Global Democracy and the World Social Forums (International Studies Intensives)
by Jackie Smith, Marina Karides, Marc Becker, Dorval Brunelle, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Donatella Della Porta
Chapter One
Globalization and the Emergence of the World Social Forums
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The WSF process – by which we mean the networked, repeated, interconnected, and multilevel gatherings of diverse groups of people around the aim of bringing about a more just and humane world – and the possibilities and challenges this process holds.
Civil society has been largely shut out of the process of planning an increasingly powerful global economy.
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The WSF has become an important, but certainly not the only, focal point for the global justice movement. It is a setting where activists can meet their counterparts from other parts of the world, expand their understandings of globalization and of the interdependencies among the world’s people, and plan joint campaigns to promote their common aims. It allows people to actively debate proposals for organizing global policy while nurturing values of tolerance, equality, and participation. And it has generated some common ideas about other visions for a better world. Unlike the WEF, the activities of the WSF are crucial to cultivating a foundation for a more democratic global economic and political order.
(4) WSF seeks to develop a transnational political identity
The WSF not only fosters networking among activists from different places, but it also plays a critical role in supporting what might be called a transnational counterpublic. Democracy requires public spaces for the articulation of different interests and visions of desirable futures. If we are to have a more democratic global system, we need to enable more citizens to become active participants in global policy discussions.
The WSF… also provides routine contact among the countless individuals and organizations working to address common grievances against global economic and political structures. This contact is essential for helping activists shar analyses and coordinate strategies, but it is also indispensable as a means of reaffirming a common commitment to and vision of “another world,” especially when day-to-day struggles often dampen such hope. Isolated groups lack information and creative input needed to innovate and adapt their strategies. IN the face of repression, exclusion, and ignorance, this transnational solidarity helps energize those who challenge the structures of global capitalism.
Aided by the Internet and an increasingly dense web of transnational citizens networks, the WSF and its regional and local counterparts dramatize the unity among diverse local struggles and encourage coordination among activists working at local, national and transnational levels.
(7) WSF values protests over permanent deliberative political bodies
Depoliticization is driven by the belief that democracy muddles leadership and economic efficiency. This crisis of democracy is reflected in the proliferation of public protests and other forms of citizen political participation, which are seen by the neoliberals as resulting from excessive citizen participation in democracy
(8) Reports claiming democratic crisis
The crisis of democracy was a diagnosis developed by political and economic elites in the 1970s, a time when the WEF was first launched. Two reports had a profound impact on how governments came to refine their relations with their citizens and social organizations in the ensuing years. The first was a report made to the Trilateral Commission in 1975 [The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission] and the second was a 1995 Commission on Global Governance Report.
(10-11) Pre-WSF summits propose radical recommendations to empower NGOs via UN
The growing participation of civil society organizations in UN-sponsored conferences reflected the need for some form of global governance in an increasingly interlinked global economy.
…it was the second Earth Summit in 1992 that revealed the difficulties besetting world governance and eventually led to the Commission on Global Governance. The commission report, Our Global Neighborhood, acknowledged that national governments had become less and less able to deal with a growing array of global problems. It argued that the international system should be renewed for three basic reasons: to weave a tighter fabric of international norms, to expand the rule of law worldwide, and to enable citizens to exert their democratic influence on global processes. To reach these goals, the commission proposed a set of “radical” recommendations, most notably the reform and expansion of the UN Security Council, the replacement of ECOSOC by and Economic Security Council (ESC), and an annual meeting of a Forum of Civil Society that would allow the people and their organizations, as part of “an international civil society,” to play a larger role in addressing global concerns
(12) WSF on the need to influence transnational corporations
The report also stated that global governance cannot rest on governments or public sector activity alone, but should rely on transnational corporations – which “account for a substantial and growing slice of economic activity.
(13) WSF as a form of Revolutionary Rupture
The WSF… grows from the work of many people throughout history working to advance a just and equitable global order. In this sense, it constitutes a new body politic, a common public space where previously excluded voices can speak and act in plurality. …we propose to see the WSF not as the logical consequence of global capitalism but rather as the foundation for a new form of politics that breaks with the historical sequence of events that led to the dominance of neoliberal globalization.
(14) WSF Precursors were a Communist Uprising and Anarchist/Communist Direct Action
The WSF is a culmination of political actions for social justice, peace, human rights, labor rights, and ecological preservation that resist neoliberal globalization and its attempts to depoliticize the world’s citizens.
More than any other global actions or transnational networking, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, beginning January 1, 1994, and the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in November 1999 were perhaps the most direct precursors to the WSF.
(16) Convergence of interests between Western Environmentalists and Unionists
…in the global north, or the rich Western countries, citizens were organizing around a growing number of environmental problems. Environmentalists and unionists joined forces with each other, and across nations, to contest proposed international free trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.
(17) Rapid rise in the number of Transnational Organizations
…between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, the number of transnationally organized social change groups rose from less than 200 to nearly 1,000…
Growth of a Transnational Political Identity, Erosion of National Identity
These groups were not only building their own memberships, but they were also forging relationships with other nongovernmental actors and with international agencies, including the United Nations. In the process, they nurtured transnational identities and a broader world culture.
(18) National economic and political agreements supersedes the UN
Many environmental and human rights agreements were being superseded by the WTO, which was formed in 1994 and which privileged international trade law over other international agreements. Agreements made in the UN were thus made irrelevant by the new global trade order, in which increasingly powerful transnational corporations held sway.
(19) Organizational mode originated in Latin America
The model of the “encuentro,” a meeting that is organized around a collectivity of interests without hierarchy, on which the Zapatistas and later the WSF process built, emerged from transnational feminist organizing in Latin America.
The events of Chiapas and Seattle reflect not simply resistance to globalized capitalism, but rather they were catalysts to a new political dynamic within the global landscape.
Chapter Two: What are the World Social Forums?
(27) WSF is an Organizational Apparatus which claims to be without Leadership
The WSF was put forward as an “open space” for exchanging ideas, resources, and information; building networks and alliances; and promoting concrete alternatives to neoliberal globalization. Both open space and networks are organizational concepts used by the global justice movement to ensure more equitable participation than occurs, for instance, in traditional political parties and unions.
The WSF process emphasizes “horizontality,” to increase opportunities for grassroots participation among members rather than promote “vertical” integration were decisions are made at the top and reverberate down.
(28) WSF as a Segmented, Polycentric, Ideological Networks
Since its first meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, the WSF has reflected a networking logic prevalent within contemporary social movements and global justice movements in particular. Facilitated by new information technologies, and inspired by earlier Zapatista solidarity activism and anti-free trade campaign, global justice movements emerged through the rapid proliferation of decentralized network forms. New Social Movements (NSM) theorists have long argued that in contrast to the centralized, vertically integrated, working-class movements, newer feminist, ecological, and student movements are organized around flexible, dispersed, and horizontal networks.
(29) Technology links Transnational Activist Planning and Actions
New information technologies have significantly enhanced the most radically decentralized network configurations, facilitating transnational coordination and communication.
Rather than recruiting, the objective becomes horizontal expansion through articulated diverse movements within flexible structures that facilitate coordination and communication.
Self-Identification as Networking Organizations
Considerable evidence of this cultural logic of networking is found among organizations participating in the European Social Forum (ESF). About 80 percent of sampled organizations mention collaboration and networking with other national and transnational organizations as a main raison d’etre of their groups. Many groups also emphasize the importance of collaboration with groups working on different issues but sharing the same values. Some groups even refer to themselves as network organizations.
Furthermore, research at the University of California- Riverside found that “networking” as a reason for attending the 2005 WSF was more common among nonlocal respondents (60 percent) than Brazilian respondents.
(30) Social Movement Interaction defines Identity
Struggles within and among different movement networks shape how specific networks are produced, how they develop, and how they relate to others within broader social movement fields.
(31) WSF provided Marxists opportunity to network with NGOs
The WSF provided an opportunity for the traditional left (verticals), including many reformists, Marxists, and Trotskyists, to claim a leadership role within an emerging global protest movement…
(32) The WSF process conceived of as a decentralized organization
The WSF is not an actor that develops its own programs or strategies, but rather it provides and infrastructure within which groups, movements, and networks of like mind can come together, share ideas and experiences, and build their own proposals or platforms for action. The forum thus helps actors come together across their differences, while facilitating the free and open flow of information.
(35) The WSF is NOT a decentralized organization
A system and hierarchy persists within the forum itself.
(38) The WSF is NOT a decentralized organization
The WSF does have its pyramids of power. April Biccum, for example, contends that it would be naïve to assume “that the open space is space without struggle, devoid of politics and power.
Many of the grassroots activists have criticized the International Council, as well as local and regional organizing committees, for acting precisely as a closed space of representation and power, limited to certain prominent international organizations and networks with access to information and sufficient resources to travel.
Chapter Three
Who Participates in the World Social Forums?
(49) Participatory Democracy
Social change requires that civil society influence other social actors, such as political parties and government officials, and therefore others believe that involving such actors in the WSF is essential.
(54) Network composition
A majority of WSF participants are intellectuals and professionals – 36%.
(56) WSF as a long term strategy for political change
The WSF’s desire and demand for a greater role for civil society in economic decisionmaking cannot quickly overcome the structural barriers that the global economy places on workers.
(62) Twenty percent of attendees in the Socialist/Communist movement
The majority of respondents in this sample expressed support for abolishing and replacing capitalism… 14 percent identified as active in the socialist movement, five percent claimed active involvement in the communist movement, and 3 percent in the anarchist movement.
(64) Political Parties play a role in the Party
Despite their formal exclusion from the WSF, representative of political parties and governments have played important and visible roles within it as well as local and regional forums. Some WSF participants are also beginning to explore issues surrounding the formation of global political parties.
(69) Latin American Leftist Parties Play Supporting Role in the WSF
Depending on the political context, parties can have very different roles and relationships within the social forum process. In many South American countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Uruguay, and Bolivia, leftist parties are on the rise, and many activists see them as vehicles for social change, even though these activists might be critical of the parties policies.
(70) WSF and link to Brazilian Communist Party
As the WSF grew, the necessity of its reliance on traditional state structures became increasingly apparent.
Lula announced that he was leaving the World Economic Forum “to demonstrate that another world is possible; Davos must listen to Porto Alegre.”
(72) Hugo Chavez’s positive assessment of the WSF
Chavez consciously contrasted his reception, his political positions, and the situation in Venezuela with those of his last visit in 2003. He also spoke of his dream for a unified Latin America, now made more real with leftist presidents Nestor Kirchner and Tabare Vasquez in power in Argentina and Uruguay. Chavez noted that the WSF was the most important political event in the world. Venezuelans, he noted, “are here to learn from other experiments.”
(73) WSF Advocates seek to link it to political parties
Other activists also argue for a closer relationship between social movements and political parties. According to Chris Nineham and Alex Callinicos, “it was a mistake to impose a ban on parties, since political organizations are inextricably intermingled with social movements and articulate different strategies and visions that are a legitimate contribution to the debates that take place in the social forum”. Bernard Cassen, a promoted of the WSF, argues pointedly: “We can no longer afford the luxury of preserving a wall between elected representative and social movements if they share the same global objectives of resisting neoliberalism. With due respect for the autonomy of the parties involved, such wide cooperation should become a central objective of the Forums.”
(74-75) WSF as an Incubator for a Global [Socialist] Party
Because of the negative connotations associated with political parties, some activists and intellectuals seeking to challenge the power of global governance institutions are calling for the creation and spread of new kinds of political agency, such as “political cooperative” or “political instruments”. Yet, political parties can take multiple forms and it is important not to reproduce false dichotomies between civil society organizations and parties given the historically variable and complex interrelationships between them.
…many activists in other parts of the world have actively contributed to the rise of socialist parties, and worked both inside and outside of electoral and legislative arenas to pursue social change.
Horizontally organized groups who are coordinating their political activities transnationally can be thought of as global networks, or even as world parties.
Since the nineteenth century, nonelites have organized world parties.
The contemporary efforts by activists to overcome cultural differences; deal with potential and actual contradictory interests among workers, women, environmentalists, consumers, and indigenous peoples’ and solve other problems of the north and south need to be informed by both the failures and the successes of these earlier struggles.
…the forum process does not preclude subgroups from organizing new political instruments, and there seems to be an increasing tendency for more structured and coordinated global initiatives to emerge from the forum process.
(76) WSF as a means for preparing activists to influence political institutions
While there may have been a number of criticisms made of the WST by activists, many see the WSF as an important instrument for preparing the public to participate actively within, and influence the decisions of, such institutions.
Smith argues that the WSF is a “foundation for a more democratic global polity,” since it enables citizens of many countries to develop shared values and preferences, to refine their analysis and strategies, and to improve their skills at international dialogue.
Chapter Four
Reformism or Radical Change: What Do World Social Forum Participants Want?
(79) Forum functions to bring together anti-capitalists
Despite disagreement on many issues, most participants share certain fundamental points in common, most notably the desire to help people take back democratic control over their daily lives. Whether this should happen through the destruction of the capitalist system, as radicals would argue, or through regulating the global economy, as reformists would content is a matter of intense debate.
(81-84) Four types of WSF participants
We divide forum participants into four political sectors: institutional movements, traditional leftists, network-based movements, and autonomous movements. These categories help provide a road map, but in practice the dictions we make are more fluid and dynamic than presented here.
Institutional actors operate within formal democratic structures, aiming to establish social democracy or socialism at the national or global level. This sector primarily involved political parties, unions, and large NGOs, which are generally reformist in political orientation, vertically structured, and characterized by representative forms of participation, including elected leaders, voting, and membership.
Traditional leftists include various tendencies on the radical left, including traditional Marxists and Trotskyists, who identify as anti-capitalist, but tend to organize within vertical organizations where elected leaders rather than a wider range of members make organizational decisions.
Network-Based Movements involves grassroots activists associated with decentralized, direct action-oriented networks… [and] are often allied with popular movement in both the global north and south that have a strong base among poor people and people of color.
Autonomous movements mainly emphasize local struggles. They also engage in transnational networking, but their primary focus is on local self-management. …[They] stress alternatives based on self-management and directly democratic decision-making. Projects include squatting land and abandoned buildings, grassroots food production, alternative currency systems, and creating horizontal networks of exchange.
(85) Majority of WSF want to Abolish Capitalism Rather than Reform It
Results from the 2005 University of California-Riverside survey indicate that a majority of, or 54 percent of, all respondents expressed the belief that capitalism should be abolished and replaced with a better system, rather than reformed.
(87) UN as a Constitutional Model to be Adopted by Revolutionaries
For many, the United Nations could provide an alternative institutional arrangement that is more democratic and more responsive to the needs of local governments and communities around the world… In this sense, current global political and economic institutions would be abolished and replaced with new kinds of thoroughly democratized institutions.
(89) WSF attendees desire a democratic world government
According to the survey of participants at the 2005 WSF, the majority of respondents (68 percent) think that a democratic world government would be a good idea.
Chapter Five
Global or Local: Where’s the Action
(108) WSF as Coordinator for Transborder Activism
Shortly after the first WSF in 2001, activists working at local and regional levels began organizing parallel forums that made explicit connections to the WSF process.
The networking among activists and the shared understandings that arise from transborder communications and a history of transnational campaigning allow action taking place at multiple sites and scales to contribute to a more or less harmonious global performance.
(115) WSF forums a small part of activism
Although activists actually gather for just a few days, they work together for many months prior to the event, and many also following up their participation in the WSF process by launching new campaigns, developing new organizational strategies, or joining new coalitions. The real action of the social forums is not in the meeting spaces themselves – although these gatherings are very important. Rather, the WSF process ripples into the ongoing activities of the individuals and organizers are part of the process.
(116) WSF enables Collaboration for Transnational Actions
As people gain more experience with the forums, they have learned to make better use of the networking possibilities therein. Indeed, more people are beginning to use the process to launch new and more effective conversations and brainstorming sessions about how to improve popular mobilizing for a more just and peaceful world.
(123) WSF as a process of idea dissemination
The process itself represents a collection of political and economic activities that have much broader and deeper significance. Understanding the impacts of the process requires that we consider the wider effects of the formulation of new relationships at forum events. It also requires that we see how the new ideas are dispersed within a context that supports and celebrates the unity in core values among the diverse array of forum participants.
(128) WSF helps strengthen transnational networks
Problematically, existing political systems provide no real space for citizens to engage in thoughtful and informed debate about how the global political and economic system is organized.
The WSF process contributes to the strengthening of transnational networks of activists that allow the stories of people in different countries to flow freely across highly diverse groups of people.
(129) WSF as site of knowledge transformation and network growth
By coming together in spaces that are largely autonomous from governments and international institutions such as the UN, activists have helped foster experimentation in new forms of global democracy, encouraging the development of skills, analyses, and identities that are essential to a democratic global policy… These activities model a vision of the world that many activists in global justice movements hope to spread.
Chapter Six
Conclusion: The World Social Forum Process and Global Democracy
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The WSF process seems to have responded to these tensions by becoming what might be called a form of polycentric governance, or a transborder political body with an organizational architecture that remains fluid, decentralized, and ever evolving…
Because the WSF is a process rather than an organization or an event, it is by intention malleable in ways other international bodies, like the United Nations, are not.
About the Authors
Jackie Smith is Professor, Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburg. She is also the editor of Journal of World-Systems Research. Smith’s most recent books include Social Movements in the World-System: The Politics of Crisis and Transformation, with Dawn Wiest; Handbook on World Social Forum Activism, co-edited with Scott Byrd, Ellen Reese, & Elizabeth Smythe; Globalization, Social Movements and Peacebuilding, co-edited with Ernesto Verdeja, and Social Movements for Global Democracy (2008).
Marina Karides is assistant professor of sociology at Florida Atlantic University. She is an active participant in the World Social Forums and Sociologists Without Borders. Her recent work considers gendered dimensions of globalization and the global justice movement. She has published articles in Social Problems, Social Development Issues, and International Sociology and Social Policy and multiple chapters that critically examine microenterprise development and the plight of informally self-employed persons in the global south. She is currently writing a book on street vendors and spacial rights in the global economy.
Marc Becker teaches Latin American History at Truman State University. His research focuses on constructions of race, class, and gender within popular movements in the South American Andes. He has a forthcoming book on the history of indigenous movements in twentieth-century Ecuador. He is an Organizing Committee member of the Midwest Social Forum (MWSF), a Steering Committee member and web editor for Historians Against the War (HAW), and a member of the Network Institute for Global Democratization (NIGD).
Christopher Chase-Dunn is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California–Riverside. Chase-Dunn is the founder and former editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research and author most recently of Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present (Paradigm 2013).
Donatella della Porta is professor of sociology at the European University Institute. Among her recent publications are Globalization from Below (2006); Quale Europa? Europeizzazione, identita e conflitti (2006); Social Movements: An Introduction, Second Edition (2006); and Transnational Protest and Global Activism.
