Anti-globalisation Activists Seek New Europe

Three thousand volunteers were in Paris yesterday adding the finishing touches to the European Social Forum, the anti-globalisation movement's combustion chamber for alternative political and social ideas.

"It's mad," said Sophie, an organiser at the town hall in Bobigny, in the city's northern Paris suburbs. "We're short of interpreters, there aren't enough bodies for the reception desks and we've no idea if we'll run out of beds. For us all, this is a totally different scale of militancy. It's wild."

Up to 60,000 people from 1,500 groups across 100 different countries are expected at the event, which begins today and follows a highly successful inaugural forum held in Florence last year. It aims to debate the building of "a different Europe" which organisers say would be "a Europe about people, democracy and citizens" rather than "the Europe of neo-liberalism".

After 55 conferences and 250 seminars - titles range from "Anti-globalisation, the crucible of a new internationalism" to "Against media concentration and the commoditisation of information" - the event closes on Saturday with a march through central Paris.

Delegates, who began arriving yesterday with rucksacks, sleeping bags and laptops, will mostly sleep in sports halls and on sympathisers' floors. Anti-capitalists, communists, trade unionists, socialists, environmentalists, anarchists, Greens, human rights activists, film-makers, farmers, journalists, women's' rights campaigners and (France being France) intellectuals are all represented.

Pierre Khalfa, a member of the organising committee, said the event had three major objectives. "First, it's a space for debate and confrontation between people of different origins, culture, history and experience who all reject liberal globalisation," he said.

"Then, through the seminars, it's about coming up with concrete alternative proposals of our own. Finally, it's about mobilising movements to ensure that those proposals actually get put into effect. The forum as such takes no positions; it's there to allow the exchange of ideas, build networks, facilitate action."

An Assembly of European Social Movements to be held after the forum closes will, however, adopt a text rejecting Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's draft constitution for the EU on the grounds that it legitimises European neo-liberalism, according to Mr Khalfa. The text will call for demonstrations against the constitution and for a Europe "built on people and their rights, not economic policies".

The name and form of this week's event, which seeks to create some kind of loose organisational form for the wildly heterogeneous anti-capitalist movement, comes from the influential World Social Forum held annually in Porto Alegre, Brazil. That event was set up to counter the prestigious World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which attracts leading financiers, politicians and establishment thinkers.

"This is the new politics," said Camille Maulini, a Swiss pacifist delegate and veteran of the alternative G8 summits in Genoa and Evian. "We're clearly becoming a significant force. But we cannot just permanently oppose the way the world is run; people expect us to come up with practicable alternatives. Events like this are where those alternatives get aired, worked out, defined."

A British delegate, Hannah Griffith, told the Libération daily that her membership of Friends of the Earth was also a new form of political engagement, necessary because "the ease with which Tony Blair was able to go to war despite the hostility of most of his voters proves the traditional parties today are cut off from the population".

Delegates' determined hostility to the established political parties has not, however, stopped the latter from courting the former. Aware of the anti-globalisation movement's importance (and votes), every mainstream French party held a conference on the phenomenon last week.

The prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said yesterday that France welcomed the anti-capitalists "with warmth and generosity", adding that he would like "the thinking on all these subjects to be as fertile and as tolerant as possible".

Not to be outdone, President Jacques Chirac announced his decision to set up a "multi-disciplinary working party" on the possibility of an international levy aimed at reducing the inequalities of globalisation.