Uppsala Social Forum, UPS, was the fourth social forum to take place in Sweden. We hope that the bonfire of cultural diversity and pluralistic richness of the USF will show example for future Forums. This shows that the Uppsala social forum organizing committee had succeeded in addressing the very fundamental concern raised at the European Social Forum in Florence in mid-November 2002, namely the lack of cultural pluralism. USF concluded by developing a Nordic framework for the social forum process by proposing a clear and common vision for future work - thus filling in the hole of low Nordic participation in the WSF process in general.

Uppsala is an old and well-respected university town with nationalities from over 90 countries. Uppsala is also the proud home town of Dag Hammarskjöld, the former UN Secretary-General, which has made Uppsala the Swedish "UN town". The combination of these three factors may have been the crucial ones in creating the highly diverse and strong local hold. The global movement can be no more that a sum of the local involvement, and strong regional and thematic anchorage creates possibilities for the movement to survive. Instead of fund-raising through out the year to get travel funding to go to WSF, the local movements should focus on their own framework and build strong holds in their regional capacities. USF gave the impression of having succeeded in involving the town of Uppsala. Events were held in movie theatres and in the offices of the Red Cross; there were large banderolls in the streets and on buildings and the evening parties were well-attended. The main themes that surfaced among the 80 some events echoed well with main themes in other social forums: the debt problem, the needs to democratise global institutions, the US-led aggressive global campaign for neoliberalism, minorities' and human rights, women's issues and need for alternative media etc. But also the local problems of for instance unsatisfactory health care at the Uppsala hospital gathered audiences. As in most social forums, the majority of the participants were young. Globalization and networking also attained new dimensions due to the vast diversity among the participants; for instance, Katarina was interviewed on the Uppsala-based radio station Centro de Estudio y Trabajo sobre America Latina, CETAL, with program only in Spanish, and own papers with important distribution in Latin America. Naturally, the cultural bridge between the strong Latin American-rooted WSF process may not seem that big to the persons involved with CETAL working on Latin American cultural issues in Uppsala as to a person involved in the European Social Forum involved in adult education or day care facilities for children. The geographical shift of the WSF from Porto Alegre in Brazil to Mumbai City in India will provide welcomed new dimensions to the WSF process as we have known it until now.

Anchoring the global process

New process, as everything else, suffers firstly from birth pains and then from growing pains. The task is not to perform according to perfection, but rather to create a democratic process and viable mechanisms that provides good ground for a participatory and meaningful process. By succeeding in involving such an impressive number of organizations (63), working together preparing for the event for a year and also fund raising together proves the strength of the USF. Whereas the pessimist quickly judges that even though the social forum events attract substantive numbers of people, the diverse backgrounds, large agendas and lack of coherent agenda pulls the carpet under the process, the optimist - realist -, however, understands that the mobilization of people is the very crucial element in building a (global) process. Katarina was invited as NIGD member of the WSF International Committee. As representative of NIGD Katarina analyzed the reasons behind the success of the WSF as a movement and presented the strategy for global democratization that NIGD has developed, seeing global democratization as a unifying common denominator among global civil society actors. In January 2002, the International Committee of the World Social Forum took the decision to root the WSF process locally, regionally and thematically. In this one year only, nearly 100 social forums have taken place. Reports of the largest events are available at www.worldsocialforum.org. Common for the events we have seen or heard reports from seems to be that these events attract unexpected high numbers of participants, and the participants represent very diverse walks of life. In this past year, the tone has also got more radical. As repeated by Susan George at the second Finnish Social Forum in Helsinki in mid-March, the call for structure, organization and the need for common strategies is essential for this movement to gain force. In addition to NIGD's work on this issue, completary strategies are presently being formed by Ibase in Rio de Janerio, Brazil, and the UNESCO Chair in Catalunya, Spain.  

Methodology and participatory mechanisms

In the final session of the USF "Continuation" Hans Abrahamsson from Gothenburg University gave an introductory speech providing an overall global context for the Social Forum processes. For the Uppsala Social Forum audience he presented three questions 1) How the old and new movements could best ally and what does it requires from each party? 2) Should the forum link itself with the local politicians /politics, if so, how and on what conditions? 3) How to ensure the continuity of the Uppsala Social Forum? The audience sitting around seven tables discussed these questions and each table came up with reflections and proposals. Many innovative and fresh view points were noted and for instance a concrete proposal to express support to the on-going communal strike was approved. Also, a group of Swedish folk high school teachers came up with the decision to use the social forum process as a platform for defending and promoting the folk high school system. The fact that this type of interactive session gathering all participants was used made also participants (as opposed to organizers) feel involved in the reparation of the future process.  

A Nordic Social Forum?

The success of the Norwegian Social Forum last year has also reached our ears. Yash Tandon, in particular, has spoken encouragingly of the Norwegians' efforts. Whereas conferences usually end by conclusions and farewells, the USF-organizers had named their final session "the continuation". At this session, as also in previous discussions, a framework for Nordic Social Forum was proposed as reference for future work. The defence against the dismantling - or fight for the survival - of the welfare state would constitute a unique, highly relevant, uniting and important common framework for civil society movements in the Nordic countries. This also invites to a positive fight for the welfare state rather than against the dismantling of it. A common fight for the national post system (against privatisation) was mentioned as a one very concrete example of potential cooperation between Nordic activists. On a global level these struggles fit into the framework for a fight for global democratization and against neoliberalism. The second European Social Forum is scheduled to take place in Paris, France in mid-October 2003. The first planning meeting took place in Berlin, time wise colliding perfectly with the USF. It has been decided that the third planning meeting on the ESF will take place in September in Gothenburg, Sweden, and it was also discussed that perhaps that meeting could also invite to a first planning meeting of a Nordic Social Forum?  

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FOOTNOTE: Uppsala Social Forum took place on 25-27 April 2003 in Uppsala, Sweden, and attracted some 3000 participants. The organizing committee included 63 organizations, and the work was chaired by a chairperson, Markus Selin. The total budget of the event was some SEK 80 000, and this money was raised through active fund raising activities. The largest part of the total budget, SEK 40 000 was provided by Forum-Syd. For more information on USF, see http://www.usf2007.org. NIGD was represented by Leena Rikkilä and Katarina Sehm-Patomäki. The organizers had invited Katarina Sehm Patomäki to speak on the link between the local and the global WSF process and also to present the NIGD proposed framework for civil society building on global democratization.