1. The first European Social Forum, held in Florence, Italy, 6-10 November 2002, was a great success by many standards. At first the organisers expected 10 000 delegates, then 20 000. The latest is that there were nearly 60 000 paid participants. Moreover, the organisers say that about one million people took part in the anti-war demonstration on Saturday, the police estimate is about half of that.

The crowds filled up even the biggest conference halls and seminar rooms. Some seminars were organised twice in succession to enable more people to share ideas and views about important issues such as GATS (WTO’s General Agreement on Trade on Services). Nonetheless, the atmosphere was good, there were no panics or troubles of any kind. People were taking things smoothly.

The demonstration on Saturday 9 November concluded the main part of the ESF. It was followed by meetings and gatherings on Sunday and Monday. The WSF International Council meeting was held on Tuesday and Wednesday.

2. The success of the ESF does not mean that there were no problems. The Italian organisers had allowed political parties in. In practice this meant that a variety of Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist parties displayed their symbols in such a visible manner that they in practice dominated the impression about the main conference site, the Fortress of Florence. Although playing only a very minor role in the official programme itself, often members of these parties assumed the floor in the discussions. Instead of commenting or posing questions, they delivered speeches of their own. This was rather annoying to many.

Another less positive characteristic was that many of the speakers – both in the main conferences and in the seminars – were middle-aged (or older) white European men. It is particularly striking how absent the immigrants were. For a feminist, also the male-dominance should be a cause of major concern. It also seems that "Europe" was defined rather exclusively. Very few outside the current EU were present in the programme. Moreover, this narrow conception of "Europe" was dominated by the Italians, French and Brits. It seems to me that there were more speakers from the US than even from the protestant Northern Europe, not to mention Eastern Europe, Russia, Turkey, or North Africa.

At any rate, the ESF was a rather spectacular event. Berlusconi had "suspended" the Schengen Treaty by exploiting its Article, demonstrating how flexible the EU treaties can be when reactionary forces want to decide upon the exception. Thus the border controls were temporarily back in force and the border guards examined carefully the identity and in many cases the belongings of incomers, also when they were coming from within the Schengen area. ‘Carabinieris’, police cars and patrols, as well as helicopters were present everywhere. Nonetheless, all this was outside the main ESF sites. Inside, people took their time to discuss aspects of neoliberalism or the war against terrorism and various proposed solutions to many of these problems. Ordinary Florentines were scared off from the city centre, thus it was easy to find a nice yet half-empty Italian restaurant with good food and wine after the sessions. By the time of the Saturday demonstration, however, many Florentines had decided where their sympathies lie. A number of them offered pasta and wine to the demonstrators, sharing their disgust – and also embarrassment – about Berlusconi. The city was full of posters where Berlusconi was dressed up as Mussolini and Bush as Hitler.

3. NIGD’s role in the ESF itself was confined to two things. We took part in organising a seminar, together with four other organisations (ATTAC France, War on Want from the UK, 11/11/11 from Belgium and ATTAC Italy) on global taxes, particularly the Tobin tax. The seminar – conducted mostly in English and French – was held on Thursday afternoon in Room Rastliglia 1 in the monumental Fortress of Florence, which was the main conference site. Rastriglia 1 is a huge and, in November, also very cold hall. No-one counted how many people were in, but it is clear that there were several hundred participants.

Rudy de Meyer from 11/11/11 chaired the sessions and introduced the topics. David Hillman from War on Want started with a strong campaigning speech, followed by Bruno Jetin’s (whose La taxe Tobin at la solidarité entre les nations was published only a few weeks ago) long talk on global taxes more generally. I was the last speaker, explaining the NIGD strategy for global democratisation and the role of the currency transactions tax in it. Moreover, I introduced the Draft Treaty and its basic ideas. The idea was also to invite people to participate in the more detailed workshop-discussions on the Draft Treaty.

The session went well and the discussions were lively. A smaller group continued work on global finance at David Hillman’s hotel, where War on Want had organised a presentation on the problems posed by the tax havens. In his animated slide-show, John Christiansen argued that the institution of tax havens is a major threat to democracy. The biggest corporations and the richest people can and do escape all taxation. For instance, half of world trade is now financed through tax havens. In addition to other negative consequences, this favours the biggest multinational corporations and is thereby contributing decisively to the world-wide oligopolisation/monopolisation of trade and production.

Besides Article 3, para 4 of the Draft Treaty, which gives the Currency Transactions Tax Organisation (CTTO) the means to tackle this problem, other possible solutions discussed include more direct campaigning against the legislators of Switzerland or Jersey and other Channel islands or the UK; and various measures which would make it more difficult for individual companies or banks to re-locate their funds in tax heavens.

4. NIGD also co-organised two workshops on the Draft Treaty. The first workshop on Friday evening was located in a small but very nice theatre far away from the main conference sites. The numbers were much smaller than in the Thursday seminar. Most of the participants were people who are already heavily involved in research and campaigning on the CTT. It was decided that the second workshop on Saturday morning should take place within the Fortress. It did, but there was a lot of noice due to the preparations for the demonstration.

These discussions initiated the process of revising and amending the Draft Treaty, to make it as widely acceptable as possible. Bruno Jetin and I will prepare a separate report on the main points and conclusions. Suffice it to say here, first, that Lieven Denys – the co-author of the Draft Treaty – proposed that the text will be left intact until a systematic and wide round of discussions has taken place, i.e. probably until summer or autumn 2003. This was accepted as the starting point. Denys was also arguing for taking the process that led to the establishment of the International Criminal Court as a model.

Second, many of the points made concerned the purpose of the CTT and the principles of allocating the funds. Two basic positions can be discerned. The Draft Treaty is based on the idea that allocative decisions should be left to democratic politics within the CTTO and, moreover, that the autonomy of the participating states should be respected and increased to the extent possible. However, some of those present felt strongly that the CTT is a tax for ‘good purposes’ and therefore all the revenues should be dictated to go exclusively to those purposes. Most prominently, Jetin argued in favour of specifying the priorities already at the stage of concluding the Treaty and establishing strong principles of conditionality on the states seeking for funds from the global funds. This debate can be summarised as a debate between (i) democratic pluralism and (ii) centrally controlled solidarity

Thirdly, besides a number of small points that mainly required clarification, other issues that were discussed included:

-what is the role of national laws for the CTT?

-would it be possible to establish regional CTT arrangements along the lines of the Draft Treaty?

-should there be stronger sanctions against disobeying members?

All agreed that already existing national laws (Canada and France being the prime examples thus far) are important. However, Denys emphasised that since national legislations vary a lot, it is important there is a shared standard such as the European VAT treaty that has also provided the model for the CTT Draft Treaty. Complementing this point, I argued that further national laws may be unnecessary. What is now needed is the international conference of states and global civil society discussing an amended version of the draft treaty and, subsequently, adopting a variation of it. In most cases, the national parliaments would then have to ratify the Treaty. Moreover, although a European regional arrangement might be politically possible, many other regions of the world would not be able to resist the political pressures from Washington and other sites of global power. This point was particularly strongly emphasised by the one-person strong Latin American constituency in the workshop.

There was no clear conclusion about sanctions. Rather the discussions clarified the issues at stake.

5. The second workshop on Saturday ended with the increasingly forceful calls to leave the Fortress which was to be emptied before the mass demonstration. The Forum is a forum, and as such it did not even try to conclude anything. And by the time the tens of thousand delegates were out in the streets, joined by the hundreds of thousands of others in the demonstration, the whole thing was united again in what it opposed: neoliberalism, war and the US-led "militarisation of globalisation". The discussion whether the World Social Forum and its regional and national offspring should assume agency and voice – however complex and pluralist – was left to the meeting of the International Council of the WSF.