ABSTRACT
When it entered the public arena in November 1999 with the protests against the third World Trade Organization conference in Seattle, the global justice movement (GJM) presented itself as an unusual coalition of traditional organizations, new social movements, and emerging groups contesting neoliberal globalization. The organizers of the Seattle protests included ‘turtles and teamsters’ – activists of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project and trade unionists – ranging from the People for Fair Trade/Network opposed to the WTO (PFT), to the Direct Action Network (DAN) and the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) with its local affiliates (Levi and Murphy 2006: 652). Similar alliances developed on the old continent, although with one important difference: while organizations of the socialist or communist tradition, including political parties, are largely absent from the GJM in the US, they are quite central to the European GJM, where the large European trade unions are historically closely intertwined with these parties and organizations (Bartolini 2000). Alongside this block of parties, trade unions, and collateral organizations that we consider as the ‘traditional Left’, we find a ‘radical Left’ sector of parties, grassroots trade unions, and groups of an autonomous, anarchist or Trotskyite tradition with their roots in the ‘New Left’ of the 1970s (della Porta and Rucht 1995; Tarrow 1989). In the following we will analyse the involvement of traditional left and radical left organizations and activists in the GJM, their integration into GJM decision making, and in particular the democratic models that their activists promote. In the first part of the chapter, dedicated to the involvement of organizations of both the traditional and radical Left in the social forum process, we use documents of left-wing organizations as sources (we conducted a search of their websites for documents related to the rise of the GJM and to the ESF process), as well as the programmes of the ESFs and material related to the organization of the successive forums. We will first briefly sketch some national differences in the traditions of the Left, which may have contributed to differences in organizational involvement in the GJM. We will then discuss the reactions of the European Left (particularly party families and trade unions) to the GJM and the social forum
process, characterized by a protracted diffidence by socialist and social democratic organizations – whereas organizations with a communist and left socialist past, together with groups of the radical Left, embraced the movement from early on. We will further sketch the role played by traditional and radical left organizations within the European Social Forum process, looking at the furnishing of logistical support for the forums in Florence, Paris, London, and Athens; the visibility of left organizations in the programmes of the ESFs; and the involvement of their activists in the European Preparatory Assemblies (EPA). The second part of this chapter is devoted to an analysis of the activist survey conducted by the Demos research team at the 2006 ESF in Athens (see Chapter 1 in this volume). We will first present some indicators of the presence of the European Left in the successive ESFs from Florence to Athens. Singling out the activists who declared a traditional left or radical left group as most important to them, we will present the sociographic and national characteristics of these activists, indicate differences in the patterns of political activism, and analyse their involvement in GJM activities and decision making. In the final part of our chapter we will concentrate on activists’ perceptions of the democratic practices in their group of reference, comparing them with their ideals of democracy. Our findings seem to indicate processes of diffusion, although filtered through existing organizational cultures. While the ideal of direct participation is overwhelmingly supported – also by activists of the traditional Left – deliberation, although also supported by large sectors, only emerges as the most popular form of democracy among activists of the newest social movements directly connected with the rise of the GJM. In addition to showing the greatest incongruence between perceived democratic practices and ideals, traditional left activists are the most unsatisfied with democracy within their group.
