A personal reflection by Tord Björk

ESF in Malmö is the only place we can start an All-European counteroffensive against the neoliberal onslaught. This was an appeal in the beginning of the Social Movement Assembly held in the evening of 7th of June in conjunction with the last European Preparatory Assembly for the ESF Malmö 2008.

The meeting in the cellar

The atmosphere was tense in the chilly cellar of the Ukraine-Cuban friendship society some blocks away from the prestigious Independence Square with the classical pompous Stalinist buildings were the EPA took place in the most central localities in the city. While the people who afford to look rich was walking up and down on the independence square and the surrounding avenues in the warm evening a poster in the cellar declared solidarity between the Ukrainian and Cuban people with thanks for the efforts made by Cuban health personnel to take care of Chernobyl victims. The cellar was more than full and not everybody could sit. Angela and Sven from Germany opened the meeting based on an initiative from the Belgian Social Forum to convene a meeting every day during ESF to discuss joint campaigning 2009.

The particular locale in Kiev is one that actually stretches from Finland to Japan. It has a population of some 142m (Russia) or 278m (CIS) - and this is to disregard the ex-Soviet states, like the Ukraine, that broke away from the CIS. This is not the new Third World. It is the ex-Soviet one, for several generations isolated and dominated by what I now think of as Russian Orthodox Communism (in so far as it in part descended from and has now been again partly replaced by Russian Orthodox Christianty). It also underwent forced centralisation, official racism, industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation, it survived and was victorious in a world war, largely on its own. I won't repeat the disasters following on Communism, since there are familiar to us. But, anyway, this is not a 'late Brazil' or an 'emerging Zimbabwe'. Anything like social movements and civil society are only now developing - with the greatest of difficulties. Carine reports some dramatic East-West misunderstanding on the labour question. Why? Here at least there is ample news and analysis available in at least English. She also mentions  the isolation of the local women - again surely despite sufficient information available internationally. Peter Waterman

Carine Clement’s article is available at : http://english.aglob.info/news.php?readmore=52

The multidimensional crisis we now can witness for the economy, food prices and climate change shows how deep the crisis is for the neoliberal project. We now need to organise an anti-neoliberal offensive. In spite of  that there was a shared assessment that the movements in many parts of  Europe is weak at the movement there was a sense of urgency and mobilisations had already started for actions during 2009 and even 2010.

Summit-hopping or All-European campaign

But how could an All-European campaign be organised? Should there be an action day with local activities all over Europe? Is there a need for a continuous campaign uniting many movements on a common platform making both joint actions and deepening knowledge and discussion on issues and their linkages in a popular education effort? Are there important Summits to challenge or initiatives for mass mobilisations during longer periods to strengthen a new momentum in the struggle? There were many ideas on the table and some already had started.

 Trade union mobilisation, NATO, G8 and Climate Change soon became central in the discussion. In March an international demonstration could be initiated in Brussels to influence EU social decisions ahead of the European parliament elections, a demonstration which might catch interest also from ETUC. Concerns were raised against becoming a tail to the official European trade union bureaucracy, others claimed that the main thing was not ETUC but  to be together with fellow workers and union members in Brussels. If a manifestation could be arranged that had independent anti-neoliberal goals  it seemed like there could be interest for doing something jointly in Brussels. Concerning taking joint action in relation to the EU parliamentary elections the reaction was more divisive.

All agreed to the importance of taking action at three other main occasions during 2009. First, the 60th anniversary of NATO is going to take place next summer in Strassbourg, France and Kehl right across the border in Germany. Secondly the G8 that will take place in Sardinia during the summer, will be difficult to get to. Finally the Climate Summit in Copenhagen taking place in December.

But there were also other more decentralised action ideas. In Sweden and Finland a campaign started on the 17th of April towards and beyond ES with the goal to end during the climate Summit and Swedish EU presidency in the autumn of 2009. The campaign started by challenging the Finnish-Swedish forest company Stora Enso and support the movement of landless in Brazil that occupied land were the company have plantations for their pulp mills. The action was supported by Friends of the Earth, Via Campesina and Latin American solidarity organisations in both countries. The plan is to get more organisations interested in supporting a common platform for common  welfare, peace, fair trade, food sovereignty, and sustainable urban and rural planning against privatisation, war, occupation and environmental destruction. The hope is to also collect articles on the issues of the campaign to promote popular education and political understanding between movements.

'Therefore, for now everyone lives in his own world and tries not much to understand each other. However, I would say that it is quite excusable from the side of the Russian and Ukrainian activists as far as here social movements are only appearing and many of them don¹t know clearly what the concepts of 'struggle', 'capitalism' and particularly 'globalism' mean. But it is less exc[u]sable from the side of the Western comrades as they have experience and there are words about international solidarity. But when solidarity deals with the hard understandable for them small initiatives and movements, which nevertheless demonstrate the only real resist[ance] to the capitalist and authoritative system it becomes not so actual. Russia and Ukraine where capitalism assumes the wildest form are just the places where it is necessary to struggle first of all at least for this form not to be exported to the West.'

This is a hard judgement even if delivered in measured terms.

It suggests to me that the Western comrades came to Kiev as if it were Padua  or even Prague, with their own particular concerns and understandings but  somewhat unprepared for where they actually landed. PW

In the year 2010 two large popular movement mobilisations are on their way. Firstly World March of Women will start again on 8th of March ten year after the first march started on the same date. Last time 5 million signatures were collected in a broad international multi-issue campaign. Secondly  there are ideas to start Euro marches again against unemployment and social exclusion.

One could add to this the successful Global Day of Action initiated by WSF which in Russia and Ukraine included many actions on housing issues. Next WSF in Belem in January 2009 might become a starting point for new similar initiatives with ESF in Malmö as one place to contribute to the global discussion on how popular movements can better use social forums as a space to organise common action. Euro May Day has already the plan to organise a network meeting during ESF for this purpose.

Conflicts

Unfortunately were many Eastern Europeans occupied by a demonstration against right wing extremism in another part of the city so only few from CEE countries participated. The day before Eastern European participants demonstrated to protect a park and 7 were arrested. The CEE concern in anti-racism and anti-fascism has not met so much interest in the ESF process so far. Mirek Prokes from Chechia was worried about that the anti-racist assembly that played an important role in the preparatory process for many  earlier ESF now had no participation at all from Western Europé in Kiev.

In general one can ask how much interest there is to start an All-European campaign. Attempts were made at putting the European parliamentary election at the core of joint campaigning. One argument was put forward why this focus actually was giving movements in countries outside EU an important role. These countries are also affected by EU-policies, that is of course a fully correct and trivial notion. But politically it shows clearly a tendency within the ESF process to make countries outside EU, and often even countries inside EU if they come from the East, a decoration and subaltern partner lacking own historical subjectivity. What is needed is rather an understanding of how different movements in places, local, national or global, simultaneously can confront the forces behind neoliberal and war politics in Europe. An understanding giving equal importance to  movements in Russia, Norway, Romania or France and not in practice seeing core countries in Western EU as the only important factor in European politics.

All in all one must say that the meeting in the Ukrainian-Cuban cellar was a great step forward in making ESF in Malmö meaningful to a vast majority of sympathisers and members of movements that want to use this occasion for starting a counter offensive against neoliberalism and war. The commitment was there. All the reporting from the different assemblies were put aside for this only task, to now start the discussion how to use ESF in Malmö to launch a campaign for movements cooperating on a broad range of issues.  With some concerted efforts from CEE -countries to start from issues of importance in Eastern Parts of Europe as housing, anti racism and right wing extremism it is fully possible to make ESF into the open space for movements  to take political leadership uniting a wide range of interests. Lets make
 ESF Malmö a uniting space for action.

I am just back from two weeks in Moscow and the small town of Yelets and - despite previous my Soviet and Russian experience and some awareness of ex-Soviet realities - I was not sure whether I had landed on Mars or come from Mars. This is what I said to local TV in Yelets, later realising that I should have said: neither one or the other but both.

I am therefore somewhat concerned that the core, frequent-flying, WSF/ESF activists may be becoming so focused on their own language, procedures and concerns as to lose sensitivity to the 'local particular'. We have consultations in Abuja or Kiev that might give our activities an international appearance (at least in a list of such), and attract international funding, but that may be quite disconnected from local
interests and capacities.

I must report for myself that I spent my two weeks there simply trying to find a way of orienting myself to this unique situation, talking with people (obviously) but also reading whatever I could lay my hands on in English and checking the relevant alternative websites. I had been invited by friends from 50 years ago. They are currently trying to find an identity for themselves, for Yelets, and are involved in a 'citizen diplomacy' network that itself tries to find a past on which to build a future. The concept of networking (in more than computer terms), the theology of liberation, the movement of global justice and solidarity, the institution of the World Social Forum, are quite literally foreign to them.

So it looks as if a dialogue of civilisations here - a dialogue which has to be based on an equality of partners and discrimination in favour of the previously absent or emerging one - has only just begun. PW

(This is not an official report from the meeting. All comment and corrections of misunderstandings are welcome. The opinion in the text is my personal comments and should not be considered as official opinions of the organisations a represent in the ESF process. Tord Björk, EU coordinator of Friends of the Earth Sweden and of NOC Contact group for Europe and the World)