Day one (10.10) in Parma

The purpose of these notes is to give some impressions on the World Social Forum International Council meeting that is taking place in Parma, Italy, on 10-12 October 2006. Together with Laura Tuominen, I am representing Network Institute for Global Democratization (NIGD) in this meeting.

As always during the past years, the first hours of the meeting seem chaotic. This time perhaps even more than before. This is my tenth IC meeting over the years, and I get slightly annoyed when thinking about how we have not been able to create more efficient mechanisms for organizing the debates. This is, of course, only the first impression, during the first hours of the first morning. I hope my assessment improves over the coming days.

The thing that particularly puzzles me this morning is why the debates of the IC meetings are not made available through the Internet (preferably both in audio and written form). When I mention this publicly at the beginning of the plenary meeting, Roberto Savio, representing Inter Press Service, points out that such proposal was formally accepted in the last IC meeting.

The IC has been criticized thousands of times of not being sufficiently transparent. Making the debates publicly available through the Internet may not resolve all the transparency problems, but not having implemented this small proposal is truly a shame, especially if the proposal was already formally accepted.

Scattered blog “reports” like this one are no substitute for systematic recording and diffusion of the debates. I have not heard a single good argument against such practice, but somehow it never gets established. In this meeting the question of recording the debates was taken up on behalf of the interpreters who wanted to record the debates for “study purposes”.

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Who are here? At one moment during the first day I count around 55 people in the meeting room, 35 men and 20 women. Since people come and go, this is not a very scientific statistical calculation. Most of the people in the room are representatives of organizations that are formal IC member, some are observers, and a few are local organizers of the meeting.

Language-wise, French seems to have become slightly more commonly used language in the IC meetings than before when Spanish/Portuguese and English were by far the most prevalent. This is partially due to a growing African presence. During the first hours of the meeting, I count around ten Africans in the room, most of them using French in their interventions. Their presence also seems to encourage people who speak native or otherwise good French to use French in their interventions as well (and some of them used to speak in English or Spanish during the first years of the existence of the IC). Occasionally, an Italian decides to use Italian in her or his intervention. The interpretation between the four languages (Spanish and Portuguese considered one language here) works relatively well.

Of the absences, compared to previous IC meetings, I note that Via Campesina seems to have no representative here. As one of the most important and admirable social movement articulations of our world, its absence worries me. To what extent is this absence a consequence of the frustrations some social movements have expressed about the WSF process?

One of the themes about which there has been most disagreement is the periodicity of the main World Social Forum events. Should the WSF be organized annually or with longer intervals? Is organizing various forums simultaneously, the polycentric format, a good way to find a compromise solution to this question that has raised passions and tensions in various IC meetings.

Via Campesina has been the most vocal of the movements that have argued against organizing the WSF every year. Organizing the forums takes up so much energy and resources that there exists a risk that once movements enter into the WSF organizing process they will have less time and resources for their other struggles, for what can be considered their “real” struggles. In this context, Via Campesina and others want the WSF to be organized with longer intervals than has been the case in the first years of the process.

Here in Parma, the hot nature of this question becomes evident during the first day in the debates on how and when the question of periodicity should be placed on the agenda of this meeting. Some want to discuss what happens in the Nairobi WSF of January 2007 first, and only then (if any time remains) enter into the debates on the future. Others argue they should be discussed together.

Despite the differences as regards the agenda, the discussions start, and various exciting points are brought up. My initial frustration with the chaotic nature of the meeting starts melting away. Even if the process is tiring, filled with frustrating moments, it is at least for the time being worth the effort.

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One of the issues discussed during the first afternoon of the IC meeting is how to organize the fourth day of the WSF 2007 in Nairobi. The “Brazilian Collective” that mostly controls the secretariat of the WSF has made a fairly detailed proposal on the methodological guidelines for the Nairobi WSF. One of the innovations, as compared to past years, is that the fourth day of the Forum should be explicitly and wholly dedicated to plans for future campaigns and struggles.

The emphasis on campaigns and struggles is, of course, not totally new. In Porto Alegre there used to be a “Mural of Proposals”, where ideas and proposals of campaigns and struggles could be posted. It never received as much attention as many of us had hoped. The lack of mechanisms that could make the WSF more useful for concrete campaigns and struggles haunts the methodology for various years now.

The complaint that the WSF is not sufficiently useful for concrete struggles has been repeatedly made by various kinds of participants and observers of the process. The debates on the fourth day of the Nairobi WSF and other related matters continue until almost midnight. At some point everyone seems too tired, the debate stops. The first meeting day in Parma is over.

Day two (11.10) in Parma

During the second day of the WSF IC meeting, two of the main themes were the concrete organizational matters of the Nairobi WSF to be held in January 2007 and the periodicity of the WSF after 2007. There was also an excellent
presentation of a report on financial strategies of the WSF. Having repeatedly
argued that the “economic” issues surrounding the WSF process have been too depoliticized, I found this report an important step in increasing the
transparency and political understanding of the process.

In my blog comments during the first day of this IC meeting, I made some
comments on the absence of the Via Campesina network. Fortunately a
representative of Via Campesina arrived for the second day of the meeting, so this fact should be taken into account when reading my comments on the first day.

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During the second day the ambiguity of to what extent the WSF is a “process” or an “event” was evident in discussions on whether our debates and decisions should focus almost wholly to urgent organizational questions of Nairobi. In my (only) plenary intervention during the second day I argued that it will be useful for the Nairobi process if we could make a decision on the periodicity question that has haunted our work for years. Resolving that question and moving beyond the impasse could inject new energies and enthusiasm for the process, and in this context it would be easier to focus on organizing the Nairobi WSF.

I also stated that while I had previously had difficulties to take a stand on
whether the main world event should continue to be organized every year or
whether it should be organized every two (or more) years, it now seemed clear to me that insisting on an yearly event would imply a very serious break within the WSF process. Whereas some had suggested that the issue should be decided in January in Nairobi, I found it important to reach a decision, if possible, here in Parma.

Compared to earlier debates on the issue, the clear majority of those who
spoke about the issue were in favour of not organizing a traditional WSF world event in 2008 but only in 2009. The emerging consensus was also that the polycentric format that was experimented in 2006 in Caracas, Bamako and Karachi would not present an adequate solution for 2008. Instead of organizing a coordinated polycentric forum, the idea was to give room for regional, national, local and thematic forums, with their autonomous organizational dynamics, during 2008, and then have a coordinated “world” World Social Forum in 2009.

One of the main doubts about such proposal, that seemed to be emerging as a consensual position, was whether it would imply some kind of vacuum. The fear was that if we will not organize anything in 2008 during the meeting of the World Economic Forum that is held every January in Davos, the media will interpret it as a failure. It seemed that on both sides of the traditional
divide that the IC has had on this issue, there existed an increased
willingness to reach a solution that would somehow take this fear into
account, for example, by proposing worldwide locally organize actions in
January 2008 even if no centralized WSF would take place, while concluding
that the next global WSF event after Nairobi would be held in 2009.

In earlier debates on the periodicity issue, some of the people who defended
maintaining the annual rhythm of the main world event had expressed, mostly in informal discussions outside the plenary, that there was also a risk
that “some groups” would fill the space during the traditional WSF days in
January if no coordinated WSF event took place. These groups were generally
associated with the Assembly of Social Movements, and sometimes fears of
a “radical” (or “Trotskyist” or something similar) conspiracy were apparent
among those defending the annual organization of the WSF.

During the second day of the meeting it seemed that time might have become ripe for reaching a consensus on this issue, though decision-making was postponed to the third and final day of the IC meeting.

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On the Nairobi WSF, there were various reports and debates. I lost one part of the morning debates when I went to send my earlier blog report from the
library of the economic faculty of the Parma University where the local
organizers had nicely arranged a working space with computers connected to the Internet.

As regards the logistics of the Nairobi WSF, one of the issues was the recent
change of venue. The main events are now planned to be held in a space outside the city center, Kasarani stadium, and this has all kinds of implications for transport, accommodation and other issue. My overall impression is that those issues represent no major problems, though I missed some parts of the discussion. A detailed written report was prepared by the Kenyan organizers, and in case someone has trouble finding it elsewhere I can probably provide an electronic copy if you ask.

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One of the issues that caused more politically loaded debate was the extent to which various kinds of churches will participate in the Nairobi WSF. Some
people, especially feminists, expressed concern about including such
institutions that may have aims that are in contradiction with the WSF Charter of Principles. The local organizers stated that various church-related
organizations, Catholic and Protestant, have decided to participate in the
Nairobi WSF in a coordinated manner. They also stated that in that context it
would be difficult for the Organizing Committee to act as a gate-keeper and
start screening what Churches may represent conservative, “or even right-
wing”, positions. Such gate-keeping would demand too much energy and probably also (though this was not stated explicitly) cause various kinds of
contradictions and quarrels that could make the organizing process much more complicated.

A participant from the French-speaking West Africa commented during a break that the way churches have been included in the Kenyan process could never have happened in West Africa where the French secular tradition has implied a different postcolonial role for the Churches than in East Africa where the British colonial tradition was prevalent.

Be it as it may, the position expressed by the Kenyan organizers on this issue was received with concern by various people I spoke with over the coffee breaks. It was an example of the difficulties we (let us assume “we” refers to the WSF IC) have often had in defining the ideological boundaries of a space that is in principle declared as “open”.

I have always thought that the idea of an “open space” should be interpreted in the context of the Charter of Principles that establishes at least some general guidelines on what kinds of organizations can and cannot participate in the WSF process. The boundaries cannot be considered totally fixed, and there are certainly all kinds of frontier zones that make it impossible to fully define what is inside and what remains outside of the WSF process.

In the preparations of the Mumbai WSF, held in January 2004, “communalism” was often used by the Indian organizers to describe such intolerant groups that should be excluded from the WSF. At some point the Indians suggested changes to the Charter of Principles to formally establish the exclusion of “communalist” groups, but an understanding was finally reached in the IC meeting of Miami in 2003 that the original Charter of Principles already included an adequate basis for such exclusions.

It seems to me that in the Nairobi WSF there might be fewer political or
ideological border guards than in many of the previous forums, at least as
regards the participation of Churches. Then again, a wide variety of Churches
has always participated in the WSF process without major debates about their role. Perhaps the Nairobi WSF provides a good moment for debating the role of different expressions of spirituality in the WSF. Whereas the Christian
Churches have participated in the process, sometimes the participation of
groups that express spiritualities in other forms has been made a
controversial issue.

I had earlier raised the issue of different standards for different expressions of spirituality in the Passignano IC meeting in 2004, when the IC membership application of the Proutist Universal was rejected by the IC. Proutist Universal is an international group headquartered in Denmark but closely related to the Indian organization Ananda Marga (“The Path of Bliss”). One of the arguments of the Indians who were opposed to its membership was that Ananda Marga has a ritual of dancing around skulls. I pointed out that in the room there were many people who had a ritual of worshipping a human body on a cross, and I found no basis for including one and excluding the others on the basis of strange rituals. Of course, the issue was more complicated than that, and we also need to take account the fact that Christian Churches or organizations closely related to them are important financial contributors of the WSF process. I am also not implying that there may not be other valid reasons to exclude organizations like Proutist Universal from the WSF process or its International Council, simply pointing out that some of the reasons to justify the exclusion were problematic.

 Day three (12.10) in Parma

The third day started in a wonderful way. Chico Whitaker read a short
declaration that had been formulated by him and some other people last night on the future of the World Social Forum process. The frustrations of the beginning of the meeting and the feeling that decision-making is so
complicated were washed away by the applause after each point that Chico read. This was consensus-building at its best. And, most importantly, we seem to have gotten beyond one of the most complicated issues of the recent history of the IC.

One of the key things decided through the applause was that the next
coordinated worldwide World Social Forum event after Nairobi will take place
in 2009. This way, the demand of an increasing number of organizations was
finally expressed in a formal decision. Even if there will therefore be no
centralized WSF event in 2008, it was also decided that there will be various
kinds of mobilizations in different parts of the world around the time of the
World Economic Forum in 2008 (in January, if the WEF timetable continues as before). The themes of these mobilizations in 2008 would not be coordinated centrally by the International Council or anyone else. It would be up to the local organizations and their networks to decide whether and how they should organize.

This decision may sound like a small procedural issue about the scheduling of
the WSF process. Nevertheless, it had been loaded with various kinds of
political tensions and disagreements. My impression, and I hope I am not being overly optimistic, is that having finally reached a consensus on this issue may give a significant boost to the WSF process.

First of all, the decision shows that there has been a learning process among
the IC members. Over the past months and years, positions on this issue became more flexible and common ground was constructed. The perceived decision-making capacity of the IC was thereby strengthened.

Secondly, my understanding is that the decision expresses the long-held
position of various large social movements and their networks. Some of them had become increasingly frustrated with the WSF process, partially because they felt that the process was too much driven by NGOs that did not
sufficiently take into account the struggles of the movements. Even if the
movement/NGO dichotomy is in many ways problematic, I hope this decision gives renewed hope for various movements since the contents of the decision in many ways reflect their demands.

Thirdly, the decision to call for mobilizations around the dates of the World
Economic Forum is an important challenge for the WSF process. It may give some new answers to the question of how the WSF could become politically more useful. Ideally, it will help us move beyond the space/movement dilemmas that have haunted the process. On the one hand, in principle there will be no central coordination or prioritization of different campaigns and struggles, as long as they are in accordance with the WSF Charter of Principles. In this sense, the mobilizations will not violate the principle that concrete political mobilization is something that the WSF participants are encouraged to do, but that particular campaigns should not be taken up as political priorities of the WSF. On the other hand, this decision may contribute to transforming the WSF process into a platform that can be considered more useful for the concrete struggles and campaigns of the movements.

Various challenges related to this decision remain, and some of them will be
taken up when the IC meets next time immediately after the Nairobi WSF in
January 2007.

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Various other issues were debated and decided during the third day. It is
almost universally agreed that the IC and other WSF organizers have not paid enough attention to communication. This is true of the internal communication of the process, for example between the IC members or between the Secretariat and others. This is also true of the external communication of the process, the way the WSF relates to media in different parts of the world.

One of the discussions was whether a certain amount of funds, mostly defined as USD 80 000, should be earmarked for communication purposes. This would include employing specialist(s) to figure out how to get major newspapers and other media outlets interested in the WSF. Not surprisingly, there was some debate on whether attracting big media should be one of our priorities.

It was also pointed out that it may be problematic for the IC to make such
binding decisions on the use of funds, when in recent history it has become
clear that the IC is unwilling or unable to take responsibility when the WSF
events run a deficit. The last WSF of Porto Alegre, held in 2005, left a
significant deficit of around USD 1.5 million that still continues to be a
problem for the process. The financial burden was mostly left for the
Brazilian Organizing Committee, and the particular Brazilian organizations
that had managed the organizational funds.

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In the discussion on the themes of the Nairobi WSF, a couple of issues became somewhat controversial. A minor controversy took place when it was suggested that “gender equality and diversity” be included as a transversal theme. A participant from West Africa stated strongly that “gender equality” is acceptable, but emphasizing “diversity” will be very problematic. At least my understanding, based also on my informal discussions with the person
yesterday, was that the key point here was to avoid sexual diversity from
being emphasized as an important theme. In other words, if the WSF process makes gay rights and other GLBT (gay, lesbian, bi, trans) themes very visible in its program, some of our African comrades tend to think that it creates a problem in the way the WSF is perceived in the local African contexts.

For example, in the Bamako Appeal that appeared during the Bamako WSF in early 2006 there was no mention of sexual diversity or GLBT themes. For many participants of the WSF process, this absence is a serious problem. To what extent the themes of the WSF should avoid addressing questions that can be “sensitive” in the local contexts? In what ways can an insistence on the importance of sexual diversity in the African contexts imply colonial
attitudes, as some Africans (and perhaps not only Roberto Mugabe) claim?

 Day three (12.10) the last hours in Parma

During the final hours of the IC meeting in Parma, the perhaps most contested issue was “fundamentalism”. There was a proposal, especially but not only by women linked to one branch of feminism, that fundamentalism should be made visible as one of the key questions in the program of the Nairobi WSF. In earlier editions of the WSF, the Latin American feminist network Articulación Feminista Marcosur had presented innovative videos and other material “against all fundamentalisms”.

The proposal to add “fundamentalism” to the program themes was, however, strongly questioned by various participants of the IC meeting. One argument was that since being against fundamentalism is one of the main justifications the US governments uses in its imperialist actions, our using similar terminology could end up legitimizing imperialism. It was curious to note (well, I had noted this before as well) that these opposing positions on “fundamentalisms” were held by representatives of different women’s networks. Many outside observers tend to consider feminism a rather monolithic position, when in reality there are often significant divergences between different feminist/women’s movements.

It was also pointed out by a participant from Palestine that she was living under regime that is labelled fundamentalist, feeling happy that it was voted for government, and therefore she found the term fundamentalism very problematic. One of her points that I found insightful, even if I tend to like the debates that focus on different kinds of fundamentalisms, was that why should we “hide” behind the term fundamentalism, if we need to talk for example about women’s rights.

There were also demands to be more specific: are we talking about “neoliberal fundamentalism”, “Islamic fundamentalist”, “Christian fundamentalism” or what? On the other hand, it was pointed out by others that if we follow similar logic, we should not be using the term “democracy” either since the Bush government uses it to justify imperialist actions.

At least my understanding is that the term “fundamentalism” was considered too sensitive to be used in the main titles of the program themes. Perhaps if more people had seen the excellent campaign video of Articulación Feminista Marcosur on fundamentalisms, the result might have been different. In the video, George W. Bush, the Pope, Bin Laden and others are all labelled as fundamentalists. Even if I like the video a lot, I have repeatedly made some friendly criticism arguing that if we really took “being against all fundamentalisms” as THE main guideline of our struggles, we could end up in problematically relativistic positions.

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One of the things I got involved in during the final day of the meeting was the Expansion Commission. Over three years ago, in its Miami meeting, he International Council created various commissions to make its internal workings more smooth and efficient. Some of the commissions have worked relatively well over the years, whereas others have been practically closed down. The Expansion Commission has been dealing with some of the main controversies, especially those that concern membership applications from organizations that want to join the IC. There has never been total clarity about the criteria that should be used in assessing the applications.

The problems in deciding on the criteria resulted during past years in a curious paradox of open space. Many have argued, especially in the past, that since the WSF is an “open space”, it must not have too many procedural rules because they are somehow against the principle of open space. Fair enough, in principle. Then the IC faced the practical dilemma that various organizations wanted to become IC members. And since the open-space ideology implied that procedures were bad, we could not establish clear procedures to decide on anybody’s inclusion. Thereby defending principles of “open space” resulted in the space being closed for outsiders.

This strange and embarrassing situation lasted for two years, from the IC meeting of Barcelona in 2002 until the Passignano IC meeting in 2004, and during that period no new members were accepted.

In the past two years, the Expansion Commission has been relatively active. In the Parma meeting, however, basically all the 3-4 key people who had been most active in coordinating the recent work of the Expansion Commission were absent. While I had previously also been quite active (though probably not sufficiently committed to sustained work) in the Commission, I missed the last IC meeting and felt therefore a bit out of touch with the issues that had to be dealt with.

In the Parma IC meeting, during the first two days nobody from the “key facilitating group” (I almost said Secretariat, but now this terminology is also somewhat outdated, though other terms are equally problematic) ever mentioned anything (that I would have heard) about the Expansion Commission. Talking to people who had been more or less loosely or actively linked to the Commission in the past, we decided to hold at least a brief meeting to finalize one of the key tasks of the Commission: processing two pending membership applications.

The precarious nature of our meeting reflected the lack of established procedures in the work of the IC. There should be mechanisms so that the work of the different organs of the IC continues even of some key people are absent from a meeting. This is of course to a large extent a responsibility of the Expansion Commission itself (and we should all whip ourselves), but it also reflects the excessively unstructured manner in which the IC often works.

There were two pending applications, one by Herriak Aske and the other by Ittijah. Herriak Aske is a network that consists of three organizations: Askapena, Coordinadora Simón Bolívar and Health Work Committees from Palestine. The application had been processed in the Nairobi IC meeting in March 2006, and a decision was then made to make a decision in this Parma meeting.

The Expansion Commission concluded that Herriak Aske seemed to fulfil the formal requirements of IC membership, including at least two letters of recommendation from existing IC members. The IC member organizations that had previously expressed doubts about its inclusion had withdrawn their objections. The doubts had mostly been around the kind of role Herriak Aske, or more exactly its core member Askapena, plays in Basque radicalism and whether there might be connections that imply problems with the Charter of Principles.

The other applicant, Ittijah, is a network of Palestine civil society organizations that work inside (what are currently often considered) the borders of Israel. In its case as well, we concluded that it seemed to fulfil the formal requirements of IC membership and its application had received support of at least two current IC members.

The Expansion Commission therefore decided to recommend the inclusion of both Herriak Aske and Ittijah in the IC. Even if the application of Herriak Aske had previously caused some controversy, a consensus had emerged around this issue as well, and both recommendations were accepted without any heated debates by the IC plenary.

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During the final moments of the Parma meeting, a couple of new commissions were created, one with the complicated task of defining a renewed system of facilitation for the whole WSF process. Questions of representation were referred to when it was discussed who should become members of such commissions. As often before, the solution was a list that one of the Brazilian initiators of the WSF process had drafted. There was no major questioning of the legitimacy of the list, and perhaps it was the best solution since the IC has few other procedures for making decisions. Trust is a key issue in those contexts, and I somehow feel that this meeting in Parma strengthened our mutual levels of trust at least slightly.

The decision on periodicity was definitively one the most important issues resolved, at least partially, in Parma. I was talking to many people after the formal meeting was over whether that decision could heal some of the wounds that had been opened or deepened by the previous inability to decide on it. Some commented, more pessimistically, that maybe the decision became a bit too late. Others, and probably the majority of those I spoke with, were more hopeful. In any case, now that a consensus has finally been constructed in the question of periodicity, it is time to focus on the organization of the Nairobi WSF. Only slightly over three months left, and much needs to be done.

The involvement of the churches in the Nairobi process caused some ideological doubts among the Parma IC meeting participants, but I felt practically all the participants were committed to building a good forum in Nairobi. About the future, I did not hear any serious conversations on where the WSF should be organized in 2009, though if there was a poll today, “somewhere in Brazil” might be a relatively strong candidate, though the emergence of a good proposal to hold it elsewhere could change the situation. Since there is still plenty of time, we can now focus on Nairobi, though it should never be forgotten that the WSF is not simply about organizing the next event. The sooner there exists a good proposal for a place to hold the WSF in 2009, the better.