Heikki Patomäki

The Universal Forum of Cultures Monterrey 2007 is an international civil-society event taking place in Monterrey, Mexico, from September to December. The Forum, as it is commonly referred to, is a global event which takes place every four years, in a different city each time, and seeks to reunite citizens from a varied range of cultures, languages, religions to foster inter-cultural dialogue and to promote global civil society empowerment. According to the official information, this event will gather around 1.5 million visitors to Monterrey.

The Universal Forum of Cultures project was born 1996 in Barcelona, Spain. The mayor of Barcelona identified that, after the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, the large number of international events fostered competition. On the other hand, there was no event dedicated to empowering civil society or focused on the celebrations of the arts and culture. The proposal to create such an event was then presented in 1997 to UNESCO by the delegation of Spain, and unanimously approved by all member states represented in the Organization.

In 2004, Barcelona hosted the first Universal Forum of Cultures. It lasted 141 days and established the event as the major global gathering for arts, culture and dialogues. Katarina represented NIGD at this event which also involved UBUNTU. Former UNESCO Director General Federico Mayor, who had been accused of financial irregularities and sexual harassment, was a key link between UNESCO and Barcelona at this point. Upon concluding the 2004 Forum, the Forum Foundation selected the city of Monterrey, Mexico, to host the 2007 Forum. Other candidate cities in the race included Amsterdam, Durban, Fukuoka, and Montreal. For further official information see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Universal_Forum_of_Cultures.

The Monterrey Forum 2007 consists of eight theme weeks. I participated in the Forum in Week 6, “Government, Participation. Human Rights and Justice”, from 30 October to 3 November. In particular, I took part in the dialogue on “governability and participation”. These dialogues consisted of a number of themes such as global good governance as applied especially to Mexico. Professor Matthias Finger from Lausanne, Switzerland, called this discussion “postmodern”. Half of the panel spoke about various on-going processes in Mexico in Spanish, the other half – me included – about global issues in English. The audience was fairly sizeable but rather academic. Compared to the World Social Forum, for instance, the atmosphere appeared gentle and formal.

Monterrey is one of the wealthy spots of Mexico. The economic growth of the last quarter of the century has made Monterrey appear USAmerican; it could be anywhere in Southern Texas or Southern California. The money spent on the Forum has been allocated in large part to building infrastructure, looking like a heavily policed Disneyland. In informal discussions, it turned out that the criminal gangs that rule many of the cities on the US border have now turned their eyes on Monterrey. It seems to me that even those who express signs of civic virtue and courage tend to opt for individualistic solutions. In Mexico, it is not uncommon that a publicly known dissident still faces serious risks, including the risk of premature death. The concentration of private property in Mexico verges on the extreme.

Like most foreign visitors to the Forum, I only spent four days in Monterrey; a few visitors left almost instantly after their own presentation. Hence any interaction between Mexican civil society – of which I saw only little – and foreign visitors to the Forum must have remained limited (in Barcelona 2004, there had been demonstrations against the event and its funding by civil society organisations). At the same time of the Week 6 of the Forum, a major flood occurred in the Mexican state of Tabasco, with the result of 800,000 displaced flood victims.

Personally, I was in Monterrey also for the sake of an academic book project, “Battling for the Institutional Ecology of Tomorrow”. Also these seminars were organised in the context of the Forum and were open to all participants. The discussions in these seminars seemed livelier as well as more pluralistic and globalistic than the ones in the main panel. So although the Forum as a whole may appear like an official cultural festival, some of the events within it can be ethico-politically exciting. Well, at least up to an extent.