By Roberto Savio (*)

ROME, Jun (IPS) - What can we expect from the future of the World
Social Forum (WSF)?

At the first WSF in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2001, just a
few thousand people were expected; at least 25,000 showed up,
putting the organisation of the event to a real test. It was the
first time that different representatives of civil society had met
to debate global agendas with a deliberately open format for
dialogue: there were neither final declarations nor processions but
only a space for exchanging ideas and experiences and making
proposals for work together.

It was also the first time that the Latin American
indigenous movement spoke and listened alongside feminists,
environmentalists, and health- and education-for-all movements.

Those were days of fiery enthusiasm buoyed by the event’s utopic
motto –'’another world is possible'’– and the shared belief that
the position of the rival World Economic Forum (WEF) was wrong that
contemporary market-driven globalisation was the sole engine and
arbiter for human society. The political and intellectual
positions underpinning the WSF are based on the presumption that
the vaunted axioms of the WEF are false.

It is probable that in the history of economic doctrines, none rose
and fell as quickly as neoliberalism, which beginning with the
Washington Consensus drove economic globalisation throughout the
planet. If we read newspapers closely, we see that the word
globalisation as we know it today entered into use shortly after
the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Washington Consensus was
formulated the following year.

A mere ten years later, the voices critical of the disaster wrought
by neoliberal policies had grown into a deafening roar.
Everyone remembers how in Seattle in late 1999 an improvised
coalition of unions, social activists, environmentalists, and
pacifists shut down the ministerial conference of the World Trade
Organisation. This should lead us to note some of the indisputable
historical legacies of the WSF, the birthplace of global civil
society. It was in Porto Alegre that the alliance between global
civil society and the United Nations was forged. One of the major
themes of the last WSF was defending the UN from the decline
imposed on it by the Bush administration.

The WSF took on the most difficult challenges. The last Forum, this
year, took place on three continents: Caracas for Latin America,
Bamako for Africa, and Karachi for Asia. The three forums were
successful in different ways, attracting a total of almost 200,000
people. The 2007 WSF will return to a single site model and take
place in Nairobi, Kenya. The challenges will be huge, given the
difficulties of the African continent at every level, particularly
economic.
It should also be noted that the WSF gave rise to regional,
thematic, and national forums. Each year there are no fewer than
forty. The European Social Forum, held this year in Athens, has a
certain autonomy with respect to the WSF and uses methods that are
not part of the original philosophy, such as marches and final
declarations.

However, these positive aspects are not enough to make a thorough
judgement of the WSF. If we set aside the numbers and remember that
the forum proclaims the possibility of creating another world, we
should ask what impact the WSF process has had on the institutions
and politics that, in the final analysis, could concretely affect
the governability of globalisation. In effect, those of us who have
participated in the WSF since the beginning saw it as a grand
process of elaborating alternatives generated in a grand process of
participation that could inject vigour and scale into the political
process. However, the refusal of the participants to allow
themselves to be absorbed by political parties and to establish
relations with political institutions has reduced the WSF to a
circuit of self-referentiality.

Is it possible to increase the WSF’s capacity for action? The
answer is essentially ‘’No'’. It has not been possible to move past
the idea of an ‘’open space'’, which allows for the exchange of ideas
and experiences and the creation and strengthening of alliances but
prevents the formulation of proposals or calls for concrete action
by the forum. It is thought that such options should be carried out
by the organisations participating in the WSF during their normal
operations.

There is a minority that holds that the WSF should not limit itself
to being a kind of spiritual exercise from which participants
emerge stronger and better. They think that the forum should decide
on a series of actions that provide an alternative to neoliberal
globalisation and should pressure institutions to adopt them. But
for now this debate is going nowhere. In all likelihood the WSF
will not make significant progress into the political realm and
will remain a major exceptional occasion for civil society to meet.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Roberto Savio, president emeritus of IPS, is a member of the
International Council of the World Social Forum.