“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”—Arundhati Roy at the World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil.
“Never before in the 33 years of the World Economic Forum’s history has the situation in the world been as fragile, as complex and as dangerous as this year.”—Klaus Schwab at the opening of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
As the United States hovers on the edge of war with Iraq, two significant events have taken place which frame the split in vision that characterizes this dangerous and dramatic historical moment—the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and its oppositional counterpart, the World Social Forum, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. As part of a Ford Foundation delegation to the WSF, four Naclistas, including myself, headed to Brazil last month to share ideas, network with institutional allies and generally get a sense of the state of the social justice movement in Latin America. We were not disappointed.
Despite its somewhat chaotic program, the WSF, made up of over 100,000 participants and over 1,700 workshops/panels and events was an impressive and life-giving event particularly in the new context of Lula’s Brazil. As celebrated Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano and Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy pointed to the positive example of Brazil, the flag waving, multicultural audience burst into “Lula Lula!!” in soccer-like chants. The motto of the forum, “Another World is Possible,” was reflected in the broad agenda which included some key themes: social movement collaboration to identify common goals across regions and continents; building peace; confronting and providing alternatives to the hegemonic neoliberal agenda as promoted by the group of eight major industrialized countries through the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; debt cancellation; women’s equality; a call to the people for international solidarity and the ongoing construction of an international network of progressive social forces.
The lively mood of Porto Alegre was in direct contrast to the “gloomy and somber” atmosphere described by delegates at Davos. Although not all would go as far as Noam Chomsky in singling out the United States as the most significant threat to world peace, there does seem to be some consensus, going beyond the usual left circles, that the Bush administration, most specifically on the issue of Iraq, is not acting “in our name.” While WSF delegates marched en masse for peace down the streets of central Porto Alegre on the first day of the gathering, Davos delegates focused on their theme of “trust building” in the context of a dire institutional accountability deficit throughout the political and economic world.
Drawing on a Gallup International poll of 47 countries polling a total of 1.4 billion people, Klaus Schwab of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, who opened the WEF, pointed to the massive decline in civic trust in national legislatures and large corporations. The institutions that are intended to carry out the neoliberal agenda, in effect, do not have a popular mandate and this is becoming clear even to those who promote the agenda. While the left is weary of critiquing neoliberalism, center and right forces that defend the model may also be tiring. This is the time to promote alternatives.
Although from different angles, both the WEF and the WSF placed the reality of this democratic deficit at the center of their agendas. An attendee to the WSF from the Interhemispheric Resource Center notes, “Despite being in its infancy, the major accomplishment of the WSF has been to puncture the basic conceit of the Davos agenda—that there is no alternative to neoliberalism and that critics of neoliberalism were only unified in their opposition to neoliberalism and lacked any coherent alternatives.”
While some rail about what they see as the hippie love-in mentality of much of the WSF, many, particularly those who attended the forum, appreciated that within and beyond the pumping music and tents of the youth camp, there were concrete opportunities for networking and strategizing in the context of a feeling of hope that many of us haven’t felt in Latin America for years.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terry Gibbs is the director of NACLA
