, whose participatory method of administration has made it the United Nations' model of good government, will be host to more than 100,000 activists for peace and social justice.
The first WSF in 2000 was the brainchild of organisations involved in the anti-capitalist protests of the late 90s; they wanted to develop alternative ways of living. "Protests are not enough", said Walden Bello, an academic from the Philippines and leading critic of the World Trade Organisation.
The event is held at the same time as the business-led World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in order to draw attention to the idea that, in the words of the WSF logo, another world is possible. The choice of Porto Alegre was symbolic too. For 15 years the city's governing Workers party - which now rules Brazil through the leftwing President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva - has been deciding the budget through a process of popular participation, redistributing wealth, reducing poverty and eliminating corruption as a result.
It is the wholehearted involvement of the city administration in the running of the WSF that makes such an extraordinary event possible. The existence of a working experiment in Porto Alegre makes it highly practical for the discussion of participatory democracy, which is - along with social economics and alternatives to war - the main theme of the forum. "I come to the forum to exchange experiences of democracy", says Alvaro Portillo, who was previously mayor of Montevideo in Uruguay.
The prospect of war has given an added sense of urgency to the search for alternatives. A sign of this is the growth in participation from the US. In the first two years only a few academics and non-governmental organisations managed to find the funds to travel to Brazil. This year the US has one of the largest non-Latin American delegations, with nearly 2,000 attendees. "If we are to end war, we need a new kind of globalisation, based on democracy and social justice", says Fred Ascate of the US group Jobs For Justice, which links community and trade union campaigns.
Porto Alegre is bursting at the seams. Every conceivable public space is occupied. Empty warehouses in the dockyards now resound to discussions of subjects such as empire, war and unilateralism, resistance to militarisation and debate on whether the World Trade Organisation can be reformed. Some of the speakers are well known: Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy and Tariq Ali are there, as is the Brazilian president. The embattled leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, will address the event.
But it is no longer solely the big names that draw thousands of people to the forum. "Initially celebrities helped to give the event its legitimacy; now everybody recognises the WSF as the space for global alternatives", Luciano Brunet, one of the organisers, says. "It has a life of its own". The diversity of the WSF, a hallmark of each of the last three years' events, illustrates that the left may at last have retained the tension of a good debate without the fractious infighting of old.
One of the most central of these debates is the relationship between civil society and political power. President Da Silva, now the embodiment of political power in Brazil, regards this gathering of civil society as an important ally. After making his speech to the WSF, he is going to its business counterpart in Switzerland. "I will be taking the message of Porto Alegre to Davos", he said. "I will be saying the same thing as I say here. There will not be two faces. I will tell Davos that their economic policies are making a terrible mistake".
Copyright 2003 The Guardian
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