BY SEAN HEALY
FLORENCE — It was always going to be a recipe for chaos. Take 40,000 European leftists, fractious at the best of times, shoe-horn them into a Renaissance-era Italian city and tell them to discuss, in half a dozen languages, the state of the world and the possibilities of changing it. And chaos it was — but of the kind from which revolutions come.
The European Social Forum (ESF) took over Florence, November 6-10. Its participants crammed into the enormous conference halls of the Fortezza da Basso, scrambled for translator headsets and strained to hear speeches on every conceivable topic, from the US "war on terror" to privatisation and the WTO.
Between sessions, participants packed the Fortezza's large main courtyard, bought left-wing newspapers (available in 10 languages), squeezed past countless information stalls, stood in long lines for food, drink and toilets, and admired each other's Che Guevara t-shirts.
When the Fortezza couldn't hold them all, the activists overflowed into workshops and seminars held in almost every public venue in the city. And every street in between was filled with people wearing bright red ESF registration tags around their necks.
At night, the city's hotels were full to capacity. Participants also crashed in football stadiums, racetracks and gymnasiums.
The forum was a powerful experiment in self-management, run by thousands of harried but no less effective volunteers.
On November 9, the ESF participants joined a million people as they poured off buses and trains from every corner of Europe to flood Florence's streets and squares in a massive show of counter-power, in opposition to Washington's looming war on Iraq.
The march was of staggering proportions. The front of the march left the Fortezza at 1pm. It wasn't until 7.30pm that the foot-weary affinity group I was in, two-thirds of the way back, reached the finishing point some five kilometres away. At 9pm, there were still marchers who had not departed the starting point.
The whole way, and even down side streets, were people with red banners and rainbow flags, many wearing Palestinian keffiyehs around necks. The ever-present songs of the WWII communist-led Italian partisans and the dull roar of hundreds of thousands of conversations filled our ears.
The success of the ESF and the antiwar march was also a very hard slap in the face for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government, which had sought to whip up an atmosphere of fear in the lead-up, conjuring images of angry youth putting the city of Dante to the flame. The right-wing media happily waded in: under the banner "Assault on Florence", Panorama magazine ran a cover photo of Michelangelo's "David", which stands in a museum a few blocks from the conference site, made up like an anarchist, complete with tattoo, helmet and red-and-black bandana.
In the end, the "assault" never happened. The massive crowd had only the most peaceful, albeit still most radical, of intentions and the carabinieri were either too scared or too wise to show their faces.
The ESF discussed an extraordinary number of issues. While they were all "specific", the processes of globalisation have led to the connections between issues, struggles and movements becoming much more obvious. The most obvious example of this was the way the ESF dealt with the war.
Bush's "war on terror" has not defeated the global justice movement in Europe, as its opponents no doubt hoped. Nor has the movement turned from being a movement against neo-liberalism into a movement against war. It hasn't transformed its focus from opposition to institutions like the World Trade Organisation or the International Monetary Fund to opposition to something more tangible, the US war drive.
In Florence, the movement against corporate globalisation, itself a coalition of movements, flowed into a new movement against war. It did not dilute or narrow itself, but rather it has been deepened and radicalised.
For the ESF activists in Florence, US war drive is more than just the atrocities inflicted on Afghanistan and looming crime against humanity that is about to be perpetrated by Washington against the people of Iraq. They are against la guerra permanente globale — the permanent global war — in Chechnya, Palestine, the Basque lands and in all Western countries, where laws are being passed aimed at activists' rights. This war includes the walls being built to keep asylum seekers out of the rich countries and the daily economic violence inflicted against the poor, the homeless and the excluded.
The ESF was not simply a forum for opposition, it was also a forum of alternatives, embodied in its slogan "Another Europe is possible". Certainly, the slogan — and sentiment behind it — got a good airing. I lost count of the number of times speakers used it to finish their contributions, always to a grand cheer.
The alternatives and solutions argued for were always the universal ones: universal welfare against privatisation and unemployment; universal freedom of movement against "Fortress Europe"; universal citizenship against the "divine right of money".
One morning, looking down from a balcony on the courtyard of people, one thing became obvious. One alternative so often referred to, the "other globalisation", already exists in this movement. What surfaced for five days in Florence was "globalisation from below".
The Assembly of European Social Movements on November 10 easily came up with a full Europe-wide program for the next period, including protests against a NATO summit in Prague in late November, in Copenhagen against the European Union summit in December, in Evian, France, against the hated G8 next July.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, November 20, 2002.
Visit the