At the Edge (11-13 November 1999)

AT THE EDGE
Towards 21st Century Internationalism

TNI 25th Anniversary (1974-1999)

Towards a New Internationalism: Closing Plenary

In the closing session, participants were invited to pull together the many and varied strands of the Festival and look for a synthesis. As Fiona Dove said, there was present an extraordinary range of people, interests and competences, and a wealth of diversity of opinion, ideas and challenges offered. She encouraged the participants to find the linkages between issues of peace and governance, the global economy and democratization, between North and South, and to take these back into their own work. The most important linkage of all is the one between ideas and action. Marcos Arruda added that it is the vocation of the TNI to bring together intellectuals and activists. This can be a difficult bridge to make. However, facing those contradictions is the only way that history makes progress.

Chairperson: Phyllis Bennis
Speakers: Fiona Dove, with additional comments by Annie Brisibe

Fiona Dove: TNI Director and host of the TNI Festival.

In the 27 sessions of the Festival, the intention has been to span a very wide range of issues and people. In fact, those present have come from 23 countries of the South, as well as all European countries, Scandinavia and the USA. They are from many different movements: women, peace, labour, green, human rights, and so on. They are from NGOs, lobbyists, students, independent researchers, lawyers, journalists and many more. Many different ideological perspectives have been reflected in the debates. It was TNI's aim to provide a space where these different people and groups could share and reflect on their work. It was deliberately called a 'Festival of Ideas' and meant to be just that and not a conference leading to a particular programme of action or any one solution. The expectation has been that by generating a sense of common purpose and some basis for unity, we will refine the questions we ask ourselves in our work and use this to inform what we are doing individually and collectively.

The aim was to look broadly at the moment in which we are living and try to theorise about it; about globalization and its terrain, its challenges, and the new actors involved. While providing a critique of the dominant powers and the world they are trying to shape, we are also witnessing the growth of a remarkable transnational activist movement. Serious cross-sectoral alliances are being built out of the previous issue-based struggles, which were more fragmented and isolated. A case in point is the WTO. Environmentalists, human rights, labor and women activists, to name a few, are all challenging not necessarily specific trade rules but the kind of international economy that is currently being carved out. A new concept of democratisations - of economic democracy - is being asserted where people are demanding a say in the way that economies, from local to international, are organised. This is a space that we have created for ourselves. This space has not been given to us - we have taken it.

Three old internationalisms can be identified: the socialist, the labor, and the inter-state internationalisms. What is new is the inclusivity of the new internationalism. It is cross-sectoral, broader in political and ideological terms, and characterized by respect for the differences among ourselves. A pluralistic internationalism is developing. This idea has not been well theorised or is not entirely understood as of yet. We still need to reflect on what might be the bottom-line values and limitations of this new internationalism.

We are no longer state-dependent. In what has been called, 'the new diplomacy' there is a new expectation for active citizen participation in state relations, whether local, national or international. How and in which ways we are to understand the state and issues of democratization came up in every single session at this Festival. We also tried to discuss political parties and forms of political representation. Especially in Europe, there is disillusion with political parties, old political forms, and there exists a tremendous need to re-think what they mean today. The moment seems to have come for deeper political participation, active citizenship or, as some call it, 'radical democracy'.

Socialists have always talked about international solidarity. Now, through globalization, there is more global interconnectedness. Never before has there been a stronger moment to assert international forms of solidarity and a common international agenda. By coming to this Festival, it seems that many of us do assume we have that common purpose.

We must be in touch with, nurture and promote the new generation of activist-scholars. We must listen to them respectfully. They understand the world in a different way and are maturing within a different context. This Festival did not really reflect this reality particularly because it was an anniversary to fete those who have meant so much to us over the years and to those who have nurtured and pushed TNI since the beginning. But in perhaps two years' time, I would like a Festival of young people, where no one over the age of 45 is allowed to speak from the platform!

Finally, I feel passionately that there is a need to develop an alternative culture. This culture should be based on our dreams and visions but should also reflect and be open to the very exciting moment we are living in now. The culture of this movement needs to belong to us and must be reflected in our music, dance and movies. This is necessary if we are to build our countervailing hegemony.

Annie Brisibe: Secretary General of the Idjoya Youth Council in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, an organisation that has 5,000 members aged 17-45 years. (Brisibe was detained and missed participating in her session as a panellist in the session on the Environment. She took this opportunity to highlight the main points of her presentation)

The Niger Delta region produces 90% of Nigeria's wealth but the people have been negatively affected. Our organisation is engaged in resisting the activities of the oil companies Shell, Chevron, Elf and Mobil that produce the wealth, and also the oppressive Nigerian regime, which in a military crackdown has killed 2,000 young people and raped women and girls. Even now there are soldiers in the region because the people have asked for environmental justice and recognition for our cultural identity. The international community says that Nigeria is in 'transition' from an authoritarian regime to democracy, but the Nigerian state does not understand democracy. Both unitary and federal political systems are undemocratic. We have come up with an alternative hybrid structure. "What have been the benefits of globalisation to us? We think it is a mask, and we will go all out to bring about change."

Discussion

Peter Waterman spoke about the 'new internationalism' or, as he would prefer to call it, 'global solidarity culture'. The new 'globalization from below', as it is popularly called, includes the old internationalism between nations, but is much more than that. It is about global issues, which are also found in localities. But to understand it fully requires more research, perhaps even a new language, which the TNI is well placed to do. He has explored the meaning of the word 'solidarity' and come up with many elements:

• Identity: as in 'Workers of the World Unite', all sharing the same chains.
• Substitution: we will stand in for you because you can't stand in for yourself, e.g. development cooperation
• Complementarity: you do A for me and I will do B for you.
• Reciprocity: you do A for me today and I will do B for you tomorrow.
• Affinity: we do it with each other because we like or agree with each other.
• Restitution: solidarity with the past.

Each of these is part of the meaning of solidarity, but each by itself is not the full meaning. They can be used for research purposes but there is no operational sense of the term that is holistic rather than partial.

Marc Raskin thought a clear theme arising from the Festival was that we do not have to fight to overturn the concept of 'globalisation' but celebrate it and paint it with our own discourse. We cannot retreat to the nation and the nation state but must move forward into the tremendous spaces that globalisation offers. Too often we forget what Marx said about capitalism - that it is a progressive force in that it overthrows feudalism. Global capitalism is overturning the values of the old nation states. The new technological corporations are living a contradiction. They want controlled democracies in which to thrive. However, they cannot thrive without allowing and enabling free speech and the free flow of ideas. "We have just begun to scratch the surface of the possibilities", he said.

Boris Kagarlitsky sounded a note of caution about international solidarity. He referred to a case of repression against a mineworkers' union in Romania, which found little support from abroad. This prompted Celia Mather to reply that in the world that she inhabits there is so much activism that it is difficult to comprehend and certainly impossible to know and
theorise all that there is. There is international trade union support for mineworkers worldwide through the ICEM union federation for example. It would certainly take up such an issue as the Romanian miners, had Boris or his colleagues known to alert them. Twenty years of activism had taught her that 'Just because I don't know that something is happening, does not mean that it is not'. She had come to realize that in fact 'It probably is'.

A number of other speakers took up the issue of the balance between intellectuals and activists at the Festival.
James Early recalled a song by Sweet Honey in the Rock, the Black American women's acapella singing group, which says "We are the ones we have been waiting for". Those of us present at the Festival, connected to thousands elsewhere, are the ones. The TNI had put out a call and we had responded, and this should be cherished. Even so, he recommended a better balance at future events between those examining policies and those engaged in activism, and a better inter-generational dialogue.

A young Dutch activist said she was impressed with all the brain cells present but felt intimidated. Rather than continuing with this analysis of 'how it is', we should be dreaming and discussing 'how we would like it to be'. She recommended that we ask ourselves four key questions:

• How would we like it to be in one hundred years' time?
• What will be the obstacles to this?
• Bearing in mind the obstacles, what are our strategies?
• Who is going to do what, when and where?

Kim, a student and volunteer at TNI, urged intellectuals to write and teach with more spirit. "We read your books but your thoughts seem so incomprehensible when we go out to examine and challenge the real world. They seem like empty words". He had learnt a lot and been invigorated by the Festival and hoped its spirit could be incorporated into the life and work of universities.

Brid Brennan, recalling a line by the Irish poet Yeats, thought that the Festival encapsulated the notion, 'Who can tell the activist from the intellectual?' and thought that the question for the next 25 years of TNI could be 'Who can tell the solidarity from the struggle?' She mentioned plans for a new TNI project on comparative regionalisms, involving a number of the Festival's participants, which would look at solidarities of resistance in regions such as Southern Africa, Southern America and South-East Asia.

Marcos Arruda recalled the words of Pablo Neruda, "Give me all the pain and sorrow of the whole world and I will turn it into hope." He was optimistic about the validity of Utopian ideals and the possibility of turning them into Topia, or what he thought of as a concrete reality. This also requires a personal revolution. "Nothing will change out there if it is not changing equally and as deeply inside each one of us, by giving new value to each act, to each relationship, to each exchange that we have with one another and with nature", he said.

Phyllis Bennis closed the Festival by referring to a famous slogan from labor internationalism. She said that the first part, "Workers of the world unite. We have nothing to lose but our chains," now seems too economistic and too narrow, limited to industrial workers. However, there is another line, which we all too often forget and yet was the central theme of the Festival, "We have a world to win."

Annabelle Torres from Chile then read out several of her poems.

Kite

Dragging a young girl into a white jeep, six men in uniform
When she disappeared, she left her scream
Kite nodded to her mother's open wound
The only limit the breadth of her arms
Reaching out to one another
And her mother runs on after the jeep
After the dust has settled, and the scream has changed
And her daughter remains, a kite entangled in the sky of pain.
Where all such kites live on
And that last image just never passes on
Kites of the screams of all the disappeared.
Entangled knots gliding above the waters of the earth
Harboured forever on blue air.

A Deconstruction of Menopause

Stop in your tracks. Here come the men.
O, pause to watch their purposeful gait.
They have invented the world
And now they must be seen to cope with its muddled mess.
They must not be seen scratching at their tick bites,
Bulging at the seams, getting blisters on their feet,
Or whatever.
Women, more than ever, men need our support.
Every day their illusion gets heavier to carry off.
The health policies, and food policies, and state policies, and war policies.
Tottering and yet still monocled and dignified,
Men must march on regardless.
Women, don't lie about, don't lie still.
And also, let us not lie to ourselves or one another.
We are old enough to know better.
Hurry up and move.
And you, men, o, pause.

Millennium Man

As soft as you want, and as tough as you need.
A woman's an ant.
That's the life she must lead.
She struggles and struggles to make it look easy.
Her dreams are of snuggles. She can't be a Cissy.
Post-feminist learnings and feminine yearnings.
Millennium wish granted?
Millennium man wanted.

To Orlando Letelier and his TNI Friends

The torch carrier gets shot.
Has it always been so?
Has the torch always fallen on the ready dry grass?
Or has it mainly been put out in a barrel
Laid out by accomplices?
Looking above, on a cloudless or cloudful glorious day
Like Autumn looks in Amsterdam
I realised that the torch also mattered
Because the wavering glow of that measly match,
Held against the darkness, did not flicker out.
TNI.