ANALYSIS - Summit protesters - rebels with or without a cause?
Date: 16-Jul-01
Country: SWEDEN
Author: Will Hardie
They brandish banners of Che Guevara and Chairman Mao, from Greenpeace to the black flags of anarchy. Depending on who you ask, the travelling circus of anti-globalisation is a rabble without a cause or the fresh new face of democracy.
Either way, the pitched battles that have made cities like Seattle and Gothenburg synonymous with mayhem and destruction pose a riddle for summit organisers like the G8 group of rich nations, who meet in the Italian port city of Genoa next week.
Faith in dialogue is fading, leaving two options: tougher security or more remote summit locations.
Both strategies confirm the diverse groups' one rallying call: "They are not listening". And each will either exacerbate or just shift the disruption, protesters say.
"This wave of militancy is not going to subside because it is a result of pent-up anger that is not going to go away," said Walden Bello, sociology professor and director of Bangkok-based anti-globalisation pressure group Focus on the Global South.
"Protests are just beginning in terms of size and impact."
MANY FACES OF ANTI-GLOBALISATION
Keith Dowding, professor of political science at the London School of Economics, compared today's protests with those of the revolutionary days of the 1960s.
"Protests in the 1960s were sparked by one international event - Vietnam. Now they are also sparked by an international event - globalisation," he told Reuters.
"Another similarity with the 60s is that today's protestors are middle class. That must be worrying for governments who rely on their middle classes to put them in power and keep their economies running."
Anti-globalisation now has so many faces and agendas, and internal strife, that its label is something of a mirage.
Most want to defend the environment and write down Third World debt. Some champion nation states over transnational bodies, others want to tear down border controls. Most defend cultural diversity and some like strong welfare systems, many with a stiff dose of socialism. Others want anarchy.
A common thread is the idea that democracy is crumbling.
"There is a widespread perception that the normal processes of representative democracy have failed and become very responsive to the needs of corporations rather than the needs of people," Bello said.
"Globalisation was pushed so hard as a panacea for the world's ills that, when it created the exact opposite, people feel that they have been run over by this process," he said.
Many see international bodies such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and groups of rich nations like the G8 and the European Union (EU) as doubly unaccountable.
"Most governments don't have any parliamentary debates on the positions they take into these meetings," Friends of the Earth campaign director Duncan McLaren told Reuters.
"They certainly aren't encouraging public debate, and the issues very rarely get media attention. So in this sense there are two levels of divorce."
INDUSTRY UNIMPRESSED
That argument gets short shrift from industry.
"I profoundly believe that democratic processes have not failed. Those who are not lazy, physically or intellectually, will find ways to use democratic processes to get things done," International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) Secretary General Maria Livanos Cattaui told Reuters.
"There are some very good issues to protest. Easy ways to do that are by looting and smashing cars. The hard way is to work in the proper democratic processes," Cattaui said.
Anti-globalisation activists argue that protest is both a time-honoured pillar of democracy and also the best way to influence politics in the post-communist, neo-liberal era.
"People don't see the conflicts in society as being between left and right but between the people and the establishment," said America Vera-Zavala of protest movement ATTAC.
"People are really frustrated that they go and vot
