Alter-Globalization E-Book

Geoffrey Pleyers

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 518

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Contrary to the common view that globalization undermines social agency, ‘alter-globalization activists', that is, those who contest globalization in its neo-liberal form, have developed new ways to become actors in the global age. They propose alternatives to Washington Consensus policies, implement horizontal and participatory organization models and promote a nascent global public space.

Rather than being anti-globalization, these activists have built a truly global movement that has gathered citizens, committed intellectuals, indigenous, farmers, dalits and NGOs against neoliberal policies in street demonstrations and Social Forums all over the world, from Bangalore to Seattle and from Porto Alegre to Nairobi. This book analyses this worldwide movement on the bases of extensive field research conducted since 1999.

Alter-Globalization provides a comprehensive account of these critical global forces and their attempts to answer one of the major challenges of our time: How can citizens and civil society contribute to the building of a fairer, sustainable and more democratic co-existence of human beings in a global world?

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Foreword by Alain Touraine

Acknowledgements

Part 1: Alter-Globalization – Becoming Actors in the Global Age

Introduction

From the first uprisings to the global crisis

A global movement

1 The Will to Become an Actor

An actor against neoliberal ideology

Social agency in the global age

Part 2: The Way of Subjectivity

2 The Experience of Another World

Resisting through subjectivity

Spaces of experience

Diversions of experience

3 From the Mountains of Chiapas to Urban Neighbourhoods

The Zapatistas

Barricade social and cultural centre

Alter-activist youth

From the Zapatistas to alter-activists

4 Expressive Movements and Anti-Power

A concept of social change

A social and subjective engagement

Illusions of anti-power and diversions of spaces of experience

Facing the political

Conclusion

Part 3: The Way of Reason

5 Expertise for Another World

Resisting through reason

Spaces of expertise

The ambivalence of expertise

Conclusion

6 Citizens, Experts and Intellectuals

Introduction

A citizen movement

Committed intellectuals

Theories of another world and practices of expertise

Conclusion

7 Reason, Democracy and Counter-Power

A movement against neoliberal ideology

Rationality at stake

Democracy at stake

A concept of social change

Conclusion

Part 4: Confluence of the Two Paths

8 Tensions and Collaborations

Common problematics

Dichotomization: from tension to opposition

Absorption: tension erased by hegemony

Combination: tensions and complementarities

Conclusion

9 The Main Debates

Think local and global, act local and global

The movement-internal organization

Rethinking social change

Conclusion

10 Towards a Post-Washington Consensus Alter-Globalization

Reconfigurations

Towards concrete outcomes

Climate justice

Conclusion

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Copyright © Geoffrey Pleyers 2010

The right of Geoffrey Pleyers to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2010 by Polity Press

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This book has been published with the support of the FNRS-FRS.

To my parents, Marie-Louise and Joseph Pleyers-Siebertz, for their devotion and their example.

Foreword by Alain Touraine

Globalization – not only of the economy, but of numerous areas of social and cultural life – has, over the past decades, been the most visible and disquieting aspect of the evolution of a capitalism which was and still is primarily led by the United States. This globalization called forth and arouses a global social movement, founded on a critique of globalization as well as the defence of diverse sectors – women, ethnic minorities, and all who are subject to authoritarian or totalitarian regimes – which have nothing in common but apparently being subject to capitalism in its most brutal and intractable forms.

The response was immediate; the globalization of capital corresponded to a broad movement, present in most areas of the world. Although it assumed different names in various countries, notably in the United States, the movement rapidly positioned itself as ‘alter-globalization’ rather than ‘anti-globalization’ – the latter being susceptible to many misunderstandings. A general consensus emerged that a globalization which could also have positive dimensions should not be rejected and analysis and action should be focused on proposals and strategies to fight the negative form of capitalism.

As well as a great many mass actions, this movement spawned analyses, interpretations and proposals from all parts of the world. To consider Geoffrey Pleyers’ the best one does not deny the quality of others; well-documented and relying on the most in-depth analyses, above all it presents a movement both truly global and adapted to the economic context of each country and region.

Geoffrey Pleyers is a Belgian citizen who was born in a village at the junction of three borders: of the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium itself. It is an extraordinary region which, having lost all the industries on which its wealth was based (mining, iron and steel, textiles), was able, in a matter of years, to attain a better and more dynamic situation than many parts of Belgium. Like many others in this region, Geoffrey Pleyers attributes this rapid and remarkable recovery to the region’s openness to the outside world, both necessitated and made possible in the first place by the quasi-coexistence of several cultures and networks of exchange. Thus Geoffrey Pleyers’ origins may have contributed to shaping the perspectives of a man who not only possesses a deep knowledge of Western Europe and Mexico, but who has criss-crossed the globe for a decade, studying almost all national and international forums on-site, and who was able to grasp from the outset that the diversity of forms of action in the movement was not simply a product of the internal diversity of the movement.

The main contribution of Geoffrey Pleyers, and what makes this book an indispensable tool, is that he clearly exposes the mixed strengths and weaknesses of a movement which was, and remains, a grassroots movement in which activists from poor countries occupy a place observed in no other movement. This remarkable fact forces one to acknowledge from the start the strength, originality and dynamism of a movement which, starting in the south of Brazil, has organized gatherings and forums on all continents. It is impossible to shake off this impression. Briefly, without losing sight of the different forms of action in each country and in each stage of its development, it is a solid and incontrovertible fact that the contemporary world has never known a movement as large and dynamic, in all parts of the world, as the alter-globalization movement.

This first observation rapidly leads to a second. This movement was not only a response to the impact and apparent triumph of capitalist globalization. Not only has it contributed greatly to the feminist cause and the defence of minority rights, but above and beyond this – and here lies the most important observation – this movement has not sought its legitimacy in the crisis of an economic, political or cultural system. The movement has not only been critical. In fact, it was and is the first large social movement to have been founded less on rejection than on the assertion of the rights of a large majority of the population. While, at its most extreme, the globalization of capitalism created a distance and even a rupture between the very rich and the others, the alter-globalization movement, because it brought together all dimensions of criticism and claims, managed to oppose the most powerful economic forces. Beyond all specific demands, it asserted itself first and foremost as the defender of the rights of human beings, ransacked in so many fields and places by the very fact of the global, hegemonic nature of an extreme capitalism, so irrational that those whom the alter-globalization movement fought must soon collapse under the weight of their own irrationality.

Rather than attacking different forms of domination, or seeking the reasons for the formation of social movements in the ‘laws’ of capitalist economy, the alter-globalization movement accorded first rank to the rights of those for whom and in whose name it fought, rather than to the nature of that which it fought. The alter-globalization movement was the first movement to assert a concept of human rights, freedom and justice within globalization, recalling the great moments and texts at the end of the eighteenth century in France and the United States, while, over the past half-century, positive discourses were weakened to the point of being reduced to an increasingly feeble economism, incapable of explaining the importance of new movements – new because of their location, and new because of the nature of the groups they defended through recourse to fundamental human rights. This is why these powerful movements were not aimed at the revolutionary goal of taking the power of the state by force.

But this discovery of the specific characteristics of the alter-globalization movement leads to an understanding of the weaknesses of this movement – weaknesses which are continually recognized and do not justify a purely critical judgement of these actors, who have so widely awakened struggles against injustice. The globalized economy is a system of production which provides a particularly large amount of power to centres of economic decision-making, which are almost always situated at the heart of the most powerful national economies, and specifically the United States. But can the alter-globalization movement directly confront a political power? I have already provided the obvious response: simultaneously, a social, cultural and political movement, the alter-globalization movement, which has given rise to so much activism, could not directly and victoriously attack the globalized capitalism’s economic and political centres of power. Some believe that it is possible and even necessary to focus action on a direct offensive against the United States and its allies. This approach has gained greatest influence in France (largely due to the impact of Le Monde Diplomatique), where it led the ATTAC movement to adopt a properly political programme, at least until the 2007 change in leadership. However, as much as the movement could be strong at the base, strength at the top was impossible because national and local powers, as well as cultural contexts in each country, prevented the fusion of all the components of the movement into a force and political or military action capable of overturning global capitalism. While some collective actions, from Seattle to Genoa, demonstrated that confrontation with adversaries could quickly become violent, the political action of the movement at the international level remained weak. The movement cannot be blamed for this weakness, since for several years the attention of the entire world was captured far more by the alter-globalization movement than by the Davos summits, which were clearly linked to economic and political elites of the most powerful countries and didn’t attract a comparable interest. For a certain period, it even seemed that the Davos Club sought to imitate the alter-globalization movement in some ways. In fact, as history was soon to show, this global capitalism even escaped the control of those who led it. But the absence of political results fragmented and divided the movement. While the French increasingly prioritized political action, in the Jacobin tradition of their country, in most other regions this approach was rejected, both because it divided the movement and because, in a more general way, it was impossible to force a political concept on a movement which had always been stronger and more creative at the base than at the top. The declining leadership of the French movement by ATTAC activists represented the end of a trend which in reality was never in the majority internationally.

But what weakened the movement the most was the collapse of the economic system it fought. A series of ‘bubbles’ bursting and the emergence of several financial scandals heralded a major crisis which, starting in 2007, became visible to everyone, spreading from the subprime crisis (that is, mortgage credit) to the entire financial system. Because neither the economy nor collective social action could fight the crisis, which risked becoming more serious than that of 1929, it became necessary, in a movement made possible by improved economic understanding, for States, led by the United States and large European countries – while the European Union itself did not play a major role – to pour trillions of dollars into the paralysed economy, stimulating motion and liquidities without which the economy would have exploded.

It would be bad faith to condemn the powerlessness of the alter-globalization movement here, because the banking sector and billionaire businesses had no greater success in acting on the financial system until the States, and no longer the bankers, took charge of a situation which teetered daily on the verge of catastrophe, a run on the banks.

This brings us back to the conclusion which I alluded to at the beginning of this foreword. The global nature of capitalism, the great autonomy of financial capital from ‘the real economy’ (a separation which is obviously never complete) and the alter-globalization movement are different aspects of a more global crisis that we could consider to be the end of a thirty-year period during which the neoliberals, beginning with President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, held nearly complete sway over the global economy and, consequently, over the lives of most people in the world. The alter-globalization movement grasped this transformation best: the end of the blind, unlimited belief in the rationality of the market; the reappearance in economic thought of the indispensable role of the state; and the reappearance in thought of the equally indispensable role of a vision of human beings which does not reduce them – either individually or collectively – to the caricature of Homo economicus, which had thought to achieve the triumph of rationality by trusting in economic conduct deemed rational, with all other conduct considered irrational.

One cannot expect that, after several years or decades of crises, more or less serious, global economic life will return to the way it was before 2008. What this movement made clearest was the urgent necessity of reconstructing ways of thinking and acting capable of mobilizing all dimensions of human action, in order to resume wilful control over economic activities which had succeeded in escaping all bounds and all the regulatory forces indispensable to the functioning of such an economic system. The contemporary economy cannot be reduced to the movement by which leading economic actors cast off all forms of control. That is only the first aspect of this economic system. The second is the re-establishment of mechanisms and institutions capable of regulating and controlling the economic world in order to ensure the redistribution of wealth and a decrease in inequality. The alter-globalization movement asserted the necessity of breaking with the Washington Consensus and seeking the equivalent of what was, after the Second World War, an alliance between a strong state and social movements, sufficiently powerful to push the state to subject the economy once again to the demands of justice. There is thus no better introduction to what must very quickly become a new political way of thinking than knowledge of the alter-globalization movement. The work of Geoffrey Pleyers offers an indispensable analysis in this regard.

Alain Touraine

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of an adventure that has taken me to various regions of the world over the last ten years. At every stage of the journey, I have had the privilege of counting upon the stimulating insights and the support of four exceptional professors: Michel Wieviorka, Alain Touraine, Martin Albrow and Jean De Munck. This book is the opportunity to express my gratitude to them all.

I am also greatly indebted to David Held, Mary Kaldor, Iavor Rangelov, Hakan Seckinelgin, Sabine Selchow, Dominika Spyratou and Fiona Holland who were all so welcoming at the LSE-Global Governance centre; to Kevin McDonald, Philippe Bataille, François Dubet, Yvon Le Bot, Luis Lopez and Alexandra Poli at the CADIS (EHESS-Paris); to Marc Poncelet, Marc Jacquemain and Jean Gadisseur at the University of Liège; to François Houtart and my colleagues of the CriDIS at the University of Louvain; to Ilán Bizberg and Sergio Zermeño in Mexico City; to James Jasper and Jeff Goodwin in New York and Jean-Louis Laville in Paris with whom I hope to carry on this debate. A special thanks to my fellow research-travellers and exceptional friends Nicole Doerr, Jeff Juris, Razmig Keucheyan, Giuseppe Caruso and Emanuele Toscano. This research gave me the opportunity to spend time with amazing people. I would especially like to thank Fabrice Collignon, Jean-Marie Roberti and Jai Sen.

Mary Foster did a great job in translating most of this book. I would also like to thank Sarah Lambert and Neil de Cort, at Polity Press, for their support. The Belgian Foundation for Scientific Research (FNRS) and the University of Louvain have provided me with excellent research facilities and a freedom that is seldom available to young scholars. May they find in this book a just reward for their trust.

To Rebeca, I would like to say how grateful I am for her faithful support in spite of the time and travels I dedicated to this research, and how privileged I feel to share with her the happiness of daily life. It has also been a privilege to join the Ornelas-Bernal family and to spend time with them at both sides of the ocean. To Gordy, Julie, Shirley, Benoit, Arnaud and Thierry, I would like to say how much I value their affection and the time we have spent together. I am running out of words to express all I owe to the unwavering support of my parents, Marie-Louise and Joseph Pleyers, who gave me both love and freedom.

Part 1: Alter-Globalization – Becoming Actors in the Global Age

Introduction

Bangalore, India, 2 October 1993

Half a million Indian farmers march against proposals included in negotiations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the precursor to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The farmers claim that the GATT will have devastating effects on their livelihoods and particularly on their control over seeds. In May, the global network of small and medium-sized farmers, Via Campesina, is constituted. It soon gathers over 100 national and local farmers’ organizations, totalling more than 100 million members in fifty-six countries. It promotes ‘social justice in fair economic relations; the preservation of land, water, seeds and other natural resources; food sovereignty; sustainable agricultural production based on small and medium-sized producers’. Via Campesina also seeks to put into practice viable and sustainable alternatives grounded in the idea of food sovereignty. The farmers’ network is prominently involved in many demonstrations against the WTO as well as in most World Social Forums and alter-globalization networks.

San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, 1 January 1994, 0:10 a.m.

On the day the Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, the United States and Canada enters into force, an army of indigenous people assume control of seven towns in Chiapas, one of the poorest states in Mexico. The movement does not seek secession, but demands ‘a Mexico in which indigenous people have their place’. The struggle is also for democratization of the country and against neoliberalism and domination by the market. Rejecting a system based on profit, they demand a world which ‘puts people at the heart of its concerns’ and which respects differences. After a few days of fighting, hostilities cease and the word becomes the only weapon of the Zapatistas. In 1996, they convened the first Inter-galactic Gathering, bringing together hundreds of supporters from all continents. This was the beginning of the international People’s Global Action network and one of the principal antecedents of the World Social Forums.

Birmingham, UK, 16 May 1998

Here, 70,000 people form a human chain around the Conference Centre where the G-8 summit is taking place. On the initiative of the international campaign Jubilee 2000, they are calling for the cancellation of third world debt. Among the participants are many ‘ordinary citizens’; belonging to no particular political organization, they are simply concerned with world affairs. In the morning, scholar–activists hold several workshops to explain the implications of the debt issue. Somewhat later in the same city, the international activist network ‘Reclaim the Streets’ launched its first Global Street Party, closing roads to all but pedestrians and cyclists. This action will be replicated around the world and its festive nature will be encountered at innumerable actions against international summits over the years to follow.

Paris, France, 27 October 1998

Following mobilizations by a coalition of more than eighty organizations, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announces to Parliament that France is withdrawing from negotiations of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). The decision terminates a long series of negotiations aimed at liberalizing trade, services and international investment. In June of the same year, following an editorial by Ignacio Ramonet in Le Monde Diplomatique, ATTAC1 is born. Its members will eventually number 27,000 in France alone, and it will have local chapters in over forty countries.

Seattle, Washington, United States of America, 1 December 1999, 6.00 a.m.

Here, 50,000 protesters block access to the conference centre. The failure of the WTO negotiations will catapult this young movement into world news. All elements due to make the alter-globalization movement a success are already present in the Seattle mobilization: network-based organizations and affinity groups; use of the internet and new communication technologies; a festive and carnivalesque atmosphere; images of broken windows; workshops where scholar–activists break down the discourse of WTO experts; and a broad convergence of civil society actors, including labour, black blocs, NGOs, green activists, experts and artists. Many other counter-summits and protests will follow, unfolding according to the same model, although without achieving the same success as Seattle: Washington DC, Prague, Sydney, Nice, Brussels, Quebec, Seville, Evian, Cancún, Mar del Plata, Hong Kong, Gleneagles, Heiligendamm, Pittsburgh and many more. Every time the ‘masters of the planet’ meet, tens of thousands of alter-globalization activists will converge.

Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, 25 January 2001

In this city in southern Brazil, the first World Social Forum convenes, simultaneously with – and in opposition to – the thirty-first World Economic Forum in Davos. After the counter-summits, alter-globalization activists want to ‘move from opposition, to the construction of alternatives’. Between 12,000 and 15,000 activists from around 100 countries come together to insist that ‘another world is possible’: a fairer world, with greater solidarity, and greater respect for differences.

As the first global protest movement since the fall of the Berlin Wall, alter-globalization came to public attention through a series of global events which erupted into the world news. Far from opposing globalization, its activists strive to contribute to the emergence of an international public space to solve the major problems of our era (Kaldor, Anheier & Glasius, 2001–3; Held, 2007), be it climate change or financial transactions. Alter-globalization activists aim to ‘contribute to the development, in each citizen, of the international disposition which is the pre-condition for all effective resistance strategies today’ (Bourdieu, 2001: 20). International mobilizations and the World Social Forums in particular have allowed thousands of activists to live a global experience and encounter people from all continents on the basis of common issues and struggles. Participation in such events strengthens the ‘global consciousness’ of each participant and a sense of her own globality (Albrow, 1996): ‘When I participated in this forum for the first time, I felt that I was of this world for the first time’ (African activist, WSF 2003); ‘As an individual, I felt that I took part in the life of this world far more after having participated in the forum. There was a really different feeling than the one I had at other international gatherings’ (Indian activist, WSF 2005).

The term ‘anti-globalization’, bestowed on the movement at its inception, was quickly recognized as inappropriate for a movement which endeavoured to ‘globalize the struggle and globalize hope’, to borrow the slogan of Via Campesina. However, it wasn’t until 27 December 2001 that the neologism ‘alter-globalization’ appeared for the first time, in the context of an interview with A. Zacharie, a young man from Liège (Belgium), published in La Libre Belgique. He argued that the prefix ‘alter’ conveys both the idea of ‘another globalization’ and the importance of constructing alternatives (interview, 2003). This term rapidly became widespread in francophone circles. Diverse variations then began to be employed in Latin America in 2003;2 while the term ‘alter-global’ gained currency in Italy. In the English-speaking world, the movement was first qualified as ‘anti-globalization’, then ‘anti-corporate globalization’ and eventually ‘the global justice movement’. A significant number of scholars and activists have, however, come to adopt what had already become the most current terminology worldwide: ‘alter-global’ or ‘alter-globalization’ – which appeared in Wikipedia in March 2009 – terms already adopted by Korean, Brazilian and German activists and analysts.

From the first uprisings to the global crisis

Three major periods can be distinguished in the short history of the alter-globalization movement.

The first is marked by the formation of the movement out of diverse mobilizations against neoliberal policies in all regions of the world. The globality of the movement became increasingly apparent, particularly during mobilizations around global events, the most commented on in the press being the Seattle protests. The alter-globalization movement was thus organized around expert meetings and counter-summits which launched the movement internationally, but also around movements which, like Zapatism, understood themselves as helping to challenge the dominant global ideology at the local level.

During this first phase, engaged intellectuals played an important role in attracting public attention to the issue of globalization and in challenging neoliberalism, at the time the uncontested hegemonic ideology. These intellectuals also initiated numerous civil society organizations and networks – which remained a feature of the alter-globalization movement until the end of the second phase – such as ATTAC, Global Trade Watch, and Focus on the Global South.

The first World Social Forum, held in Porto Alegre in January 2001, marked the beginning of the second phase, which was dominated by social forums, gatherings oriented less towards resistance than to bringing together alter-globalization activists from different parts of the world and, in some cases, elaborating alternatives. Although many columnists proclaimed the movement dead in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, maintaining that the ‘war against terrorism’ had replaced economic globalization as the central issue,3 this period can in many ways be considered the golden age of the alter-globalization movement. It was then recognized as a new global actor.

From 2000 to 2005, the movement grew rapidly on every continent. There were 50,000 protesters in Seattle in 1999. A year and a half later, 300,000 marched against the G-8 in Genoa in July 2001; the same number in Barcelona in March 2002 at a European summit; a million in Florence in November 2002 at the closing of the first European Social Forum (ESF); and 12 million worldwide against the war in Iraq on 15 February 2003, a global day of action initiated by alter-globalization networks. The number of participants in the yearly World Social Forum climbed from 12,000 in 2001 to 50,000, 100,000, 120,000 and 170,000 successively until 2005. After its success in Brazil, the World Social Forum moved to India in 2004, and the Social Forum evolved to spawn many hundreds of forums at the local, national and continental levels.

The alter-globalization movement emerged at the pinnacle of globalization in the second half of the 1990s, in a context dominated by economic issues, international trade liberalization and the rapid spread of new information and communication technologies (Castells, 1996–8). However, the global context changed at the beginning of the new millennium. Before the first World Social Forum took place, George W. Bush replaced Bill Clinton in the White House and the WTO had been subjected to its first failure in Seattle at the end of 1999. The internet speculative bubble burst in the spring of 2001, throwing into question the euphoria of economic and financial globalization. At the same time, fraud and the collapse of major global companies, such as Enron and Worldcom, tarnished the image of the financial sector. The Bush administration started wars against Afghanistan and then Iraq. Opposition to war was integrated as a major theme at the 2003 and 2004 Social Forums, but subsequently declined in importance. The 2005 WSF was focused chiefly on global governance and economic issues: third world debt, fiscal justice, reform of international institutions and global regulations, etc. After a slow-down between 2001 and 2003, international trade resumed, with markets regaining their vigour post-2003 and enjoying a period of exceptional growth until mid-2007. China’s entry into the WTO in 2002 and its rising power represented a new advance for economic globalization and trade liberalization.

The alter-globalization movement managed to win over a large part of public opinion in several countries. In 2001, a survey was published showing that 63 per cent of the French population agreed with ‘civil society organizations which demonstrate against neoliberal globalization during global summits’ (Le Monde, 19 July 2001). From 2002 to 2005, even right-wing politicians and representatives of the World Bank wanted to take part in the WSF. The 2002 European Social Forum in Florence and the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre marked two high points of this period of alter-globalization – remarkable for their size (respectively 50,000 and 170,000 participants), their openness to very diverse political cultures, and the active involvement of grassroots activists in their organization and in the discussions which took place.

Between 2002 and 2004, the war in Iraq became a major concern among the alter-globalization activists. During this period of the movement, several anti-imperialist thinkers rose in popularity as they did in the 1970s. Their conception of war as the ‘ultimate stage of neoliberal globalization’ (Ceceña4 & Sader, 2003; Chomsky, 2003) was widely popular among the activists: ‘The militarization of globalization is now the sole means of imposing neoliberalism’ (a panel at the WSF 2002, see also Klein, 2007). The alter-globalization movement globally tried to mobilize against war the same strategies and tactics they had developed to confront international institutions. As they had done against the Washington Consensus, activists strove to break the consensus in the US administration, media and most of the population, and to cast the political decisions into debate. But in the face of fundamentalists and war-mongers, their denunciation of the irrationality of the war in Iraq as a risk management strategy appeared to have no echo until the end of 2006, long after the strong mobilizations against the war in 2003.

After an impressive ascendant phase from 1995 to 2005 – though not without its setbacks and retreats – the international movement experienced several less than successful events and entered an irresolute phase. However, the decline of some of the major European alter-globalization organizations and networks does not diminish the fact that the movement achieved fundamental success on two levels: geographic expansion and the end of the Washington Consensus. The WTO trade liberalization process was hit by a series of setbacks and the Washington Consensus was massively discredited. The 2008–9 global financial crisis vindicated much alter-globalization analysis, demonstrating that it had been correct on many points. The global crisis was taken to confirm many alter-globalization analyses and some of the movement’s ideas were even adopted by heads of state. The right-wing French President Nicolas Sarkozy didn’t hesitate to appropriate alter-globalization slogans – ‘the ideology of the dictatorship of the market and public powerlessness has died with the financial crisis’5 – and the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown became a defender of a taxation on financial transactions.6

Paradoxically, many actors of the alter-globalization movements appeared to have a difficult time adapting to a new ideological context it had helped to bring about. However, chapter 10 will show that, in this third phase, this does not reflect a decline in the movement so much as a reconfiguration at three levels. The movement became more oriented towards obtaining concrete outcomes which its activists hope will emerge out of the crisis of neoliberalism. It is increasingly structured around networks and individualized commitments rather than rooted in activist organizations. Moreover, its geography has evolved considerably. The movement has declined in some of the former strongholds in Western European countries while the social forum dynamic has been reinforced in regions which are symbolically or strategically important (North America, the Maghreb, Africa). Besides, the infatuation with alter-globalization’s ideas and with its forums has not diminished in Latin America, as the adoption of anti-neoliberal policies by several heads of state in the region and the participation of 130,000 activists at the WSF in Bélem, Brazil, in January 2009 can attest.

A global movement

From Porto Alegre to Mumbai and Dakar, from Seattle to Genoa, Hong Kong and Pittsburgh, a long series of mobilizations have been conceptualized and lived as steps in the same movement. On what basis can one refer to a single, integrated movement, unifying events and actors as heterogeneous as retired scholars, rebel students, US trade unionists, Indian dalits, self-organized neighbourhoods in Argentina, indigenous communities, Korean and Brazilian farmers, artistic happenings in Italian cultural centres, Whitechapel squatters, actions against transgenic cornfields, and workshops in which retired people become familiar with macroeconomics?

First of all, the unity of the movement should not be confused with the existence of a single organization encompassing its various components. On the contrary, the existence of such a structure would risk paralysing the movement. The unity of the movement relies rather on social meanings7 shared by the actors who embody them (Touraine, 1978; Melucci, 1996) and on the major challenge they face – asserting the importance of social agency in the face of global challenges and against the neoliberal ideology: ‘Citizens and social movements can have an impact on the way our common global future is shaped.’ This has been the central message of demonstrations around the world carried out under the banners of this movement, which has declared that ‘another world is possible’. This central meaning is the starting point of the unity among alter-globalization actors and events on all continents, though neither individuals nor organizations are identical.

From this perspective, the unity of the movement is not in the least incompatible with a heterogeneity of its actors. A. Touraine (1978: 124) reminds that ‘we sometimes forget, in speaking about the workers’ movement, that it is embodied by unions, parties, cooperatives and mutual aid organizations’. Similarly, the alter-globalization movement is embodied by diverse and relatively autonomous actors and events: advocacy networks, citizens’ networks like ATTAC or Global Trade Watch, Social Forums, trade unions, youth activists, indigenous peoples, human rights networks, green activists, third world solidarity networks, etc. From this perspective, the present book aims at analysing alter-globalization as a historical actor which has a coherence of meanings. While a series of experiences, speeches, gatherings and demands can be associated with this historical actor, none of these precisely or completely corresponds with the historical subject of alter-globalization (Dubet & Wieviorka, 1995: 9). However, it is at this level that the unity and coherence8 of the practices, events and actors of alter-globalization can be grasped.

Two paths to becoming an actor in the global age

Identifying alter-globalization as a historical subject that affirms and strengthens citizens’ ability to act within a global context immediately leads to other questions: How to become an actor in this global age? How to have an impact on the world’s affairs when even elected politicians are bypassed by decisions taken by transnational companies or by experts at international institutions? How to oppose the Washington Consensus agenda efficiently?

Data from field research show that alter-globalization activists do not provide one common answer, but elaborate two distinct ways of becoming actors in the global age. One focuses on subjectivity and creativity, the other on reason and rationality. Each one has its own logic, its core values, its approach to social change and its ways of organizing the movement.

On one side, alter-globalization activists struggle to defend their subjectivity, their creativity and the specificity of their lived experience against the hold of a global, consumer culture and the hyper-utilitarianism of global markets. Their concept of social change is clearly bottom-up: rather than seeking to change the agendas of policy makers, these activists want to implement their values and alternatives in their experience of daily life, in local communities and in the networks and organizations of the movement. They claim to create autonomous spaces ‘delivered from power relations’ where they experiment with horizontal networks, alternative consumption and participatory processes. In part 2, three case studies will be used to illustrate this particular concept of social change: the autonomous process which indigenous Zapatista communities in south Mexico have experimented with; an alternative social and cultural centre in Belgium; and networks of young ‘alter-activists’ who are both strongly individualized and highly cosmopolitan.

On the other side, alter-globalization citizens have emerged as actors in the global world relying on knowledge and expertise. Part 3 will show how these activists offer alternative policies to the Washington Consensus, producing expert reports that show that current policies are not only socially unfair but also irrational according to economic and scientific criteria. In this way, thousands of activists believe that building a more active citizenry and a fairer world requires citizens to become familiar with scientific knowledge and debates, especially in the field of public economics. They consider the major challenge to be the bounds between the economy, operating at a global level, and social, cultural, environmental and political standards, which are still largely reliant on national policies. These activists thus highlight the urgent necessity of stronger and more democratic international institutions and of efficient measures capable of controlling the global economy and instituting redistribution and participation at the global level. Their approach to social change is institutionalized and rather top-down, focusing on global standards and policies, global institutions and strongly structured civil society actors able to put their issues on the agendas of national and global policy makers. Correspondingly, their organizing modalities are also often top-down and hierarchically structured. Because the movement assigns a key role to its experts and its cosmopolitan, engaged intellectuals, a major risk is that a few intellectuals assume strong leadership of the movement. Case studies of ATTAC-France and of the WSF International Council reveal that many organizations associated with this alter-globalization track have shown little concern for internal democracy. While they promote a more participatory society, many of these organizations have been reluctant to implement participatory organization internally.

This book proposes these two paths of globalization as a framework for understanding the structural tensions in a movement which is diversely embodied by specific actors. We will seek to understand these two political cultures (Escobar, 1992), each of which constitutes a coherent logic of action, defined as sets of normative orientations, practices and ways of organizing the movement (Dubet, 1994), as well as ways of relating to an adversary and approaches to social change. The aim of the present volume is less to give a panorama of the organizations, networks and social movements that embody the alter-globalization movement than to develop an analytical perspective of their main logics of action, taken as ‘heuristic devices which order a field of inquiry and identify the primary areas of consensus as well as contention’ (Held & McGrew, 2002: 3; cf. Weber, 1995[1922]).

This requires adopting a comprehensive approach, seeking to understand the movement from the inside and to grasp the projects and values which guide the actors, the way they built movements, organizations and networks, and their approach to social change. This ‘system of meanings is not generally clearly provided in the discourse of the actor but . . . directs the orientations of the action’ (Touraine, 2000: 271). Actors’ discourses must hence not be taken at face value. Through analysis, we will seek to uncover the impossible in their aims, specifically investigating the limits of these projects, the structural contradictions, the distance between the achievements and espoused values of the movement, and how these actors differentiate and distance themselves from, or even pervert (cf. Wieviorka, 2003), the founding meanings of the alter-globalization movement.

Beyond alter-globalization, this book focuses on the approaches to change developed by the two paths of the alter-globalization movement as they help us to understand the conditions under which social actors can have an impact on social change in the global age. The progressive transition to a global age represents a profound historical transformation (Albrow, 1996; Castells, 1996–8; Held et al., 1999), involving fundamental changes in political and social spheres. In today’s ‘global society’, the possibility for activists and citizens to take action is not necessarily lessened, but the modalities for effective action have shifted profoundly. This is notably the case because the context of action is no longer national society, and the state is no longer the central actor in a political and social system. Reformulating the possibilities for action in this global world constitutes a major challenge for our time and the central issue of alter-globalization. This book proposes to discuss it starting from concrete experimentations by social actors which have developed two distinct, and in some ways complementary, political cultures.

To accomplish this, we will have recourse to field data obtained in a wide range of contexts, from western countries and from the global south, pertaining to globalized actors and to those resolutely anchored in the local.9 In a first phase, we will rely on observation and analysis of those actors who have most strongly embodied these currents in regions where alter-globalization was at is pinnacle. In parts 2 and 3, our approach will consist initially of isolating in a heuristic manner the two paths of alter-globalization in order to draw out, beyond the specificity and particularities of each actor, the meanings and coherence which underpin the actions of the different currents. Within this approach, we will first of all isolate the two main logics of action assumed by alter-globalization activists (chapters 2 and 5). These logics will then be illustrated by empirical case studies, beyond ideal-type models (chapters 3 and 6). We will then focus on their concept of social change as well as the stakes and values of their struggle against the neoliberal ideology (chapters 4 and 7).

The encounters, interactions and tensions between these two paths of alter-globalization will be examined in the fourth part of the book. We will first (chapter 8) describe and illustrate three modalities of encounter between the two paths (dichotomization, assimilation and cross-fertilization). Then, in chapter 9, we will examine the main debates to which most of the tensions between the two paths of alter-globalization can be traced: privileged level of action, organization of the movement, and approach to change. Finally, chapter 10 will analyse the ways in which the core tendencies of the movement have been reconfigured since 2005, in a period that is no longer characterized by the hegemony of neoliberal globalization but by its crisis.

First of all, chapter 1 will pose the basis of the argumentation by discussing the assertion of social agency as the central meaning of alter-globalization, emphasize the main dimensions of a questioning and renewal of political citizenship and activism that marked the movement, and make explicit the methodological and field research choices on which this work relies.

Notes

1 Association pour la Taxation des Transactions financières pour l’Aide aux Citoyens; in English: ‘Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Benefit of Citizens’.

2 For example, the article by V. Quintana, ‘Globalifóxicos’, La Jornada, 9 Aug. 2003, p. 9.

3 The New York Times editorialist Thomas Friedman was among the first ones to develop this idea in the 19 September 2001 edition. On 26 September 2001, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf labelled the movement ‘violent anarchists’ – those who blame the attacks on the ‘US promotion of global capitalism’. Meanwhile, Silvio Berlusconi, who faced intense criticisms over the policing of the Genoa protests in July 2001, put the alter-globalization movement in the same category as the perpetrators of the 11 September attacks (Guardian, 29 Sept. 2001).

4 A. E. Ceceña is a Mexican scholar and activist, close to the Zapatista movement, and a member of the Continental Social Alliance, a pan-American alter-globalization network.

5 Speech of President Sarkozy on ‘the measures taken to sustain the economy’, Argonay, 23 Oct. 2008.

6 See the Guardian, 13 Dec. 2009; 12 March 2010.

7 A wide range of students of social movements have recently compelled us to pay greater heed to the social movement’s culture, its imaginaries, meanings and significance (Jasper, 2007b; Alvarez, Dagnino & Escobar, 1998; Goodwin, Jasper & Polletta, 2001), as well as activists’ experience and reflexivity (Dubet, 1994; McDonald, 2006).

8 Cf. Touraine (1978). This move arises from an attempt to synthesize reality which resembles a Weberian ideal-type in its ‘will to a reduction of complexity and to a principle of selection of facts’ (Coenen-Huther, 2003) with ‘a deliberate accentuation of certain features of the object under consideration’ (Weber 1995[1922]: 91). As Weber notes (1995: 290), ‘the fact that none of these ideal-types we have discussed are historically present in a “pure” state cannot prevent a conceptual fixation as pure as possible’.

9 For more detail on methodology and field research data, see pp. •• and ••.

1

The Will to Become an Actor

An Actor Against Neoliberal Ideology

A Constitutive Relationship with Neoliberal Ideology

The 1990s were marked by the expansion of markets in former communist countries, strong economic growth in the United States and United Kingdom, and a period of trade liberalization. Such, at any rate, was the dominant meaning attributed to globalization at this time. This inevitable and ‘happy globalization’ (Minc, 1997) was celebrated by some, while its detractors often adopted a demagogic discourse in which globalization became the root of all evil, transformed into a general explanation which dispensed with all analysis.1 Alter-globalization activists adopted a different position. Their criticisms were levelled not at globalization per se, but at the consequences of economic liberalization and market supremacy. R. Passet, president of the Scientific Committee of ATTAC France, emphasized that ‘it is not a matter of denying that the opening of borders has greatly contributed to an increase in the global product these past years’ (Grain de Sable2 415, 8 April 2003). Alter-globalization activists do not oppose globalization but an ideology: neoliberalism. Hegemonic throughout the 1990s, the neoliberal ideology managed to control the direction and meaning of globalization, tying the progressive transition to a global society to the image of a self-regulated global economy, beyond intervention by policy makers.

The origin of neoliberalism can be traced to the end of the 1940s, when a handful of intellectuals met at Mont Pélerin, Switzerland. With F. Hayek as their central thinker, they opposed the then dominant Keynesian policies and the expansion of the social state, which they believed constituted impediments to economic development. From the beginning of the 1980s, neoliberalism assumed a dominant role. This was symbolized by Mrs Thatcher taking office in Britain in 1979 and R. Reagan in the United States in 1980,3 with their emphasis on ‘free capital movements, monetarism and a minimal state that does not accept the responsibility for correcting income inequalities or managing serious externalities’ (Held & McGrew, 2007: 188). With the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoliberal ideology became hegemonic. The dominant, quasi-uncontested, interpretation of the events of 1989 was that they represented a total and definitive victory for market democracy. Journalists and opponents of this ideology referred to the package of principles promoted by the IMF, the World Bank and the American Treasury as the Washington Consensus agenda (Williamson, 1990). Focused on the elimination of barriers to free markets, the neoliberal agenda encouraged countries to privatize public services and companies, drastically reduce the economic role of the state, limit public spending, liberalize international trade, services and investments, open to foreign direct investment, decrease public expenditure on well-directed social targets and secure property rights (Held & McGrew, 2007: 187–9; Anderson, 1999).

Driving these policies was the will to promote a purely economic rationality, liberated from all obstacles stemming from regulations designed to moderate the economic system. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoliberal ideology and free trade were presented as the sole and inevitable path of modernization and transition to a global society: ‘There is no alternative,’ as Mrs Thatcher stated. Increased unemployment or poverty rates were presented, ‘as inevitable fluctuations, beneficial in the long run, or as the result of systemic constraints’ (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005[1999]: 28; D. Cohen, 2004). Placing the market at the centre of the organization of social life and international relations, the neoliberal ideology makes actors disappear in favour of a global system ruled by markets, in which governments are relieved of their capacity for intervention: a world without actors and alternatives.

This is precisely what alter-globalization activists oppose. The World Social Forum slogan ‘Another world is possible’ was intended to reject the ‘End of History’ (Fukuyama, 1992), to denounce the notion that ‘the future is no longer produced by the unfolding of a humanist project, as conscious as possible of potentials and pitfalls. It is produced by blind forces imposed like a power external to humanity: the “laws of the market” ’ (Amin, 2001). The first challenge for the alter-globalization movement was to throw into question this concept of globalization, which dominated, almost without debate, in the mid-1990s. Their objective was to ‘change minds, a necessary detoxification after two decades of neoliberal brainwashing’ (ATTAC, 2000b: 14); ‘People should know that markets are not self-regulated’ (A. Zacharie, interview, 2003). The 2008 and 2009 global economic and financial crisis showed they were right in much of their analysis.

This conflictual relationship with the neoliberal ideology is constitutive of the alter-globalization movement. It is within a conflictual relationship with an adversary that a social movement constructs itself (Touraine, 1978). Unlike a radical rupture between two enemies who seek to destroy each other, two movements in conflict (rather than at war) struggle over shared cultural values, issues and orientations. The workers’ movement shared the values of industrial society (progress, the importance of industrial production, etc.) with the capitalists of the era. Globalization, individuation of activists’ commitment as much as executive careers (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005[1999]), networked organization (Juris, 2004; Pleyers, 2009), the importance of communication and the culture of the event, are all features of this reflexive (Beck, Giddens & Lash, 1996; Dubet, 1994), information society (Castells, 1996–8), inhabited by both alter-globalization activists and their neoliberal adversaries.

The Myth of Seattle

The mobilizations against the WTO ministerial summit in Seattle, December 1999, highly dramatized the opposition to the political fatalism of the market and the assertion of the possibility of acting: citizens managed to block the WTO trade liberalization process. However, an objective analysis of the battle of Seattle soon reveals the mythical and constructed character of this alter-globalization victory. The failure of the Millennium Round of the WTO owed much more to the tensions between the United States, the European Union and certain countries of the global south (E. Cohen,4 2001) than to the 50,000 protesters outside, ten times less numerous than those at the G-8 summit in Genoa. Nevertheless, the failure of the Seattle negotiations was attributed by the press, public opinion and even WTO officials5 to the protesters. One could also note that the issues at stake in Seattle were hardly more important than those addressed at previous summits. In 1994, the summit held in Marrakesh gave birth to the WTO, but attracted only limited popular opposition. Moreover, the alter-globalization movement did not originate in Seattle. Its mobilizations owed much of their impact and their very existence to the dynamism of already well-established alter-globalization networks, such as Global Trade Watch, the International Forum on Globalization, and ATTAC, which had already raised popular awareness about the questions at issue.

Whatever their real impact, however, the events of Seattle were invested with major significance: through mobilizing, ‘ordinary citizens’ and civil society organizations can have an impact on decisions taken at the highest level, even by international organizations which had previously appeared to be inaccessible. That the failure of the negotiations objectively owes more to disagreements among WTO members than to protesters changes nothing. The historian E. P. Thompson (1963) has demonstrated the great importance of myths and heroic acts in the construction of collective consciousness, just as W. I. and E. S. Thomas (1928: 572) maintained ‘if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (see Merton, 1995). In this way, attributing the failure of the WTO to the alter-globalization movement validated the appearance of a new actor and inaugurated a period of strong growth. Seattle became the model for counter-summits, the very symbol of resistance to the Washington Consensus and the expression of the will of thousands of people around the world to ‘reclaim the power of initiative and decision-making’ (activist from ATTAC-Liège, December 1999). The failure of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1997, then of the Millennium Round of the WTO in Seattle, came to show that the current model of development allowed room for political choices, and was not a matter of ‘inevitable historical necessity’ as the neoliberals had claimed. What was shouted, sung and danced at the Social Forums was a refusal of the ineluctable nature of neoliberal policies and an assertion of the possibility of ‘another world’: the will to participate in decisions affecting world future.

Two high-profile activists, which the following chapters show belong to two quite distinct trends of alter-globalization, can be quoted in this regard. The French-Spanish intellectual I. Ramonet, author of the Monde Diplomatique editorial which gave birth to ATTAC, proclaimed that ‘the suffering in this world is not inevitable. To rectify it, thirty billion dollars per year would be sufficient. It would be sufficient to levy 4% tax on the 225 biggest fortunes in the world! Thirty billion dollars per year, that’s what the Europeans and Americans spend on perfume. There is nothing impossible about it’ (ATTAC at Le Zénith, 19 January 2002).

Embodying a new generation of activists, Naomi Klein conveyed a similar message at the second WSF in Porto Alegre, Brazil:

We grew up with messages of impossibility. It was impossible to confront poverty, impossible to have a foreign policy independent of the United States… . Everything was impossible. But today, the world has changed. There is a new generation and now, it is possible. It is possible that people participate in choices as in Porto Alegre. It is possible to have independent media… . We are constructing an alternative to a culture which says that no other society is possible.

Thus, while the omnipotence of the market and of economic globalization was proclaimed everywhere, with the corollary that states and, a fortiori, citizens had limited capacity to act, this protest movement insisted that globalization had not vitiated social agency. Young and not so young, ‘ordinary citizens’ and long-standing activists sought to ‘reappropriate the future of the world together’, ‘re-conquer the spaces lost by democracy to the financial sector’6 (a text of ATTAC-Liège, 2000), and participate in decisions on which their destiny depended. This will to become an actor is omnipresent in interviews with alter-globalization activists encountered in different countries: ‘Either we choose to be a cockleshell adrift in the sea, or we say, “I want to row” … , to say, “No, I want to struggle, I want to have an impact, I want to try to influence decisions, even in a small way” ’ (interview, 2000).

Two Paths of a Movement

Along with other actors, alter-globalization has contributed to a profound shift in dominant approaches to political economy and to the transition to a global society. In a context where policy makers, structured political participation and representative democracy have shown their limitations in the face of global challenges, how did this global but heterogeneous movement manage to become an actor in the global age and against neoliberal ideology? How did this ‘will to become an actor’ translate in concrete terms? Responses drawn from empirical observation yielded paradoxical results. Here are four examples:

1. In the course of our research on alter-globalization youth, our interest was essentially focused on particular groups, observed in London, Paris and Mexico, as well as at the World Social Forums and numerous international mobilizations. The similarities in their discourse and practice were striking, though no formal link existed between them. These networks of urban youth, with an innovative and very individualized political commitment, all claimed a strong Zapatista inspiration. How to explain the appeal of an indigenous, rural movement, engaged in a struggle to defend communities, to very individualized, urban youth?

2. Another permanent paradox of alter-globalization resides in the co-existence, within the same movement and sometimes the same location, of very different practices. Can the street parties in Birmingham, samba parades in Porto Alegre, concerts, festive and playful actions really be part of the same movement as the summer universities, conferences and Social Forums’ workshops, which bring together hundreds of activists to sit through eight hours of lectures a day on ‘extremely boring’ themes, to borrow the term of the president of a local chapter of ATTAC?

3. The third example is drawn from the mobilization against the WTO in Cancún. Hundreds of NGOs and advocacy networks had worked for months in order to be accredited by the WTO and thereby gain access to the negotiation centre, in the hopes of having their arguments heard by government delegates. A mile from the Cancún congress centre, an Italian alter-globalization activist argued, ‘I am not here to try to influence the ongoing negotiations. I’m not interested in that.’ Why then did he travel 12,000 kilometres to take part in the mobilizations at Cancún? A response was suggested by one of his fellow countrymen in the ensuing discussion: ‘We don’t want to enter into negotiations or influence governments… . We want to create something different: alternative spaces that don’t follow the rules dictated by the WTO and the G-8.’

4. Finally, in discussing a thirty-year-old Belgian alter-globalization leader, two activists of the same age offered sharply divergent opinions:

At ATTAC, many people said that Benjamin was starting to take up too much space. But he’s the one with the expertise. He works hard. He has written seven books! I don’t even want to know the hours he keeps. I don’t mind if someone who works so hard is put in front.

ATTAC, they are the people who speak on behalf of others. Benjamin, we know each other, but it really pisses me off when he speaks for me. I don’t have an intellectual problem, no problem with articulation, none with expressing myself which would prevent me from doing a TV interview… . Really, it is robbing others of their speech; he is out to lunch when he says that their points of view are better founded than mine.

These four examples constitute enigmas which are particularly intriguing because they resurfaced, in multiple variations, in each country where this research was conducted. Their repetition in very distinct contexts indicates they should be considered not as insignificant incoherences of a disparate movement, but as the result of structural characteristics of the alter-globalization movement. These paradoxes become intelligible once we conceive of alter-globalization not as a homogeneous movement but as an uneasy convergence of two tendencies, one centred on subjectivity, the other on reason, and both asserting the will to be an actor within and in the face of globalization and against neoliberalism.