The World Social Forum is now on its way to its annual gathering, but in very different national and regional settings than its origin as an expression of Brazilian political culture in the Southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, in 2001. A first attempt was successfully made in 2004 when WSF was held in Mumbai, India. A second attempt was made this year through a three part, polycentric WSF. Two were held simultaneously in January in Bamako, Mali, and in Caracas, Venezuela. A third polycentric WSF will be held 24 - 28th of March in Karachi, Pakistan. Originally it was planned for the same time as the other polycentric forums, but was postponed due to the earthquake in Pakistan. The 2007 WSF will be held in Nairobi, Kenya. By then we will know whether the WSF has been able to fruitfully move from Brazil to other very different places, on all the continents that are underprivileged by the present world system.

The challenge ahead is to be able to turn the two new kinds of locations of the WSF into something changing, while, hopefully, developing a coherent social forum process. In some aspects, Karachi represents a location were strong religious mobilisations takes place under an authoritarian dictatorial regime that is under heavy pressure from Western powers, and has a poor and oppressed population. Nairobi represents, in some aspects, the most advanced NGO location with roots in the emergence of a global civil society system linked to the UN and the market for development management. The People's movements summit protests in the early 1970s was part of the development that resulted in the establishment of the first UN headquarters in the South.

The United Nations Environmental Programme was established by a decision at the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm 1972. UNEP and Nairobi became a global centre for broader environmental and social development concerns administrated by a NGO sector growing out of, sometimes, violent clashes at the Summits between1968 - 1972 when both anti-imperialistic and people's movements protested against the official World Bank finance ministerial, and UN summits. While the NGO development sector has prospered, the Sub Saharan region has declined socially and ecologically, and has greater problems than any other region in the world with some important exceptions. Kenya, being a good example, has urban and environmental movements that are able to gain some democratic influence. Deforestation is very prevalent in the much of the region, and has, to some extent, been reverted by popular mass mobilisation. To develop the WSF process through placing it in this very different location is a great task.
p> Legitimacy from action

A key factor in assessing the WSF is how ideas are put into action. People with diverging opinions on what groups, movements or organisations in society are important to the social forum process can mostly agree that the important actions will result in social, ecological, political, or other changes in the direction on which WSF is based upon. Thus it is necessary to include other actors in the analysis of the situation besides those that dominate WSF in order to contribute to actions that will result in these changes.

A legitimising role of the social forum process was illustrated by the world-wide demonstrations protesting Western allies’ war against Iraq, 2003. Repetitively, these demonstrations are accounted as proof of the capability of social forums to stimulate action.

It is also necessary today to ask oneself what similar political actions are going on, and how are social forums related to these actions. A critical assessment of this relationship is seldom present in the current discussion on WSF. Present actions such as, the mass boycott among the rural masses and urban poor in Muslim countries against Danish products are seen more as a threat by focusing on the marginal, smaller scale, although violent, protests against islamophobic Denmark. Both secular, international leftists, and NGOs seemingly have a common interest in the Danish government’s input in the present, massive international action against Western imperialism, aside from the irrelevant violent fundamentalism.

Organising popular protests or building political alternatives of international importance is not easy. Most struggles maintain their impact at local or national levels, or their impact is felt within a very narrow field like banning land mines. Identifying struggles of global importance beyond their geographical, thematic or other limitations is thus important. Some examples are: the Zapatista uprisings in Chiapas, the world-wide WTO protests heralded by small farmers, international trade union strikes and campaigns against transnational companies, or feminist rebellions to build an alternative to the authoritarian society.

The way the WSF is able to give space to such struggles, and that it is a place where new, coherent initiatives are taken is crucial in assessing the importance of the forum.

Four ways of looking at WSF

One can look at who is going to carry out action in at least four different tendencies in the debate on the future of WSF. Three puts emphasis on the action’s outcome, the fourth emphasises the internal integrity of the WSF process.

1. Civil society making proposals to political actors

The first, which might be the WSF’s mainstream thinking, sees a need to formulate alternative proposals and invite political actors to discuss how to implement them. In the words of Oded Grajev: "after the first years of WSF where we were very concerned about establishing and consolidating the process, there is a great and lawful need to produce and strengthen proposals and join other political actors to consider a strategy to transform dreams, ideas and visions into reality." Many of the founders of WSF follow this direction of formulating appeals and trying to get closer cooperation with political parties and like-minded governments in order to make proposals a reality. A more specific definition of the actors that take part in WSF is not given, instead the vague term civil society is used without specifying any differences among, e.g., peoples movements built on lay participation and their own strength, or professional NGOs built on external funding and vague or absent democratic rules. Between this unspecific civil society and the political actors there is an equally vague intermediary function. In practice this vague function is mainly populated by individual intellectuals gaining their position through self-selecting mechanisms and competence in gaining strong relations to donors, political actors or markets for intellectual work. The vague civil society and the vague intermediary function are then complemented by a political actor formally outside the WSF process. Here there is some more clarity; the term political actor is made more specific by saying political parties and like-minded governments. Thus the historical subject of changing society tends to be placed outside the acknowledged participants at WSF. Civil society is given a role more as a pressure group helped by those formulating proposals, but not seen as actors putting the proposals into practice.

2. Peoples movements develop and carry out proposals

Another way of looking at who is going to carry out action on proposals made at WSF is to focus upon people's movements. It was recently strongly stated by Ruth Reitan: "the most effective proposals have, are and will be coming from the grassroots up through the massive transnational networks that are alive and well--on agriculture and food sovereignty and the WTO from the Via Campesina; the WTO and other trade agreements from Our World Is Not for Sale; addressing both patriarchy and poverty wrought by neoliberalism/capitalism from World March of Women (and others); how to best organize and fight against the war and militarism from the Global Anti-War Assembly; radical youth ecological anarchism from the Peoples' Global Action; fighting the debt and SAPs from Jubilee South; environmental justice from Friends of the Earth International and the like; tax justice from ATTAC". Here the WSF is placed parallel to other places where networks of movements meet to discuss action - " --a process which IS occurring, from what I can see, at the WSF, but not only there, also in such spaces as the Via Campesina's international meetings and forums, at OWINFS planning meetings".

This organic model of grassroots networking contrasts the synthesising appeals made by the intellectuals not seeing this lead to any action. "These manifestos are marching orders for no one; to write as if they are is to entertain vanguardist fantasies that are going to only crumble in disillusionment and accusations of false consciousnesses". What is instead needed is to "follow the movements, support them, research them, give them voice, but don't propose or suppose to do their thinking for them". Here the actor is more specified and the intellectual formulation of proposals is not separated from the historical subject that is supposed to act upon the proposals. Here the weakness lies in at least two places. On the one hand, the political effectiveness of the peoples movements can be questioned; they lack the means to implement the proposals. On the other hand, there is a tendency to focuse upon visibly established transnational movement networks, and less on the possibilities of new actors suddenly entering the scene or actors using more revolutionary or violent means in their struggle.

3. Marginal or revolutionary groups take space and carry out change

A third perspective is to focus upon marginalised groups at the place were the forum is held, and at the national and global level. This perspective can be seen as a complement to the peoples movements perspective with more emphasis on marginal actors, or mainly revolutionary movements and parties.

Raphael from Lima states in the current discussion: "it seems to me that the Fora in the future should seek to intervene more directly in the experiences and realities they visit, by opening up spaces inside or directly related to concrete problems and struggles (which according to most accounts did happen for example in Mumbai)". Feminist and indigenous autonomous movements are presently seen as marginalised in the way WSF is held, the Caracas meeting as an example.

The discussion has been going on since the beginning of WSF. Groups emphasising autonomous or horizontal ways of working have developed different ways of "contaminating" or doing alternative events to social forums. Radical small farmers, indigenous and other popular movements have maintained their own ways of coordinating international action through networks like Peoples Global Action, or have joined hands with revolutionary parties and organised alternative forums to WSF like Mumbai Resistance 2004.

4. Maintaining WSF integrity and civil society as the key actor

A fourth tendency is to focus upon the integrity of the WSF and seeing an outcome in terms of some action done by civil society as less important, or ignoring this issue.

The weakness and strength of this tendency lies in its limitations, mainly or only, to the form of the WSF. It has to be an open forum building on its strength through civil society, and guarding its principles on who should and should not be allowed to participate, maintaining independence from outside actors like the state or political parties, and, less specifically, ignoring market dependency. Internal democracy and transparency are regarded as of high importance, especially for those able to be present at WSF.

Lesser emphasis on action makes it hard to assess what an action outcome of their proposals might be. There is a tendency to focus upon a nebulous individual participant, and a equally nebulous civil society, in practice often professional NGOs, but certainly with an importance on other participating persons or collective actors. While being vague on action outcome, this perspective often brings a lot more critical assessments to the constructive discussion on specific WSF events.

Ahead of the Karachi polycentric WSF, Madhuresh, from India Institute for Critical Action - Centre in Movement, CACIM, posed some questions regarding the up coming event. First, what are the likely implications of the lack of, or lukewarm response, from big Pakistani civil society organisations? Secondly, what are the risks that the event will be instrumentalised by the secular urdu ethnic Mutahida Quami Movement, which is a political party supporting the WSF and the local government? Thirdly, how will fundamentalist organisations view, or maybe, use the forum in a country where wide spread protests against the Danish cartoons of the prophet and violent bomb blasts have taken place? Fourthly, how is it possible to relate to the problems of women’s movements in Pakistan when, allegedly, these have not been represented enough in the WSF, and thus stay away from the organising committee, but hold their events anyway at the forum? Fifth, how are the visa problems facing many Indian participants, being refused on a mass scale the possibility to come to the event, to be dealt with? Sixth, how can the future WSF strategies be developed in relation to holding further events in non-democratic/dictatorial countries?
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Assessing action outcome and the four perspectives

One way of looking at the four perspectives is to state that they all contribute to the current debate. This shows the vitality of the WSF process. It may possibly be that it is the diverging opinions that keep the WSF alive.

But that is a rather trivial notion. The amount of energy put into the social forum process calls for a more critical assessment. One way of doing this is to maintain emphasis on how the WSF contributes to globally important, collective action, and how the different perspectives might shed light on how the WSF develops, especially in regards to the Karachi and Nairobi events.

The antiwar protests in 2003 are assessed as something where social forums contributed a lot to their political coherence, but it is harder to see similar effects to the world-wide, simultaneous quality of the protests in the following years. Rather than maintaining coherence and momentum, the war protests, at least in the North, have fragmented. A split has occurred among those supporting resistance to occupation, and those critical towards both the occupation and the violent resistance.

In other fields campaigns and struggles have been carried out but with less significant coherence and simultaneous mobilisation as was the case of war against Iraq. Anti-privatisation issues at local, national and international level have some momentum, and the on-going struggle against EU and FTAA neoliberal policies, WTO, IMF and the World Bank have their ups and downs. Some reports state that there was a slack in world-wide protests during the short period after 2003, but protests have regained more momentum last year.

But to what extent have social forums contributed to the coherence of ongoing and new struggles? If ongoing struggles have been helped, it is hard to see how the WSF has helped new coherent transnational struggles in the same way that it did with the protests against the war against Iraq. There have been significant electoral victories for parties linked to the WSF process both in Brazil and India after the forums were held there. But popular mobilisation beyond parliamentary action has a more unclear record, in spite of that, it is these kinds of transnational campaigns that are seen to be the key to maintaining popular, direct participation in global politics by many supporters of WSF.

The 2004 Mumbai WSF in India can be seen as a point of stalemate between the different strands in the global justice movement, and in the social forum process. The Brazilian conjuncture of well developed NGOs and popular movement cooperation, and a workers party still not in power was starting to cause the WSF to develop into a less vibrant situation with the risk of split between administrating power and opposing governmental neoliberal policies. India became a proof in many ways of the vitality of the process. Not only international oppression, but also domestic oppression was set on the agenda by the Dalits and others. But also the opposing tendencies within the global justice movement became evident in about three different events evolved in Mumbai. One, the WSF dominated by NGOs and closely related to reformist left wing parties, as well as popular movements, then the smaller Mumbai resistance with radical popular movements and revolutionary parties, and finally even smaller parallel events where political parties and popular movements had dialogues outside the WSF context.

Out of the Mumbai Resistance came further coherent opposition to the occupation of Iraq and the war against terrorism, as well as a stronger criticism of the NGO domination of WSF and its financial dependency on funding from neoliberal countries, especially the US and Ford Foundation. The dialogues between political parties and movements organised by, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam and others, stimulated projects like the Network Institute on Global Democracy addressing the issue of global political parties, and the relationship between parties and civil society. WSF could continue to be strengthened by the stronger openness and criticism that the Indian political culture contributed to process.

In terms of coherent mass action, Mumbai 2004 represented a possibility inspired by the Gandhian movement strategies with a focus on mass participation in civil disobedience. Since 1998 this has been at the core of the Peoples Global Action, and many of the Summit protests. Arundhati Roy, who also spoke at Mumbai Resistance, proposed a massive boycott of key American corporations as a protest against the occupation of Iraq in her inaugural speech at the WSF. This and other similar proposals for mass direct action gained no significant support.

At the next WSF in Porto Alegre, the campaign to eliminate poverty and support the UN millennium goals gained wide adherence as an action worthy of the social forum participant’s campaign efforts. The participation in this campaign has been considerable. At the same time, political coherence and the possibility to democratically influence who represents the campaign, control of its content, and its way of working has been controversial; it has even been accused of helping to legitimise both a neoliberal agenda and elitist Northern dominated forms of politics. The latest attempt at making a joint, world-wide, coherent campaign supported widely by different actors at the WSF resulted in severe fragmentation, splits between South and North, and confusion.

Four perspectives on the WSF action record

How can than the four different perspectives explain, and put forward solutions to the possibilities of gaining coherent collective action outside the WSF process?

The first perspective tends to overlook the effects the WSF has on campaigns built on mass participation. Instead it focuses upon the quality of proposals, and how political actors implement these proposals. With its central position in the WSF international committee and support from key donors, as well as practical competence not only in managing, but also in adapting the WSF to new conditions this perspective seemingly has no need to legitimise itself through results in terms of coherent transnational campaigns with mass participation.

To the second perspective, coherent transnational struggles with mass participation are very important. But the main location of inventing this kind of struggle is placed partly outside the WSF process, in the networking between different people's movements that claim the WSF begins to fail in this regard thus is not seen as important. On the contrary, it can be seen from this perspective that the result of marginalising peoples movements by putting vanguardistic intellectuals and political parties more central in the WSF process while continuing to use the presence of these people's movements as a main legitimising argument for a process is less and less influenced by these movements.

In practise this can be seen in the rise and decline of coherent people’s movement coordination at the WSF meetings. The tool for this coordination was the first Call of social movements and than by the Social Movements International Network to maintain a continuous discussion and coordination of campaigns and initiatives. The central role of the Call of social movements has now partly been replaced by the consensus appeal made by intellectuals at Porto Alegre 2005, and the Bamako appeal made by selected intellectuals and organisations at the Bamako polycentric WSF 2006. The Social Movements International Network was set up in 2003 to support the process of coordinating calls of social movements at the WSF that had declined. The homepage has hundreds of contributions from peoples movements, but no new contributions since 2004, and the latest reports on WSF are from early 2005. Instead the organised reflections on the WSF process are made among groups dominated by intellectuals like Network Institute on Global Democracy, CACIM or NGO projects as Choike based in Uruguay.

To the third perspective, the development of the WSF verifies a critique against the domination of NGOs and political parties administrating, although reluctantly, neoliberal strategies. Instead of having illusions of the results of millennium goals campaigns or the WSF process, this perspective puts an emphasis on radical struggles. In Western Europe against racism, terrorist laws and refugee policies trying to build alliances between churches, anarchists, immigrants and other actors often outside the social forum process in many countries. In other parts of the world, it is trying to build alliances between Islamic forces and the left against war and economic imperialism. Or class alliances between small farmers and workers against neoliberal politics in Latin America, to some extent also supporting guerrilla warfare beyond the perspective of WSF.

To the fourth perspective, the lack of collective action resulting is less important. Instead there is an almost constant interest in defending the integrity of WSF against external state interests prevailing. Recently, the Caracas polycentric WSF caused severe anxiety in terms of the influence of the Chavez government, and stronger political party domination.

Karachi questions

Concerning questions in regard to the Karachi event, from this perspective some remarks can be made regarding the historical experience of actions coming out of answers to the questions put forth. One is asking what implications the lack of interest from big NGOs in the host country may have.

One can look at a similar occasion in Spain, at the 5O year anniversary of the Bretton Woods Institutions 2004. Than, the big NGOs participated, but lukewarmly, in the network organising protest demonstrations and seminars. A week ahead of the actions in Madrid, the big NGOs chose to publicly announce their dissociation with the organisers of the join protests, stating the participation of the political party, Herri Batasuna, in the network as the cause of their splitting action.

Herri Batasuna was the political wing of the Basque resistance movement with another military wing struggling with the Spanish state in a conflict that, at that time, had caused the death of 800 persons. The result was the mass media, partly, put a terrorist stamp on the protests. The result on world politics was very good. International NGOs and peoples movements had no other realistic choice than to continue to cooperate with the only existing well organised coordinated protests against Bretton Woods in Madrid. With the big domestic NGOs outside, the forming of coherent political will at a Summit finally allowed the voices of the South to breakthrough along with the Spanish trade unions, environmental movement, and other peoples movements in the network organising the protests. Instead of a joint statement calling for more place for civil society to influence the official process, and some of the reforms that had dominated ethos of the NGO alternative statements at Summits in the beginning of the 1990s now entered a new language, in the mainstream protest at a Summit as well.

The Alternative Madrid declaration called for the cancellation of all debts, and made no concessions to legitimise the present neoliberal world order as had been the case at the Rio sustainability and other UN conferences. With the radical demands from this peoples movement, and the NGO declaration from Madrid, the reformist agenda of Northern NGOs started to crumble and they had to give in more and more to demands of the radical peoples movements all over the world and to NGOs in the South. By the end of the 1990s this resulted in such achievements as, a clear no to the MAI investments agreement, and a no to including further areas into WTO based on very broad coalitions of peoples movements and NGOs. Thus the lukewarm interest from big domestic NGOs can be seen as either irrelevant, or a prerequisite to establish demands of common interest of a majority of the people in the world against the interests of NGOs and states to divide and rule in order to maximise resources of their own professional or governmental project. In terms of quantity and long term administrative capacity, big NGOs are of course important, in terms of quality and interest in challenging existing power structures they might be a hindrance.

The risk of becoming instrumentalised by the political party Mutahida Quami Movement, or holding the WSF in non-democratic/dictatorial countries are general problems. Parties have always been there as a crucial factors in enabling a big event, such as the WSF, to become a practical reality. They have to be dealt with according to local circumstances and the WSF statutes. Claiming that MQM poses a different problem from earlier parties behind the scene requires a lot more outspoken criticism than that which is given by CACIM. The idea to only emphasise non-democratic countries as a problem is of course wrong. The problems might be somewhat different, but the ranges of problems are also in democratic countries, sometimes even including visa problems. Anyone trying to organise a WSF in the US will find out.

Democratic countries building their position in the world on economic oppression of global poor people have, maybe, more sophisticated means of influencing an event like the WSF, but surely they can be just as effective as any dictatorial regime. The way World Youth Festivals are used by peoples movements and political parties from all over the world during the last half of the past century show that it is fully possible to undermine even very strong dictatorial regimes as well as challenging the world order dominated by democratic countries by gathering tens of thousands of activists to demand peace and end to economic oppression whether the festival takes place in a democratic or dictatorial countries. These festivals actually became the starting point for strong dissident cultures in Poland, the Soviet Union, and DDR, at the same time they had a key role in building global anti-imperialist alliances helping the same kind of rebellion against authoritarian cultures and neocolonial politics in the West.

There is a problem with some of the criticism emanating from CACIM spokespersons in relations to comments both on the Caracas and Karachi WSF. That it is mainly state or political party influence is posed as a problem, while the equally problematic influence from the market is downplayed. The excellent CACIM work on making the WSF process more transparent and guarding its independence thus risks being bias and dwarfing the intellectual and political quality of this intervention.

The problems of Pakistani women’s movements in relation to the WSF seem to have been dealt with in a clever way. There is now a whole range of methods for movements having problems with form or content of different aspects of the WSF process. One can either give up and totally adapt to the dominant ethos, or one can, successfully in many cases, make the WSF, or for that matter regional social forums, more of a tool for the participating organisations than a partly closed preparatory process. One can choose to stay away from parts of the process and focus upon arranging ones own contribution to the WSF programme, or "contanimate" the process by deliberately challenging interventions, or organising parallel events, or even a totally separate process that does not take place at the same location. The challenge, if one is interested in collective action against neoliberalism and imperialism, is to find ways of developing the quality and impact of all important initiatives whether they are inside, intermediary, or outside the social forums.

The visa problems facing many Indian participants, being refused on a mass scale the possibility to come to the event, are an important issue for the integrity of the WSF process. Apart from putting as much political pressure on the Pakistani government as possible to open the borders, the plans for organising a parallel event in Amritsar on the Indian side of the border is a strategically important way challenge the political harassment against WSF. What is important than is that the results of the Amritsar event will be strongly included in the reports from Karachi WSF. Maybe even that interaction can take place between the two parts of the unwillingly separated forum.

How fundamentalist organisations view, or maybe use the forum is one way of putting the last of the CACIM questions. Another way is to ask why the whole structure of the meeting is made to exclude religious organisations from a constructive role in society and politics. The themes of the Karachi event include "State and religion, pluralism, and fundamentalism" and the "overarching Transversal themes" including "Religious sectarianism, Identity Politics, Fundamentalism". Religious organisations are firmly put into a context of only posing a problem and not as a possible ally in the struggle against oppression. At a social forum in another city where MQM also had a stronghold, in Hyderabad, India at Asia Social Forum 2003 there were workshops on religion and democracy and the local population was strongly interested in these issues where religious communalism was criticised from religious perspectives. Actually it was one of the few occasions when local people had an interest in the event. But it seems like this kind of constructive perspective on religion is excluded. So it comes as no surprise that Pakistani religious organisations are not going to participate according to a report from IPS. It puts the WSF process into question. The days before the Karachi WSF, the international committee meets to prepare next year’s WSF at the conference and training centre of the All Africa Conference of Churches in Nairobi. Is it only Christian organisations that are allowed to be central in the WSF process, while religions without European origin are excluded?

CACIM’s question on religious organisations also focuses on the affects on the forum from "the recent bomb blasts in Pakistan as well as the wide spread protests there against the cartoons of the Prophet". The Asia Social Forum in Hyderabad was also held in a region where violent struggles and revolutionary demonstration against the forum had more participants than the demonstrations made by forum organisers. But it did not affect the forum process much more than it contributed to WSF criticism more coherently expressed through Mumbai Resistance 2004. Rather than asking about the effects the wide spread protests against Denmark have had on the forum, it would be more appropriate to ask how the WSF can be used to support the oppressed Muslim minority in Denmark that is in need of international solidarity. Many people in Pakistan taking part in the protests against Denmark and WSF should, if its role as an open forum where international solidarity is supported, find it a good place to discuss how to organises support the oppressed Muslim minority in Denmark. At least to us in the Nordic countries struggling against xenophobic policies and growing imperialistic attitudes towards the South, also in small European states, it is important to develop joint strategies with those that prefer economic and political means rather than violent protests against Denmark. The mass participation in the economic boycott against Denmark shows that the main efforts are of this nature, but the carriers of this boycott seem to be excluded from WSF due to the way religion is treated. Thus, the WSF can make itself irrelevant to current needs for building solidarity links between the South and the North.

Karachi and the Danish Islamophobic conflict

Although mass protests through boycotts presented at the WSF have failed other movements, they have been able to very quickly mobilise a massive boycott against one of the states that is an especially willing partner in the war and occupation of Iraq. At the same time, this country is the most radical xenophobic country in Western Europe with a conservative government backed by an openly xenophobic nationalist party. Developments in this Nordic country, Denmark, pose a radicalisation of the opinions in countries that goes to war in the Middle East. Save the Children in Denmark now reports that Danes now are questioning giving aid to earth quake victims in Pakistan as they see the Pakistani people as violent protesters against Denmark. Humanitarianism turns into political revenge against the massive protests.

When the polycentric WSF is held in Karachi it will be placed at the centre of this conflict between Western imperialism and the masses of the world. Here imperialistic interests in Central Asian and Arab oil wells and military world domination will clash with oppressed people in a common location where problems cannot be solved on the immediate level by using a fair amount of the resources that today are accumulated in proclaimed democratic, but certainly unfairly rich countries.

The Danish attack on its immigrants through the most xenophobic legislation in Western Europe is centrally placed within the context of present Western domination of the world. Denmark is a country with a strong self-image of being humanitarian. It has the second highest foreign aid rate in the world, and a system of well funded NGOs. Denmark is also the country with the highest popular support in Western Europe and North America to start war against countries that do not act according to the will of Western powers, like Yugoslavia and Iraq. It sent troops to Iraq, and its shipping company Maersk, the biggest Danish multinational company, is the biggest profiteer on transport contracts for all foreign troops in Iraq.

When the Muslim minority protested against openly racist statements by key politicians in the xenophobic Danish People's Party, and the pictures of Prophet Muhammad portraying him as a terrorist, the right wing government supported by the Danish peoples party escalated the conflict further. Prime Minister Fogh refused to meet with a delegation of ambassadors from Muslim countries. When 27 Danish Muslim communities instead turned to civil society in Arab countries to gain support, Fogh tried to claim that they were betraying the country by rhetorically stating that due to juridical reasons he could not use the world treason although he strongly legitimised the term traitor in the debate that was frequently used by others in the conflict. When the boycott against Danish products started to have strong effects, Fogh claimed it was a sort of terrorist attack on Denmark stating that the boycott was to "seize" Danish workplaces as "hostages" in a religious conflict. When the conflict escalated further and the Danish embassies were set on fire, Fogh condemned the protests and said what was now needed was dialogue. In this he said he had the full support from President Bush.

Opinion polls show the Danish Peoples Party gaining massive support making it bigger than the social democrats. The social democrats now are at 20% of the electorate, the lowest for almost a century. Meanwhile the social democrats and the Socialist peoples party have stopped the dialogue with the 27 Danish Muslim communities that many claimed to be traitors and instigators of international protests. The most left-wing parliamentary party, the red green alliance, organised demonstrations against a small Danish radical Islamistic party. The Muslim communities have now also been excluded from integration dialogues set up by the government to which they were previously invited. Instead new Muslim organisations are established based on individual membership for moderate Muslims that are included in dialogues, instead of the Muslim communities. In the middle of the conflict, the third Danish Social Forum was held with five-fold the participation than the first, welcoming 1 600 participants. On the xenophobic issue, it had no, or little, political impact, a result it shares with many grassroots dialogue initiatives that are mushrooming. Maybe now a cemetery will be constructed for Muslims, before they had to bury their dead relatives in church yards, and the 200 000 Muslims still without a mosque, and dwell instead in basements or other provisional localities. Across the border in Sweden there has been a mosque since 1970, but in Denmark the resistance against the Muslim religion has blocked all attempts so far to create a worthy building for the great minority.

While the violent protests have declined the boycott is still in full action. It is people in common, but rich enough to buy dairy products that are the main carriers of the boycott. Danish fashion companies or the influential shipping company, Maersk with its strong presence in the Middle East, have had very few problems as they have richer customers or strong relations with governments. It is more dairy products that are targeted causing losses that can exceed a billion euros. Especially hard hit is the Danish Swedish company Arla, a loss that in the end will be paid by family farmers in Denmark and Sweden who are already under economic pressure.

Fogh has recently further escalated the conflict by using a Danish proverb dividing people into sheep or bucks, also referring to the bow which means that either one behaves with self respect according to their own values, or bows to powerful interests. This is similar to President Bush’s classical statement either you are with or against us. Fogh used his proverb to attack the Danish industry stating they were too lukewarm in speaking up against threats to Western values of freedom of expression. The answer was that the industry was in constant contact with the foreign ministry who was asked to not to be too outspoken, and one Danish multinational company threatened to leave Denmark while others have strongly supported well funded international dialogue initiatives to try to change the image of Danish companies in Muslim countries and the world. The economic protests by masses in the South have had some impact on business while the political will of public opinion is radicalising further towards the right from a position that was from the outset to the right.

On the global level the Danish xenophobic Muhammad conflict has raised problems for the alliance to maintain the present world order. A crucial factor in this alliance building has been to mobilise religious forces against secular nationalist and left wing forces. When the political and economical conditions for the poor masses in many countries worsens due to the present world order, the need to maintain an alliance against secular forces that might unite people is furthermore needed. Now well funded information programmes against racism will be introduced, primarily against anti-Semitism, but sometimes also against Islamophobic tendencies, both in a way exclude the economic and political context of racism turning it more into a moral question. The Danish state funded propaganda against racist genocide puts Saddam Hussein’s mass murder of Kurds on top, followed by the communist mass murders/genocides in Soviet Union and Campuchea, Nazi genocide of Jews (but not the 15 million civil Slavic Soviet Union victims of the same German genocide), and the nationalist Turks genocide of the Armenians. The genocide in Rwanda was mysterically not carried out by any political ideological force like the others (as the political force behind the genocide was christdemocratic, thus belonging to the same ideology as members of the Danish government). In some Arab countries propaganda is made stating that the genocide of Jews did not exist.

The other method is to try to introduce an international agreement against blasphemy in the UN discussed by countries like the US. At least on paper, by re-introducing authoritarian agreements in the West one hopes to dismantle the mass protests in the Global South and any other local alliances necessary in order to maintain Western domination. By making the cultural oppression less provocative one hopes to maintain the other forms of oppression.

Thus the Danish xenophobic Muhammad crisis poses a challenge to WSF both in terms of capacity to mobilise a massive economic boycott, and wide participation in protests while also being a complex issue linking secular and religious, economic and political, racism and freedom of expression and other questions. It is ideal to discuss and propose campaigns at the Karachi WSF, or the Amritsar event if the religious organisations interested in an alliances with secular forces opposing xenophobic politics can participate. But as it looks now, both the masses of Pakistan, and religious organisations of this kind have felt excluded by the way the WSF was set up, and the funding for travels from Europe to Karachi for this kind of purposes is small or non-existent. But the challenge from the mass boycott is still that there is this emerging and growing aggressive attitude towards the South in some Northern countries that ought to be confronted.

Nairobi and the NGO system

The next challenge for the WSF is Nairobi 2007. Here the role of NGOs is an extremely strategic issue. The most recent world-wide campaign launched, with the help of WSF, is last year’s campaign to eradicate poverty. This campaign was dominated by Northern NGOs and lacked coherent political content. It has also been criticised for top-down management rather than democratic participation of movements willing to establish political facts through direct actions like boycotts and not only building on professional lobbying and people as consumers for campaign events. Thus, in what way will the problems of the millennium campaign and the dominating NGO way of campaigning needs be addressed when WSF moves to Nairobi where NGOs are a crucial cooperation partner and peoples movements are weak?

Once again Denmark contributes an example of the problems ahead. The face of modern, Western imperialism is not only xenophobic or racist attitudes and war, but also softer humanitarian image. The way this double face is visually managed is by presenting the public, through mass media, two pictures of the masses in the third world: one being the violent terrorists, and the other the powerless victims in need of help from generous, rich, and democratic people. A realistic self-image includes both the oppressive economic and military global role and the role of the welfare state with freedom of expression for its citizens replacing the unquestionably democratic and benevolent country with generous persons. These real, existing, contradictory qualities along with this self-image are projected onto the masses in the third world. One wonders what will happen when the image of the omnipotent terrorist and violent masses conflate with the image of the weak victims in need of care.

In Denmark, there is not only the picture of Prophet Muhammad with a big bomb in his turban, printed in the biggest daily, there are also numerous images of terrorist attacks or violent demonstrators. On the other side of the coin are the images of dark people in need of help. Here, NGOs produce some of the most extreme contributions to this double image. The NGO campaign to eradicate poverty in Denmark has a website where the content is dominated by pictures, and the political text is reduced to very short promotions and quotes from the millennium goals as if the content is uncontroversial and they are unquestionably good.

The pictures on the website moves against the viewer; it portrays eight close-up pictures of dark faces of babies, children, and others in need and each illustrates one of the millennium goals. Only the last picture includes more than one person; it is taken from an above angle and has an empty white bowl being extended towards us, above their heads, by an appealing dark hand.

This is what a campaign strongly supported at the WSF looks like in Denmark, in the hands of NGOs. This is the result of long term NGO development, both in Denmark and internationally. Danish NGOs were especially successful at leaving behind an international solidarity culture based on local communities whether they were churches or groups of political activists, to establish a well funded NGO system dominated by professionals. This has resulted in Danish NGOs often taking positions very close to the government’s, and even developing a double talk to maintain its position both in international cooperation with peoples movements and NGOs, and with their own government. When Peoples movements and NGOs joined hands before the WTO Summit in Seattle 1999, Danish NGOs quickly signed appeals along with other Nordic movements against expanding the WTO while, at the same time, signing another appeal for the domestic market, stating that they wanted to be involved in reforming an expanding WTO, to the embarrassment of fellow NGOs in other countries. Being well-funded, Danish NGOs supports global NGO programmes related to UN on questions of sustainability, and supports national social forums in the third world.

In spite of this close relationship to governmental positions, Danish NGOs are under strong pressure from the present right-wing government. The foreign minister has proposed cancelling all funding for information to NGOs on third world issues, in total 3 million euros. Instead, all the money should go to practical aid. This would especially hit organisations that put effort into educating the public on third world issues, and do political campaigning rather than limiting themselves to charity.

The Danish government will probably end up with a more clever way of handling its support in order to portray the image that they see cancelling all money to NGO for third world information as beneficial. To give no support would suddenly make movements based on voluntary political commitment relatively stronger which would not help the right if they do not chose full polarisation, both at domestic and global level.

The developments in Denmark are of interest internationally in that it is an intriguing relationship between business, government, media, NGOs, movements, and the public. Danish NGOs holds a strong position within international NGO cooperation. The way Danish NGOs handle their central role to portray the image of a rich democratic country as an aid donor to the poor is also of relevance to other countries. It is relevant not only to international relations, but also to the way NGOs related to oppressed and poor people at the domestic level.

Conclusions

With the Nairobi WSF realistically giving a central place to NGOs, it is important to reflect upon the problems and possibilities of the WSF being able to stimulate proposal making and political action. Whether it is the promotion of the new millennium goals campaigns, or starting to ask oneself the hard questions on why the WSF tends to make itself irrelevant to civil society mass mobilisation against white oppression. It is obvious that the present global power relations make military opposition to Western domination of the world very difficult, or impossible. Thus, protests take on other forms, like when a billion Muslims are culturally portrayed as terrorists in one of the occupying states in the North. One can see these protests as a result of the manipulation from questionable governments and political movements since campaigns in the North are unequally used by governments and political parties to their own purposes. One can see it as questionable that the demonstrations did not react upon the occupation of Iraq and the war on terrorism. But the fact remains, the mass protests took place, and they got broad support due to its character of acknowledging a threat to all Muslims, whether poor or rich, for or against the war in Iraq, which the Danish government and media represents.

Future development where, one the one hand, NGO campaigns like the eradicate poverty, formulating proposals, or, on the other hand, political parties dominating the WSF while civil society mass protests outside the control of Northern NGOs are ignored will make an empty shell out of the WSF. In the long run such disinterest in what the oppressed masses actually are doing represents not only a patronising attitude towards oppressed people, but also makes oneself irrelevant to solving growing polarisation in the world.

But the WSF has already shown its capacity of being flexible to include new perspectives. The 2004 WSF in India included more cultural expressions by oppressed groups in the middle of the forum, and the Dalits and others had their agenda more firmly placed within the process. In Denmark, the Muslims are the Danish Dalits. It should also not be impossible to make this kind of oppression against immigrants, or other socially underprivileged groups in society, a key issue at the WSF in the future. NGOs are also flexible to a certain degree. When radical peoples movements at the end of the 1990s demanded a strategy beyond reformism against international institutions dominated by the North, the NGOs followed suit and did construct necessary criticism to legitimise radical protests. Although NGOs mostly are dominated by their professional interests, they cannot come to close to governmental or business positions if they do not want to become irrelevant in their intermediary role between oppressed masses and power. The WSF is built on an intriguing balance to be able to practically and politically organise the huge events and also to carry the process forward. Whether this cooperation will be able to become relevant to the masses participating in international protests against oppression, or to politicise the global polarisation between rich and poor is still an open question. Maybe it has already been addressed at the Amritsar event and Karachi WSF, and it certainly will have to be addressed before the Nairobi WSF to make it possible for people at the WSF to make conscious choices between different kinds of campaigns and political actors that are able to challenge the present world order.

Tord Bjork:
Member of Friends of the Earth Sweden, Network Institute on Global Democracy, and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.

Links:

Danish eradicate poverty image campaign: "http://www.undrydfattigdom.nu/first8.htm"http://www.udrydfattigdom.nu/first8.html

Other texts on this subject by Tord Björk:

The emerging global NGO system (in the period between 1972 - 1997): http://www.folkrorelser.nu/inenglish/stockholm-rio.html

World Social Forum and Popular Movements Confronting Globalisation (a more long term look at the emergence of the global justice movements and its class components): http://www.folkrorelser.nu/socialaforum/globaljustice&WSF.html

Gandhian and Indian Influence in the Nordic Countries (including a piece on three different events in Mumbai 2004): http://www.folkrorelser.nu/saltmarschen/NordicGandhi.html