Exception or rule? The case of the London ESF 2004

The third European Social Forum (ESF) took place in London from 14-17 October 2004, attracting over 20,000 delegates from across the continent for three days of discussion, networking, strategising and, at times, intense political dispute.

Many observers dubbed this third ESF 'the London exception', expressing concerns that its practices failed to live up to social forum principles. The label also implies that the difficulties of the London ESF were the product of local circumstances: a fragmented and sectarian Left, and relatively weak social movements. There is some truth to this, as a lack of civil society involvement resulted in an organising process that was particularly focused around the Greater London Authority's (GLA) City Hall, where agendas were set and the vast majority of preparatory meetings were held. This led French and Italian delegations – the main power brokers in the ESF's internal disputes – to the verge of withdrawing their support altogether. But the difficulties in London were also part of the bigger picture of how the forum relates to state institutions, and the lines of this debate were not drawn in London.

Virtually all major social forums (with the exception of the 2004 WSF in Mumbai) have relied on state funding, despite their formal status as civil society initiatives. In Porto Alegre this works, with occasional friction, because the city government's participatory ethos means that it has learnt to recognise the benefits of the forum's relative autonomy. But the same was not true in London, where the unwritten rule that local authorities should restrict themselves to logistical support was broken. The Mayor's Office, most of whose senior staff are affiliates to a tight-knit (post-)Trotskyite grouping called Socialist Action, has a heavily centralised approach to London governance and it extended this same managerialism to the ESF, with practical tasks outsourced or dealt with bureaucratically. The lines of accountability within the ESF office (a vital aspect of the forum's informal decision-making structure) led to the GLA, which also hosted private weekly co-ordinating meetings of its own in parallel to the 'official' ESF process. Other tasks, such as the website and 'event management', were outsourced – albeit to ethical companies. But the lack of accountability inherent to these contractual arrangements meant that the forum was not able to operate as a space of practical experimentation, prefiguring the 'other world' that it promises to bring about. Underlying these decisions was a tendency – by no means unique to the 3rd ESF, although seen in exacerbated form there – to treat the ESF as an event rather than a process, subordinating the ongoing dynamic of pan-European social movement networking to the perceived need for administrative 'efficiency'.

Paradoxically, the lack of a significant Left party in the UK contributed to this situation. The background involvement of political parties is another unwritten rule of forum organising, despite the Charter of Principles proclaiming the social forum to be a 'non-party context'. In principle, the London ESF offered a rare opportunity to break this mold. In practice, it proved that the forums currently rely upon such parties to mediate the relationship with local government, as well as allowing them a space within which to articulate their political demands and organise collective activities. In the case of London the GLA took on this role by proxy. Political parties were still present, however, with Socialist Action (Labour Party entryists) forging an unlikely alliance with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and some members of the Communist Party of Britain. These same groups sought to involve the British trade unions in the forum with mixed success: several held seminars, and both the public sector union Unison and the Transport and General Workers' Union offered financial and logistical support, but this did not translate into significant involvement by branch-level trade unionists, and there are few signs that British trade unions will remain involved in the forum process after London.

This is just one symptom of the forum's failure, thus far, to fully Europeanise itself. Although a lower turnout meant that the proportion of international delegates at the London forum increased, it remained way below 50 per cent. The organising process still has a long way to travel to overcome its methodological nationalism too. In 2004, as in previous years, the ESF continued to assign national quotas to the selection of its plenary speakers – a process well suited to political party involvement (and, in the case of London 2004, manipulation).

With crisis comes renewal, however. Discontent with the 'official' London ESF process resulted in the spread of a number of 'autonomous spaces', a label which fuses a statement of formal organisational independence with a political conception of 'autonomy' drawing on post-Marxist and anarchist traditions. These spaces didn't necessarily share a common ideological position, but all shared a concern at the 3rd ESF's 'vertical' organising processes. This culminated in a stage invasion at a Saturday night plenary where London Mayor Ken Livingstone was scheduled to speak (he did not turn up), with activists from the autonomous spaces unfurling a banner that read "ESF – another world is for sale." But this wasn't simply an inside-outside conflict, as dissidents from the ESF Organising Committee also joined the protest. The boundary between the ‘official’ and autonomous spaces was porous in another sense too, as the constant flow of participants between them meant that the latter were not simply fringe events but became integral to the experience of the London ESF as a whole. This new dynamic could even be seen as a model for re-conceptualising the social forum "as a constellation of related self-organised convergence spaces without a centre” (Nunes, 2004). Rather than viewing the Forum as a singular open space, we might then begin to understand it as a complex pattern of interlocking networked spaces – an organisational logic that to some extent mirrors the mass direct actions against multilateral institutions in places like Prague, Quebec, and Genoa.

In the aftermath of the London ESF, reflective meetings of the ESF Preparatory Assembly in Paris, Brussels and Athens drew something approximating this conclusion – though in watered down form. The next ESF, held in Athens in spring 2006, will be structured around thematic terrains (as was the WSF 2005) and the process has already started with a European-wide consulta, which is more closely in keeping with the forum's participatory principles. There will no doubt be efforts to marginalise the results of this process, or read them selectively, but it nevertheless signals that another forum might yet be possible.