ABSTRACT
The European Social Forum (ESF) is an open space for debate but also a space for protest. Its participants not only attend workshops and discuss alternatives to neoliberal globalization and ways to build another Europe, but also use their broad repertoires of protest within and around the forum. This chapter discusses the use of various forms of action within the global justice movement (GJM), tackling the issue at two distinct levels of analysis. In the first part, we look at the relationship between protest and the arena we chose for our analysis, that is, the ESF. We first discuss the forum as a form of protest in its own right, or more precisely as a space where multiple and heterogeneous forms of protest against neoliberal globalization are planned and practised. The acceptance of variegated action repertoires with the one condition of nonviolence emerges as a distinct common aspect of the protest activities connected with the ESF. Notwithstanding this acceptance, tension in connection with specific protest events and certain forms of action also reveals the forum as a contested protest space. This tension mirrors general strains within the social forum process, concerning in particular the boundaries of the movement and internal decision making. However, the common basis within the ESF also proved to be solid with regard to forms of action. In the second part, we analyse the use of various forms of action by individual participants in the May 2006 ESF in Athens, based on the survey we conducted there in the context of the Demos project. Here, we follow the research tradition on political participation (Barnes and Kaase 1979; Dalton 2002; Milbrath 1965; Verba and Nie 1972; Verba et al. 1978) to inquire into the differences in the forms of participation by those who attended the Athens ESF, distinguishing among three general forms: party related activities, demonstrative protest, and confrontational protest. Although we treat these general forms as three distinct ways of engaging in politics, they can be seen as increasingly demanding in terms of commitment and as increasingly radical in their expression. We first look into the relationship among the three general forms of participation and their connection with the different areas of the GJM. We argue that the overlapping use of action forms by the various movement areas constitutes a factor contributing to the solidity of the ESF protest space, notwithstanding its characteristic as a contested space. We then examine how the use of these forms of participation is influenced by three sets of factors: the structural characteristics
of the people involved (gender, age, social status (being a student), and position within the group most important to the respondent); their attitudes towards politics (as indicated by degree of identification with the global justice movement, being a radical leftist, degree of political and institutional trust, and level of satisfaction with decision making processes); and their views about democracy as well as globalization. In other words, we aim to look at how certain social, political, and cultural characteristics and values of participants in the ESF influence their political activities. The latter factor is of particular interest for us, as it allows us to study the relationship between forms of action and the democratic views of participants in the ESF and more generally in the global justice movement. The focus here will be on three aspects that give us a broad picture of how activists place themselves vis-à-vis democracy and globalization: their views about how collective decisions should be taken, about strategies to enhance democracy, and about strategies to tame globalization. Concerning the first aspect, we shall focus more specifically on four key features of deliberative democracy (see Chapter 4 in this volume): whether the quality of arguments (rather than resources) should primarily make the difference in decision making; whether mutual acceptance is always important in a political conflict; whether participation (rather than delegation) should always be a priority in decision making; and whether political decisions should be taken by consensus (rather than voting). The latter two aspects, in particular, define the deliberative-participative model of democracy (della Porta 2005a) often stressed by the movement.
