Focus on Trade 87, May 2003, Focus on the Global South

Contents:

• Hunger riots and protests: From the IMF to the G7
• Paris 1989: The "first summit of the seven poorest countries" and "thats enought of that!"
• Lyon 1996: "Lets retake the initiative", "The other voices of the planet" anf "The summit of the seven restistances"
• Birmingham 1998 - Jubilee 2000
• Cologne 1999: The battle for debt cancellation and the J-18 of reclaim the streets
• Okinava 2000, against military bases and for people´s security
• July 2001: Genoa the terrible
• 2002, democracy according to the G8 in Kananaskis, and democracy according to the people in Siby
• A provisional conclusion
• Notes

Hunger riots and protests: From the IMF to the G7

Until 1984, the G7 was not the focus of any widespread questioning, nor would the organisation itself have taken any notice. However, the social impact of economic adjustment measures imposed at the end of the 1970s by the international financial system on the indebted countries of the Third World (and validated by the G7), combined with the fall of the prices of raw materials, very quickly became intolerable to those who were suffering the consequences.

From 1980, whether in Africa (1), Latin America (2) or Eurasia (3), the application of these measures provoked a series of grass-roots uprisings - strikes and demonstrations degenerated into riots and looting - leading to thousands of deaths. The immediate cause of these urban social explosions was usually an increase in the price of basic foodstuffs and transport, added to the corruption of the ruling regimes. They were grass-roots mass
reactions, at once spontaneous and organised, in which the participants were above all students and young people excluded from the labour market, but also local organisations, groups linked to churches and trades unions; opposition parties also played a role. In most cases, the events led to significant political changes (4)." These social explosions, known as "hunger riots", constituted "a central social expression of the social struggles of the 80s (5)  -- they challenged the IMF by name and were thus directly linked to the G7, although without bringing this to general notice.

It was after 1984 that several NGOs and English-speaking groups began to target the G7 directly. They had indeed become aware of the fact that this was a legitimate target on which to put pressure and/or to oppose. At that moment, the G7 began to appear more and more clearly as a significant institution for the western world. The first meeting which coincided with a G7 summit, in 1984 in London, was organised by "The Other Economic Summit", better known as TOES, which turned up to insert itself in the doorway of the great and good of the London Summit. Parallel to the summit, researchers, activists, mainly ecologists and alternative economists responding to the hunger strikes and nuclear problems, thus came to challenge the G7 member states, especially about their relationships with the countries of the South and the environment.

The English TOES then became the New Economics Foundation in London, but TOES remained the generic term for the summits held parallel to the G7 during the 80s which, between1984 and 1988, evolved according to the different networks and coalitions of NGOs (6) of the host countries (7). In time, these coalitions came to declare the G7 a symbol of "globalisation and neo-liberalism", which made little impact on public opinion as the alternative summits had limited publicity. It is however from this period that the G7 increasingly made references to social conflicts, placing them on a par with other regional, military and political conflicts.

It was however only later that the G7 became a popular symbol of liberal globalisation and the target of broader-based activist protests. For this to happen, two major geo-political developments needed to take place. First of all, the end of the USSR and the Eastern Block: as long as bi-polarisation and the Cold War continued, international institutions, with the exception of the UN, and structures like the G7 only affected the western world and its periphery. Most of all they were subordinate to US strategy and the East-West polarisation in all important matters. The main international protests in the 1970s and 1980s also concerned solidarity with popular struggles (Vietnam, Nicaragua or Poland) and disarmament - with European protests against the deployment of Soviet SS-20 missiles and US Pershings on European soil.

From the turning-point of 1989/91, with the "Washington Consensus", neo-liberal policies became the norm in all countries and continents. The international institutions and structures - the G7, IMF, World Bank and, from 1995, the WTO - became the decisive players in putting in place what later came to be called "liberal globalisation".

However, for the protests to develop the climate needed to be right and the energies of activists had to be available! This happened at the end of the 1990s, when the global cycle of protest which emerged after "Seattle" began to spread across the entire planet. However, early signs had existed in different countries before this, in particular in France in 1989 and 1996.

Paris 1989: The "first summit of the seven poorest countries" and "thats enought of that!"

1989 coincided with the bicentenary of the French Revolution. Francois Mitterand wanted to give a particular splendour to these festivities by linking them to a meeting of the G7, during an international situation marked by the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and by the disintegration of the Eastern block. The summit was therefore challenged by everyone who wished to united to be the voice of the "third estate" of the planet: a demonstration and a concert were organised, an alternative summit, a symbolic meeting of seven representatives of the poorest peoples of the world.

The decade of the 1980s was notable in the western world for numerous social policy regressions and the weakening of the voluntary networks and trades unions which had developed after the war. The only sector to experience a rapid activist expansion was the NGO world - a type of involvement new at the time, experienced as being more directly effective and free from ideological baggage - and, by extension, initiatives such as SOS-Racism and Concerts for Ethiopia which had taken on board the significance of the media, the appeal of artists and music celebrities and the use of mammoth concerts as a way to mobilise people. Just before 1989, several factors showed that an important change was taking place. The March for Equality in 1983 and "Convergence" in 1984 signalled the breakthrough of the ordinary citizen, through the voices of immigrants and young people from the slums at the forefront of the social movements. A series of social movements appeared, in France and also in Italy. Following the great student strike of spring 1986, several major social conflicts took place, first of all the railway workers and then the nurses. In both these cases, the employees used a new tool, the "coordinations", which showed at the same time their desire to impose unity and democracy on their activities, starting at the grassroots. At the same time, strong social and ecological tensions began to appear as a result of international economic policies. This was particularly the case concerning GATT and the farmers (8) but also concerning the international financial institutions: the annual meeting of the IMF and the World Bank, in Berlin in 1988, was greeted by a huge protest, bringing together many groups over and above the international solidarity associations. Various initiatives converged there: ecological debates, trades union assemblies, taxi-drivers' demonstrations, an alternative congress of voluntary and political organisations, a street demonstration of 80,000 people and a special session of the Permanent Tribunal of the Peoples on the IMF and the World Bank, dealing particularly with the issue of Third World debt.

The mobilisation of July 1989 against the G7 was the meeting-point of these developments. First of all it followed directly in the line of the Berlin mobilisation, as the International League for the Right and Freedom of Peoples (which had organised the Permanent Tribunal of the Peoples in West Berlin) joined in the preparation of TOES '89. This took a different shape by mixing the  "classical" forum, dealing with ecological issues and new economic relationships based on micro-projects, and a new, more symbolic and political form to deal in the context of G7 with issues linked both to disarmament (East-West relations) and the Third World (North-South relations). It was this latter issue which set the tone for the "First Summit of the Seven Poorest Peoples" of 15th/16th July. By denouncing the very philosophy of the G7, it anchored itself in two of its fundamental principles: not the richest but the poorest, not the state but the non-governmental representatives of the people, thus symbolising "unambiguously the exclusion and neglect in which more than two-thirds of humanity finds itself."(9)

However, in the tradition of media appeal dating from the 80s, it was the French singer Renaud who organised the most significant media moment of the protest: a giant concert in the Place de la Bastille, with Johnny Clegg and many other performers. This concert took place on the evening of 8th July, after the demonstration organised by the writer Gilles Perrault who wanted to use the Bicentenary to "see the revolutionaries of 1989 celebrate those from 1789". The text of the appeal, using several references to the French Revolution, showed a totally different, more political and radical, direction from that of the concerts against racism or for Ethiopia.

All these initiatives were gathered under the slogan: "Debt, apartheid, colonies - that's enough of that", thought up by Renaud, who was responding to a deep need for a radical statement on the occasion of the Bicentenary. A radicalism without revenge or hatred, but strongly expressed. Thus, the area opened by Renaud on 8th July allowed people to "sound off" (according to the description of those organising the event), and the initiatives of the 15th and 16th showed that the "alternative" groups knew how to have ideas and start turning them into action.

However, even though the actions of 1989 definitely left their traces, they marked above all the end of a short resumption of the struggles in Western Europe, between 1986 and 1989. In spite of the final affirmation of the statement at the end of "The Other Summit", the social movements did not really take off again until 1993, and the coalition formed against the G7 in Paris disappeared.

 It is true that the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall was marked by a wind of hope which came on a wave of democratisation extending beyond the former Soviet block to Africa, Asia and Latin America. But this hope that cooperation between people would in future gain the upper hand and that the G7, having lost its enemy, would vanish, was quickly swept aside, making room for a new cycle of very significant social struggles. For this reason, it was not until the summit in Lyon in 1996 that the challenge to the G7 became important once again.

Lyon 1996: "Lets retake the initiative", "The other voices of the planet" anf "The summit of the seven restistances"

Seven years after the Bicentenary, the G7 returned to France. In the meantime, "the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet empire disintegrated, bombs exploded in the Gulf, there was a war in former Yugoslavia, Africa experienced the tragedies of Liberia and Rwanda, unemployment in Europe became more severe, the extreme right found its roots in France, and Chirac took over from Mitterrand. The same policies which, amongst others, were advocated by the governments represented in the G7, had had their long-term results: everything was the same and yet it was different, history had turned the page on the 'short 20th century'." (10).

The mobilisation in Lyon to challenge the G7 nevertheless re-discovered the same spirit as that of 1989. Six months after the general strike in the public sector in the winter of 1995, it took place with a certain continuity with this spectacular demonstration of resistance to the disastrous effects of the dominant policies and the new world (dis)order. The coalition "The other voices of the planet" multiplied local initiatives, particularly in Lille during the "Social G7", finishing off with a 12,000 strong demonstration in Lyon, followed by an alternative summit of discussion and debate. Parallel to this, the Communist trade union confederation, CGT, organised a trades union demonstration which was joined by other groups, the national teachers union (FSU) and the unions of another major trade union confederation, the CFDT, bringing together 40,000 trades unionists.  For the whole week before the official G7, many conferences and meetings were organised in Lyon, particularly by the NGO collective "Let's retake the initiative", on Africa, on the International Criminal Tribunal (Rwanda and Yugoslavia), on freedom, ecology, development. The "Summit of the seven resistances", organised by two French NGOs, Cedetim and Agir Ici, became in a sense the main  organ of this week of mobilisation.

The coalition "The other voices of the planet" was created in 1995, following on from the "50 years is enough" campaign which was led by the coalition of the same name to mark the 50th anniversary of the Bretton Woods agreements, together with its opposite number in the USA - which would play an essential role in organising the demonstration against the World Bank and the IMF in Washington in April 2000. Now, if the strike in the public sector was the significant event in France of the year 1995, it followed on from the appearance of other social movements. In 1994, these were the European Marches against unemployment, initiated by AC! (Act together against unemployment). The winter of 1994/95 was notable for the occupation by the DAL (Right to Housing) of the Rue du Dragon, which would become the starting point for the discussion on how to span the rift between the economic classes. And just before the general strike in the public sector, the universities went on strike and the associations for women's rights mobilised 40,000 people in defence of the right to abortion. The 1995 strike in defence of pensions and the public services became the point at which these struggles became articulated, especially in the giant demonstrations organised by the trades unions in every town in France, but also by the associations and what had come to be known as the new social movements.

This general context explains why, during the initiatives around the G7 in Lyon, a deep change was seen. The first departure concerned the themes of the alternative G7. During international summits, the message of the key players (often the NGOs) had up until then been focused on solidarity with the South which, in 1989, had even influenced the reference to the French Revolution: "the new Third Estate is the Third World" . In Lyon a consciousness emerged that the policies of the seven dominant countries deepened the inequalities between the North and the South, but also within each of these worlds and thus the social issues in the North also came to be at the heart of discussions and actions. A second departure followed from this: the social forces, associations and trades unions became the lead players in the alternative summit and the demonstrations on the streets.  The success of the demonstration organised by the CGT also marked the entry of the trade union movement into this struggle.

The third departure was symbolised by the philosophy of the Summit of the Seven Resistances. This meeting between one Brazilian man, one Algerian woman, one Russian woman, one Bosnian woman, one Senegalese woman living in France, one Belgian man living in the USA, one Indian man, one Chinese man and several French people, chaired by a Nigerian man, showed a common desire to challenge the powerful and a common aspiration to take charge of their own future. DAL's invitation to a  delegation of the Brazilian MST (landless movement) is a symbol of this development. In Lyon, a development took place from the logic whereby the NGOs in the North had the monopoly of the links with the movements in the South, which they "helped and supported", to a new logic: from now on, the movements in the North and the South would organise directly to act together and to develop actions in solidarity with each other. This was re-affirmed just after the alternative summit in Lyon during the  "inter-galactic" meetings organised in the summer of 1996 by the Zapatistas from Chiapas, then at a broader level in the World Social Forums.

From 1996 onwards, the G7 was systematically challenged. Furthermore, this is the date when, seeing that demonstrations were becoming more widespread, the members of the G7 "recognised" the "civil society" and the NGOs, by mentioning them in official documents.

Of all the initiatives organised in Lyon during the days preceding the G7, the "alternative summit" of the collective "The other voices of the planet" was certainly one of the largest. This collective, which brought together several dozen organisations, prepared a weekend of work and action with several thematic workshops on 8th/9th June, 1996. The statement to the G7 which concluded this meeting was read at the opening of the Summit of the Seven Resistances.

Birmingham 1998 - Jubilee 2000

 "And the Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai and said: [...] you will count seven Sabbath years, seven times seven years, and the days of these seven Sabbath years will be 49 years. [...] You will make holy the fiftieth year, you will declare freedom in the country for all who live there: it will be your Jubilee. [...] if your brother next to you becomes poor and sells himself to you, he  will be at your service until the year of Jubilee. Then he will leave your house, he and his children with him, and he will return to his family, into the property of his fathers."

This extract from Leviticus must have had an effect on the British university lecturer, Martin Dent, because since 1990 he had been thinking about reclaiming the concept of Jubilee as it exists in the Old Testament, and applying it to Third World debt. In  1994 the "Debt Crisis Network" decided actually to launch a campaign which became known as Jubilee 2000. The year 2000 was chosen by the Roman Catholic church to  celebrate its Jubilee. The campaign started in Great Britain in spring 1996, with the support of Christian Aid, one of the largest British NGOs. It very quickly became successful and in October 1997 a coalition of several trades unions, NGOs, women's movements and refugee organisations formed around it.

This campaign decided to centre its challenge on the G7, the structure where the heads of state and government sit as "majority shareholders in the international finance institutions" and in consequence hold a very responsible position in relation to Third  World debt. It was therefore during the meeting of the G7 in Birmingham in 1998 that Jubilee 2000 organised an action whose success surpassed all their hopes: more than 70,000 people took their place in a human chain which surrounded the summit.

The success of this mobilisation was very little reported in France, where the new forms of action coming from Great Britain have always been slow to catch on. However, Great Britain is, among Northern countries, the one which experienced the earliest re-awakening of activism, ahead of France which, after the wave of social movements in the 1990s, gave birth to ATTAC at the beginning of 1998, and ahead of the USA, where the activist networks which burst onto the scene in Seattle took shape in the 1990s.

The success in Birmingham marked the beginning of a very broad international campaign: two years later, Jubilee 2000 coalitions existed in 66 countries; Jubilee had taken part in hundreds of demonstrations and had organised a petition which, with 24 million signatures from 166 countries, beat all previous records!

Cologne 1999: The battle for debt cancellation and the J-18 of reclaim the streets

In the memory of activists, 1999 has become the year of "Seattle", referring to the town which hosted the WTO Ministerial Conference so seriously disrupted by demonstrations. And in fact, 1999 can be regarded as the pivot al year, from which actions spread out across the whole planet. But even before "Seattle", several events also pointed to the development underway.

In Paris at the end of June 1999, 1,200 activists from all over the world met on the initiative of ATTAC and other European activist networks: this meeting spawned others, which increased in number after Seattle: the meeting in February 2000 in Bangkok, around the UNCTAD conference (11), the Geneva conference in June of the same year, alongside the UN Social Summit,  "Copenhagen +5"; and, most importantly, the various annual gatherings of the World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre in Brazil  since January 2001.

However, two other international actions targeting the G7 took place in 1999: in Cologne, around the meeting of the European Council and the G7, and the J-18 of Reclaim the Streets.

The German government had chosen Cologne as the venue for the two summits of which it held the presidency: at the end of May the European Council (summit of the heads of state and government of the EU) and, three weeks later, the summit of the G7 itself. In response to these two summits, two actions were organised in a common framework.

The initiative to demand a different direction from the EU came from the "European Marches against Unemployment, Exclusion and Insecurity". The Marches had gained their reputation by organising the first large European demonstration of the 90s, in Amsterdam in May 1997, the culmination of marches of unemployed people all across Europe. In Cologne, 30,000 activists from the whole continent met again, following a march of 300 people from Brussels to Cologne.

To challenge the G7, the coalition took debt cancellation as its main theme, reflecting the success of Jubilee 2000 in Birmingham, and almost 30,000 people marched again through the streets of Cologne. The issue of debt was at the centre of the discussions on both the official and the activist level. Cologne was the meeting-point for activists from the South (driven by people from the Philippines and South Africa), the same people who would create "Jubilee South" a few months later in Johannesburg with the  aim of articulating a Southern voice which would be different from that of the British Jubilee: namely, the demand for an  unconditional cancellation of debt for all countries of the South and not just the most impoverished. After a more lively discussion than at Cologne, the G7 announced that they would engage in a process of (conditional) reduction of the debt of the most impoverished countries. (12)

But in 1999, other initiatives regarding the G7 also took place. For example a "caravan" of Indian peasant farmers from Kamataka travelled for several weeks through European countries, finishing its journey in Cologne just as the  demonstration against the G7 was taking place. This caravan had been organised by a peasant trades union in Southern India which was a member of Via Campesina, and with its 500 participants it would popularise, in Europe, the struggle of the peasants of the  South. It took part in several symbolic acts: the European Marches against unemployment, the pulling up of GM rice in Montpellier  with Jose Bove (who became increasingly successful in drawing media attention to the movement) and a "laughter sit-down" outside  the Novartis factory in Geneva.

Another action made more of a stir: the "J-18" organised on 18th June 1999, the opening day of the G7 summit, by Reclaim the Streets and its allies. Reclaim the Streets is a movement set in motion in the UK at the beginning of the 90s by radical tendencies within the ecology groups, "Friends of the Earth" and "Greenpeace" on issues of public policy. Reclaim the Street was successful amongst the young people of Britain and specialised in organising "Street Parties" while taking part in various social struggles: the doctors' strike in Liverpool, marches against unemployment which passed through London in spring 1997, struggles together with the trades unions against the privatisation of the London Underground. J-18 was intended to paralyse the financial centres of the world. In the days after the Asian crisis, Reclaim the Street had decided, like ATTAC in France, to make the markets and the  financial institutions the target of its campaign. On D-Day, 10,000 activists invaded the City of London, something which had not  happened since the middle of the 19th century!

With the hindsight of several years, we can now see more clearly the importance of what took place in 1999. Seattle was only the last act of what will come to be seen as the birth year of the movement against neo-liberal globalisation.

Okinava 2000, against military bases and for people´s security

In the following year, the G7 (now G8 with the inclusion of Russia) switched continents to Okinawa, in Japan. Up until then, the so-called "anti-globalisation" movement had not taken on the significance in Japan of its British, French, Indian, Korean or American alter egos. However, coming to the end of the century, the G8 summit was the moment for the global Jubilee 2000 campaign to demand once again, and forcefully, the immediate cancellation of the debt of the poorest countries. It was also the occasion for several activist movements to show solidarity with the population of Okinawa in their fight against the large American military bases stationed there: the island, which makes up only 20% of the area of the region, contains 70% of US installations in the whole of Japan! It is the real heartland housing the USA's main overseas military complex. This operational centre is directly linked to the Korean peninsula, the nearby Taiwan Strait and Southeast Asia, and, in a crisis, the Gulf.

Pacifist sentiment goes very deep in Okinawa, which was the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War. The population refuses to be the focal point of any future conflict and does not want its territory to be used for the domination of other peoples. The main actions which took place during the summit were therefore primarily aimed at the withdrawal of the US military complex. The first initiative was organised three weeks before the opening of the G8, from 30th June to 1st July, by an Asian activist network, the International Okinawa Forum for the Security of Peoples, whose main themes were cooperation and disarmament.

Jubilee 2000, for its part, organised a world conference on the debt of the impoverished countries, on the eve of the G8, 19th-21st July. Every element of the international campaign was there, including a large delegation from the UK, and Jubilee South played an active role. The participants demonstrated at Naho and Naga, then joined the main demonstration: a huge human chain of more than 27,000 which encircled the base at Kadena.

This conference sent a unanimously adopted message to the directors of the G7, taking up again the Alternative G7 practice which had disappeared since "That's Enough of That" in 1989. This message demanded the cancellation of illegitimate debts, as well as those which could not be met without sacrificing the health, education or even the survival itself of the impoverished  population. It condemned the conditions imposed by the international financial institutions and demanded that independent mechanisms be put in place to monitor the debt cancellation process. In an unusual political gesture, the Japanese Prime Minister Mori received a delegation from Jubilee 2000's world conference, which showed the breadth of the mobilisation against debt and the echo which it could have even beyond activists circles, even though in the end the G8 still continues to turn a deaf ear and refuses to take any real step towards lifting the debt burden from the peoples of the Third World.

July 2001: Genoa the terrible

As with many major events, different interpretations of Genoa are possible and the central thread could be the loss of legitimacy of the G8 meetings or the shock of police repression; but these aspects are well-known today (13). Here it will suffice to set Genoa in the short genealogy of the Seattle "movement". In fact, while the failure of the WTO ministerial conference in December 1999 marked the breakthrough of this movement onto the world scene, it has seen different phases and Genoa represents a genuine turning-point.

In the first phase, the mobilisation was numerically small. In Seattle, even with the presence of the large American trades union AFL-CIO, there were never more than a few tens of thousands of demonstrators; one year later in Prague, for the annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank, there were no more than 20,000 from all over Europe. The strength of the movement  lies in its alternative expertise, the use of new direct methods, the arrival of a new militant generation amongst the young people,  and, above all, the sympathy of public opinion worried by the negative impact of liberal globalisation at a social, environmental  and democratic level. In this respect, a parallel can be drawn with the "strikes by delegation", which took place in France in the 90s, where those who were able to go on strike (above all those in the public sector) were massively supported by those who were in a weaker position, especially those employed in the private sector, pensioners, the unemployed, and so on.

After the actions in Quebec against the American free trade zone a few months beforehand, Genoa represented a leap both in quantity and quality. To bring together 300,000 people in spite of police violence and the closure of stations and airports was, in the first place a confirmation of massive rejection by public opinion of the effects of liberal globalisation. But above all, the physical presence of these demonstrators, the great majority of whom were Italian, gave weight to the events which followed:  thousands and thousands of responsible members of associations, trades unionists as well as activists from political parties, were  plunged into the cauldron of Genoa along with young people who were making their first political experiment. And nobody came out unharmed. In this way, Genoa was a major catalyst for the series of actions which took place in Italy in the following months, irrespective of the debates and differences amongst the participants: the Perugia/Assisi march against the war in Afghanistan, the  "girotondo" against the amnesty Silvio Berlusconi granted to himself, the national demonstration, then the general strike against the undermining of Article 18 of the Labour Law, and finally the European Social Forum in Florence and the 2 million strong  demonstration in Rome on 15th February 2003 against the war in Iraq.

In this last year Italy has experienced an impressive series of actions, but it would be a mistake to believe in an "Italian exception" within a Europe and a world which remain lifeless. After Genoa, the "general public", began to take real notice of the fact that things were happening in all four corners of the planet: this would become clear with the second and third sessions of the World Forum at Porto Alegre where, in 2002 and then in 2003, there were 50,000 and then 60,000 participants; the Argentinean actions; the Spanish demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people at the European summits in March and again in June, parallel to a general strike which received massive support; and finally, 10 million demonstrators around the whole  world on 15th February 2003.. All these examples are a result of developments which are as much about quantity as about  quality.

For it should be noted that those who take part in all these different initiatives, in both the South and the North, might certainly speak in different ways but they speak about the same things and in inter-twined networks which no longer reflect the divisions of the previous century. This coalition will strengthen over time and it will be possible to speak of a "movement" in the political sense; this will bring together different hopes and challenges based around a broad sense of world democracy and sustainable development.

2002, democracy according to the G8 in Kananaskis, and democracy according to the people in Siby

In 2002, faced with the demand for democratisation and radical change in the international order so strongly asked for in Genoa, the G8 responded with exile. It held its next meeting in Kananaskis, a small village deep in the Rocky Mountains of Canada, accessible only by one road, fiercely guarded by a heavy police and military presence who managed to have one victim: a bear who had wandered too close to the security barrier. However, civil society was one of the most important participants - in the official discussions! Thus, the official site of the summit of Kananaskis had a section for "discussion with citizens" - an unintended demonstration that democracy according to the G8 is only a virtual democracy.

Many believed, wrongly, that nothing would be organised against the G8 that year. However, there were many events in Canada, including a counter-meeting organised by the Group of Six Billion (G6B) which attracted about 10,000 to the University of Calgary. 2002 would also be the occasion of a "first world summit" to challenge the G7/G8: a demonstration that the peoples of the South, those "forgotten ones" of the world, knew how to make themselves heard, knew how to show their autonomy and were the bearers of another vision of the world and relationships between peoples. From 25th-28th June, parallel to the G7 meeting in Kananaskis, the Forum "Kananaskis, village of the peoples" took place in Siby, Kati Circle, a small village at the centre of a region in Mali with 18,000 inhabitants, a few dozen kilometres from the border with Guinea. This forum was organised by  Jubilee 2000/CAD-Mali in partnership with other organisations and with Malian civil society.

In Siby, as in Kananaskis, one main topic was discussed: the New Economic Partnership for African Development (NEPAD).  However, the nature and context of the discussions was obviously not the same. While the major decision-makers of the world met in Kananaskis, Siby welcomed some 300 representatives of peasant organisations, trades unions and citizens of West Africa  (Senegal, Mali, Niger, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Guinea, etc.). The point of the forum, the village of the peoples in Siby, was not to support NEPAD, but to create a collective and alternative opportunity for grass-roots education, information, discussion, and constructive criticism from the social movements at the national, sub-regional and international level, with all the diversity of their visions and positions on the burning issues of the African continent, for example NEPAD, the debt burden, unjust trade, food  insecurity, and so on (14).

In spite of the limited means (lack of roads, electricity and running water), there were three days of meetings, analyses, and exchange of experiences, each time introduced by imaginative sketches and interpreted by young people. Not  without humour, these small scenes depicted the situation of an African people impoverished by the dismantlement of the public sector, the burden of foreign debt, the faithless competition of the western transnationals and the historical plummeting of the prices of raw materials.

A provisional conclusion

The movement, in gaining more and more in size since Genoa, is linked to activist networks and is integrated into national contexts, but this very fact makes it lose in homogeneity and transparency. Little separated the demonstrators of Prague, in September 2003, from those in Washington DC who, in April of the same year, were already protesting against the policies of the IMF and the World Bank. They had the same goals and the processions were made up of very similar young people. Today, the movements are confronted by challenges of a totally different order and the arrival of new forces and new partners raises complex questions. The enlargement of the movement into broad strata of the population, well beyond the young people who demonstrated in Seattle or Prague, has the immediate consequence of developing actions on the social level, the refusal of job-losses and insecurity, the protection of pensions, and therefore the links with the trades unions. On another level, the actions against the extreme right, for example in France during the presidential elections, also raise the problem o
f a break with liberalism, because the grass-roots consolidation of populist forces and the extreme right is also linked to a rejection of the current system and of a globalisation which allows no hope. The movement finds that it is broadening its themes and its social base, which will mean the arrival of new participants, trades unions, or left-wing parties. The movement comes up against governmental decisions and political issues which are indeed the consequences of liberal globalisation, but which raise problems of alliances, commitments, and national deadlines.

Today, the demonstrations against the war in Iraq have focused the minds of the activists and given a common international context for action. However, in the long term, a widening of the mobilisation leads to a dilution of "the movement" as it used to be, in Seattle and Genoa. The issue of alliances divides it, the arrival of new partners makes it less transparent, and the need to respond to national decisions clouds its global nature. But this widening also allows it to make the case against neo-liberal globalisation. For the movement, the task will be to find the places and the tools to multiply the exchange of experiences and to improve the understanding of the current mobilisation.

 
NOTES

1. Zaire, May 1980; Morocco June 1981then 1984; Madagascar 1982; Tunisia, January 1984; Sudan, March-April 1985; Algeria, 4th October 1988.
2. Ecuador, October 1982; Chile, May 1983; Brazil, 1983 then December 1986; Dominican Republic, April 1984; Haiti, May 1985; Guatemala, September 1985; Bolivia, January 1986 then November 1989; Venezuela, 27th February - 3rd March 1989; Argentina, 1989; Peru 1980 - 1990.
3. Turkey, February 1980; Philippines, September 1983.
4. Cf. Serge Cordellier, Le nouvel Etat du monde. Bilan de la decenie 1980-1990, La Decouverte, 1990.
5. Ibid.
6. In the main, these were NGOs dealing with international solidarity, development and ecology.
7. Cf. London School of Economics, Global civil society 2001, Oxford University Press, 2002. See also the web-site of Toronto University, ibid.
8. A new cycle of GATT negotiations began in 1986 at Punta del Este (Uruguay), signifying the beginning of the Uruguay Round  which led to the creation of the World Trade Organisation in 1994.
9. Actes du Sommet des sept peoples, parmi les plus pauvres, Agir Ici 1989. The impoverished countries were Bangladesh, Brazil,  Burkina Faso, Haiti, Mozambique, the Philippines, Zaire.
10. Bernard Dreano, Actes du Sommet des sept resistances, Lyon 27tth June 1996, Agir ici, Cedetim, 1996.
11. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
12. The campaign ran until the end of 2000 and the British NGOs who had been its inspiration decided to dissolve "Jubilee 2000 - UK". From then onwards, the British established a more short-term campaign, "Drop the Debt", which had the G8 meeting in Genoa as its goal. In fact this was the beginning of a process of drawing together of the large NGOs and new groups, which would become focused in the Social Forums.
13. "Genes. Multitudes en marche contre l'Empire", Reflex, June 2002, Samizdat.net, contains a very relevant survey of these themes.
14. Recommended reading on this topic is Arnaud Zacharie, Forum des peoples a Siby, Mali, 25-28 June 2992, Une appropriation  citoyenne du developpement social en Afrique, CADTM, http://users.skynet.be/cadtm/