Aktuell
Versammlung der Sozialen Bewegungen bei der Europäischen ESF-Vorbereitungsversammlung am 7. Juni 2008 in Kiev / Ukraine
The ESF in Malmö is the only place we can start an All-European counter offensive against the neoliberal onslaught. This was an appeal at the beginning of the Assembly of the Social Movements held on the evening of the 7th of June in conjunction with the last Kyiv/Kiev European Preparatory Assembly for the ESF in Malmö 2008.
The meeting in the cellar
- The atmosphere was tense in the chilly cellar of the Ukraine-Cuban Friendship Society, some blocks away from the prestigeous Indepedence Square with the classical pompous Stalinist buildings where the EPA took place in the most central locality in the city. While the people who can afford to look rich were walking up and down on Independence Square and the surrounding avenues in the warm evening a poster in the cellar declared solidarity between the Ukrainian and Cuban people with thanks for the efforts made by Cuban health personel to take care of Chernobyl victims. The cellar was more than full and not everybody could sit. Angela and Sven from Germany opened the meeting based on an initiative from the Belgian Social Forum to convene a meeting every day during the ESF to discuss joint campaigning 2009.
- The multidimensional crisis we can now witness for the economy, food prices and climate change shows how deep the crisis is for the neoliberal project. We now need to organise an anti-neoliberal offensive. In spite of there being a shared assessment that the movements in many parts of Europe are weak at the momement there was a sense of urgency - and mobilisations had already started for actions during 2009 and even 2010.
Summit-hopping or All-European Campaign
But how could an All-European Campaign be organised? Should there be a joint action day with local activities all over Europe? Is there a need for a continous campaign uniting many movements on a common platform making both joint actions and deepening knowledge and discussion on issues and their linkages in a popular educational effort? Are there important Summits to challenge or initiatives for mass mobilisations during longer periods to strengthen a new momentum in the struggle? There were many ideas on the table and some already had started.
Trade Union mobilisation, NATO, G8 and Climate Change soon became central in the discussion. At the March 2009 EU Summit an international demonstration could be initiated in Brussels to influence EU social decisions ahead of the European Parliament Elections, a demonstration which might catch the interest also of the European Trades Union Confederation(ETUC). Concerns were raised against becoming a tail to the official European trade union bureaucracy, others claimed that the main thing was not the ETUC but to be together with fellow workers and union members in Brussels. If a mainfestation/demonstration could be arranged that had Independent anti-neoliberal goals it seemed like there could be interest for doing something jointly in Brussels.
Concerning taking joint action in relation to the EU Parliamentary Elections the reaction was more divisive.
All agreed to the importance of taking action on three other main occasions during 2009. First: at the 60th anniversary of NATO which is going to take place next summer in Strassbourg in France and Kehl right across the border in Germany. Secondly: at the G8 which will take place in Sardinia also in the summer, a place which might cause some problems getting there. Finally: the Climate Summit in Copenhagen taking place in December.
But there were also other more decentralised action ideas. In Sweden and Finland a campaign started on the 17th of April towards and beyond the ESF with the goal to end during the Climate Summit and Swedish EU Presidency in the autumn of 2009. The campaign started by challenging the Finnish-Swedish Forest Company Stora Enso and supporting the Movement of Landless in Brazil that occupied land where the company have plantations for their pulp mills. The action was supported by Friends of the Earth, Via Campesina and Latin American Solidarity organisations in both countries. The plan is to get more
organisations interested in supporting a common platform for common welfare, peace, fair trade, food sovereignity, and sustainable urban and rural planning against privatisation, war, occupation and environmental destruction. The hope is to also collect articles on the issues of the campaign to promote popular education and political understanding between movements.
In the year 2010 two large popular movement mobilisations are on their way. Firstly: World March of Women will start again on 8th of March ten years after the first March started on the same date. Last time 5 million signitures were collected in a broad international multi-issue campaign. Secondly there are ideas to start Euromarches again against Unemployment and Social Exclusion.
One could add to this the successful Global Day of Action initiated by the World Social Forum(WSF) which in Russia and Ukraine included many actions on hosuing issues. The next WSF in Belem (Brazil) 1st January 2009 might become a starting point for new similar initiatives with the ESF in Malmö as one place to contribute to the global discussion on how popular movements can better use Social Forums as a space to organise Common Action. Euro-Mayday has already the plan to organise a network meeting during the ESF for this purpose.
Conflicts
Unfortunately many Central and Eastern Europeans were occupied by a demonstration against right wing extremism in another part of the city so only few from CEE countries participated. The day before Eastern European participants demonstrated to protect a park and 7 were arrested. The CEE concern in anti-racism and anti-fascism has not met so much interest in the ESF process so far. Mirek Prokes from Chechia(Czech Republic) was worried that the anti-racist assembly that played an important role in the preparatory process for many earlier ESFs now had no participation at all from Western Europé in Kiev.
In general one can ask how much interest there is to start an All-European Campaign. Attempts were made at putting the European Parliamentary Election at the core of joint campaigning. One argument was put forward why this focus actually was giving movements in countries outside the EU an important
role. Namely that these countries also get effected by EU-policies. That is of course fully correct as a trivial notion. But politically it shows clearly a tendency within the ESF process to make countries outside the EU, and often even countries inside the EU if they come from the East, a decoration and subaltern partner lacking their own historical subjectivity. What is needed is rather an understanding of how different movements in places, local, national or global, simultanously can confront the forces behind neoliberal and war politics in Europe. An understanding giving equal importance to movements in Russia, Norway, Romania or France and not in practice seeing core countries in the Western EU as the only important factor in European politics.
All in all one must say that the meeting in the Ukrainian-Cuban cellar was a great step forward in making the ESF in Malmö meaningful to a vast majority of sympathisers and members of movements that want to use this occasion for starting a Counter - Offensive against Neoliberalism and War. The commitment was there. All the reporting from the different assemblies were put aside for this one task, to now start the discussion on how to use the ESF in Malmö to launch a campaign for movements cooperating on a broad range of issues. With some concerted efforts from CEE -countries to start from issues of importance in Eastern Parts of Europe such as Housing, Anti - Racism and Rigth Wing Extremism - it is fully possible to make the ESF into the Open Space for movements to give political leadership uniting a wide range of interests. Lets make the ESF in Malmö into such a Uniting Space for Action.
(This is not an official report from the meeting. All comment and corrections of misundertsandings are welcome. The opinions in the text are my personal comments and should not be considered as official opinions of the organisations I represent in the ESF process. Tord Björk, EU coordinator of Friends of the Earth Sweden and of NOC Contact group for Europe and the World)
Tord Björk
E-mail: tord.bjork(at)mjv.se
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