To be European is mostly a chosen affinity, hence love being closer to the core of our identity is an important condition for the spread of a European identity. Her examination of the cross cutting themes of love and Europe (in fact more Britain and Europe and the changing emotions of the British left towards Europe) between 1920 and 1945 includes two complicated moments in which activists and intellectuals on the British left were prepared to sacrifice their lives for a democratic Europe: the Spanish Civil War and the resistance to Fascism.To illustrate her arguments, she provides an analysis of the writings of two partisans – the poet, John Cornford, who was killed at the age of 21 by Franco’s troops and Frank Thomspon (brother of E.P.Thompson) killed by fascists in the fight for the resistance in Bulgaria.

The context of 21st century Europe and the continent wide struggles against economic insecurity, the destruction of public services and the growth of racism is of course very different but there are strong signs of an equivalent emotional engagement with the idea of a democratic and egalitarian Europe. I am thinking of the extraordinary growth of the European Social Forum (ESF) and all the spreading networks and campaigns that this has generated or reinforced. An outcome of the global social justice movement, the ESF has organised three four-day events – in Florence, Paris, and London – and next April in Athens, around the theme of ‘Another Europe is Possible.’ Forty thousand activists gathered to debate, plan and enjoy. It fits Passerini’s theme. For its momentum, the Forum, despite huge organisation, political and cultural problems, owes much to sharing different cultures and to the international friendships generated in the course of working for a common belief in social justice and human dignity. It is this rather than the cold, remote, intergovernmental negotiations which will lay the foundations for a democratic Europe.

The achievements of the ESF process stem from a recognition of the need for a cross border, trans-European way of organizing, debating and exchanging ideas. This is being reinforced by accumulated skills creating new, international networks for social change. As a result there is a strong dynamic around the ESF as a pan-European civic space, evidenced by significant growth of trade union involvement and by new practical initiatives in co-operation and joint action. Another is the creation, most notably at the 2004 London ESF, of a web or ‘galaxy’ of autonomous spaces, connected by common publicity and by thousands of individual participants whose eclectic political desires gave them the energy to criss-cross London in pursuit of new ideas and connections.

There are important areas of conflict in the ESF which its participants do not fear to face. These concern both the basis upon which the infrastructure of the Forum should be organized and the Forum’s programme, as well as the relationship and dependency of the Forum upon political institutions and their impact upon its autonomy. First the issue of the infrastructure of the Forum: its physical architecture, the organisation of the translation, the management of the knowledge generated, and the way finances are administered – including the relation of free labour and the social economy to services bought commercially from the corporate economy.

These practical issues are also political – they are sites of radical imagination and sometimes, of conflict. For example, many feel uncomfortable listening to panels on food sovereignty and then going to a bar stacked with Coca-Cola. Conflict over these issues has illustrated two sharply different views of politics. If the Forum is treated as a means to an end, on an instrumental approach to politics, then the nature of the space it takes place in, or the means by which it is paid for and organized, don’t much matter. But the predominant ethic of the Forum implies that rather than a means to an end, it is an attempt to prefigure the kind of ‘other world’ that it promises to bring about. Prefigurative politics of this sort is understood not simply an alternative means to reaching the same end. Instead, it recognizes that our knowledge of possible other worlds is incomplete, and that we will only arrive at meaningful social improvements (if not perfect ‘ends’) through refinements developed out of our everyday practices. As the Spanish poet Antonio Machado put it, ‘Caminante no hay camino se hace camino al andar’ (‘Walker there is no road, the road is made by walking’).

Babels, the network of volunteer interpreters and translators, is another example of prefigurative politics. Born in a squatted medieval tower in Florence, Babels is a non-market alternative to professional translation services – relying on solidarity and a massive collective effort of voluntary labour to make space in which language diversity (and, through that, political and cultural diversity) can flourish.

The Babels network was also involved in the birth of Nomad, an international project for the construction of nonproprietary alternative technologies. Using free-software to record and transmit different translated versions of speeches, it increases the number of different languages that can be offered simultaneously and even more innovatively, it allows for the real-time streaming over the internet of speeches in several different languages.

The – precarious – development of Nomad is an example of the use of the Forum as a laboratory of experimentation for alternative technologies, for volunteer work outside of the money economy, and for alternative ways to engage in noncorporatised, locally appropriate production within a global scope.

Running through the organization of the Forums is a division over organizational principles, summed up (far too crudely) as the division between ‘verticals’ and ‘horizontals.’ These arguments also have wider implications for the debate about the nature of democracy within our movements. On the one side, ‘verticals’ assume the existence and legitimacy of representative structures, in which bargaining power is accrued on the basis of an electoral mandate (or any other agreed means of selection). On the other, ‘horizontals’ aspire to an open relationship between participants, whose deliberative encounters form the basis of any decisions.

There is, however, also a clear danger inherent to the framing of this debate in binary terms (vertical vs. horizontal), which is that the division could harden and become entrenched. Horizontality can be specified as a ‘mode of doing’ but there is a risk that it is becoming a mode of being, an identity formation which defines and delimits itself to a specific group of people; ‘the horizontals’. To fully assume this identity could risk the reproduction of a core/periphery structure which, in antagonistic terms, would undermine the fluid relationship between the ‘official’ Forum and the autonomous spaces from which both potentially derive strength.

Going beyond these divisions in the preparation for the 2006 ESF in Athens is enabling the organizing committee to address a growing dissatisfaction at the Forum’s core programme. Up until now it has been based on a system of national bargaining, weighted in favour of the host country, which has not produced creative outcomes – on the contrary it is leading to repetition and tedium. There is much to learn from the way that activists prepared for the 5th World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre in January 2005.

The 2005 programme was decided through a six month process of consultation with all the campaigns, networks and projects who have participated. The method was, in theory at any rate, one of co-ordination without centralization. The overview is a widely shared one rather than the monopoly of small organizing groups. It is an experiment from which the ESF is learning. The result was messy and problematic as well innovative and productive. It takes time for organizations to get used to working in this way, by which they have to take some responsibility for making the whole process work, rather than just working on their particular project. But it is a methodology that builds on the networking methods that are already second nature to many organizations.

In the first phase of this innovation this could tend to favour organisations that have more resources and time to participate in the process. On the other hand, there is much wider access to the decision-making process than before, every network and group can play a part. We will see. For its success much will depend on the capacity of the process to learn lessons from its experiences and negotiate new solutions.

The need to reclaim the global and globalization from all the varieties of neo-liberalism is leading us, the ‘alter-globalization movement, to produce radically different understandings of space and place. The global is being reproduced and struggled over in every locality – from Manchester to Sao Paulo and beyond. We have a sense of space that allows for a multiplicity of histories simultaneously occurring, rather than a single queue or line of historical development. Therefore what becomes strategically important and interesting is the consciously created connection between these struggles to enhance their collective ability to determine the nature and direction of globalization. In this sense the global is highly concrete. If the movements that are a product of these different but connected histories are to produce democratic counter power internationally then the existence of a means by which locally rooted organizations and networks can exchange and debate the lessons, insights and perspectives arising from their different histories is of vital strategic significance.

Here lies the importance of the ESF, WSF and the international process they and other Social Forums have stimulated. This internationalism is part of a rejection of a politics organized around the nation state. The Social Forum process explores new forms of political agency, new subjectivities, and new agencies of social transformation. The process is an experiment in finding new ways of integrating the particular – demands and campaigns on specific issues – with the universal – the wider effort to bring about a radical transformation of the whole of society. Traditionally political parties have had a monopoly over such a process. The principles of the WSF, the original inspiration of the ESF, specifically exclude the direct participation of political parties and state institutions. This does not mean the Forum is necessarily or invariably anti-party and anti-state. In both Brazil and Italy many of those most energetically building the forum come from parties (the Brazilian Workers Party, PT, and the Italian Refondazione Communista, PRC) trying to open themselves up to the influence and activity of the social movements. The point is that just as the Women’s Movement and movements of ethic minorities argued in the 1970′s, movements of the oppressed and marginalized need autonomy to develop and identify their own needs, identities and sources of power. And that includes thinking through in theory and in practice what forms of political subjectivity/ies to create or recreate.

In that context, relations with existing political institutions will be judged according to how far they behave with a genuine modesty, showing that they recognise the need to learn and support from the movements. Fausto Bertinotti, leader of Rifondazione Communista, made an interesting remark: ‘Every way of reforming party policy has to start from an experimental approach; practice has to come before theory&.The collective intellect is the movement and the party is helping to contribute to that but it cannot in itself be that collective intellect.’

The notion of ‘a collective intellect’ is controversial and still to be negotiated in the new conditions of the diversity of the alter-globalization movement but the commitment to a collective process is clear. Negotiation and experimentation will be influenced by the example of Paulo Freire, Antonio Negri ,Antonio’s Gramsci, and by feminist, environment, peace groups and new networks of precarious workers as well as traditional organisations of labour.And it will be driven by chosen affinities that combine the powerful mix of friendship, political commitment and the excitement of intellectual and cultural discovery.See Louisa Passerini Europe in Love; Love in Europe (1999).

This article was published in Catalyst’s What Future for Social Europe? and draws on the newsletter European Social Forum: Debating the challenges for its future (www.euromovements.info)

These activists began to see these treaties as tools to maintain the dependency of the ‘developing world’ by means of “free market” policies; the privatisation of public services and knowledge; the commodification of nature; the liberalisation of labour markets; and the enactment of agricultural and environmental policies that undermined the livelihoods of farmers and indigenous peoples–all for the profits of the big transnational corporations.

The movement against these treaties has grown throughout Latin America. Yet even though they address issues such as external debt, ‘corporate-led globalisation’, and re-militarisation, they have been largely focused on multi-lateral issues and especially on US policies in the region such as the FTAA, NAFTA, Plan Puebla Panama and the current set of negotiations with Central America countries and the countries of the Andean Community.

This focus on the US is not just a Latin American phenomenon. Even at the WSF, which brings together people from a wide range of political traditions from around the world, there seems to be an almost exclusive focus on opposition to US policies. US policies are seen, quite rightly, as an ever-growing threat to development, peace, democracy, the environment and co-operation among the peoples and countries in the world. This is especially true since the election to power of George Bush and his Wild West view of the world.

On the other hand, EU policies receive much less attention. A number of factors have contributed to an indulgent and even optimistic perception of EU policies in the Latin American region. First, EU policies are evaluated not in and of themselves, but in comparison with the more militaristic and unilateral US policy. This is partly because the EU seems to embed its foreign policy in democratic values, respect for human rights and sustainable development. Second, the memory of Europe’s positive contribution to democratisation when large regions of LA were under military regimes contributes to a nostalgic idyllic vision of the ‘Old Continent’. Third, the EU’s “Cooperation for Development” programmes play a key role in the social imagery that helps to blur what is really at stake and what are the real European interests in the region: access to markets and natural resources, and fewer environmental and labour regulations for European corporations.

As a result of these factors, mainstream discourse about the EU’s presence in Latin America highlights how co-operation and political dialogue is a good thing for both regions, and how EU-LA political relations can build a multipolar world to counterbalance American imperialism in Latin America. Therefore, when it comes to free trade agreements negotiated or under negotiation, the discussion centres on how the agreements will help access to agricultural markets for poor Latin America, leaving the damaging effects of these agreements to be fixed with social clauses.

Up until now, in both Latin America and the EU, few people seem to be able to look at the EU and see how it has changed and the direction of those changes. A reassessment is badly needed that takes into account the shift to the right within the EU itself; the battle over the future of the Welfare State that is taking place; the Lisbon Strategy; the fight over the New Constitution; and the emergence of the EU based corporations as major global players.

This may be changing, however. It is becoming increasingly clear to a growing number of people in Latin America that the European Union is advancing a series of policies which contain neoliberal components. Therefore to keep focusing the opposition only in the United States is a simplification which could have negative consequences for Latin America.

In fact, the EU is pursuing a strategy which advances by parts to reach the whole. The EU has already signed free trade agreements with Chile and Mexico, which go well beyond the provisions of the WTO. Negotiations are on-going for a new treaty with Mercosur, the embryo common market of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay established by various treaties from 1991, and the key region for Europe in LA, although a deadlock over agricultural provisions has so far blocked an agreement. In addition, negotiations for free trade agreements with the Andean Community and the Central American Common Market are also underway, although if Europe has fewer economic interests in these regions.

Given this reality a number of organisations and activists in both the EU and Latin American have begun to tackle the problem of the EU and European capital in Latin America and to expose the EU’s “WTO Plus” policies in an effort to shift mainstream debate. The first step was taken in Guadalajara, at the ‘Enlazando Alternativas’ encounter, parallel to the Third EU-LA Summit in Guadalajara, 28 May 2004 and since then we have been working on building a political movement powerful enough to counter the increasingly neoliberal approach within EU-LA relations.

It is not a simple task. It is not just a question of European governments pushing their policies; many people within Latin America also consider Europe a good option. For instance, many NGOs are ready to co-operate, and many trade unions have had a very ambiguous attitude. Indeed, there are many progressives and leftists from both continents who still view EU policies with an uncritical eye.

One of the main things that has emerged from this new dialogue is the recognition that we all want good relations between the peoples of Europe and the peoples of LA, and that there is a long tradition of co-operation between unions, social movements and NGOs to build on. The issue is how to build alliances and solidarity from below, rooted in a true co-operation among people and not to legitimate neocolonial and corporate-led agendas, nor to sustain an image of Europe that does not fit with reality.

In this sense the real challenge is how to build internationalism within regions– the North and the South-that is not simply based on the old concept of European solidarity with the popular struggles in Latin America, but one that also confronts global capitalism together. Our starting assumption is that even if Latin America has been one of the main losers of this globalisation process , eventually it will affect Europeans citizens as well. In a world dominated by global institutions and “free market” treaties, workers and communities are pitted against each other in a global race to the bottom. It does not matter whether this process is promoted by the EU or the US. The only way we can reverse this downward spiral is by constructing alternative development strategies based on human need and not the short term profit of global corporations.

Instead of the traditional WSF workshop-panel framework or a loose assembly-based structure, the Caracol offered one-off workshops, ‘micro-processes’ (a succession of workshops and/or meetings on the same issue), large debates and open everyday meetings to evaluate and organise the process as a whole, as well as video sessions and performances most nights. The ‘micro-processes’ proved to be great tools for networking: three days of debates produced tighter coordination between activists organising the resistance to the G8, FTAA and WTO summits in 2005, as well as the creation of a European/ Latin American network of research activists and a call for a Global Day of Action against Intellectual Property. The Caracol also provided space for the birth of the anti-consumerist Yomango Brazil, as well as the first joint action between Yomango groups of three countries, Argentina, Mexico and Chile; it enabled a full day of organising and planning for the Brazilian Free Public Transport Campaign, and, following various theoretical and practical debates on clowning led by the UK’s Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, the appearance of clown armies in three different Brazilian cities.

This year’s edition made some progress towards overcoming the limits of the essentially urban, young and white profile of previous years. This was evident in the workshops of Brazilian homeless and Bolivian peasant movements, as well as in a session on Zapatismo and Militarism. Moreover, the theory of autonomous politics and horizontality was made so much more real and urgent by the moving accounts of daily struggle in conversations with the Unemployed Workers’ Movements (MTDs) of Solano and La Matanza and the Situaciones Collective, both from Argentina.

The Caracol inhabited the border between the Youth Camp and the ‘main’ WSF site, placing itself in a position not only to criticise but also to physically embody the critical tensions inside the social forum process. This position was perhaps made most visible in an open-mic session with members of the WSF International Council (Virginia Vargas, Christophe Aguiton, Teivo Teivanen, Immanuel Wallerstein) and the Brazilian Organising Committee (Moema Miranda, Fatima Mello, Chico Whitaker).

The debate challenged the WSF process from the perspective of autonomous spaces and the horizontal groups involved in them, as well as other ‘marginal’ experiences such as the Youth Camp and the Argentinean Social Forum. Although the changes in the methodology and the overall organisation of the WSF 2005 were applauded, many issues remained: the lack of transparency and openness of the Forum’s International Council and the critique of their representative logic; the sources of the funds for the event; the focus on size rather than quality of the political process; the preference given to corporate instead of community and alternative media; the hijacking of the political capital of the WSF by self-appointed ‘representatives’, or President Lula, who had a few days earlier announced he was going to Davos to speak ‘on behalf’ of the WSF. The intervention of a Mapuche woman complaining about her own exclusion even in the indigenous space was particularly harsh, as was her criticism of the fact that Grupo Santander, a Spanish Bank that has been investing aggressively in Argentina, had contributed funds to the WSF.

More generally, the Caracol showed the advantages of decentralised, horizontal, networked organisation. It sought to substitute a logic of accumulation and linearity by one of connection, with no ready-made answers but rather a sentiment of, as the Zapatistas say, ‘Asking as we walk’. The Caracol did not have to contend with the unmanageable size of the ‘official’ WSF: its attempt to root politics in human relations and the quotidien struggle of communities on a level that necessitates direct engagement with each other, was made easier by the smaller number of participants in this space. Critics might still argue that the process was not rooted enough in real practical alternatives, and that it did not really overcome its White Middle Class Urban identity at its core. Nevertheless, as participants, we came away with a real sense of having established new connections. In contrast to today’s alienated capitalist social relations, it was refreshing to enter a space that put affective relations at the heart of network-building and political struggle.

A profound political frustration underlies this self-doubt. The global social justice movement and the anti-war movement have both effectively won the moral arguments. But they have had not had a commensurate impact on the exercise of political and economic power. This was visible in the smoke signals coming from the World Economic Forum across the geographical and political divide in Davos. There, the corporate elite were morally on the defensive, desperate to prove that they too cared about poverty yet stubbornly continuing the policies which daily mean millions go to sleep hungry – including the poor of Brazil whose government, under President Lula, (who made a brief and controversial appearance at the Forum) is being forced by the IMF to pay in debt relief which would otherwise go towards the social programme for which the leader of the Brazilian Workers Party was elected was elected.

How could the strength of moral arguments and the movements behind these arguments be turned into effective sources of transformative power? And what role could and should the WSF play in achieving this?

The organisation itself of the latest Forum – the decentralised way in which the activities of the forum were decided, the thoughtful spatial and political relationship between the different activities of the Forum including the central location of the 35,000 strong Youth Camp, and the way that provision of food, treatment of waste and architectural design tried to illustrate the principles of the society we are trying to create,- all provided glimpses of an answer. The organisers of the WSF were trying to create a closer, more directly supportive and catalytic relationship with the campaigning movements and initiatives which are the source of the Forums extraordinary energy.

In the first three Forums there was a contradiction, inevitable perhaps but ultimately debilitating if it had continued. Its founders claimed that it would be a self-managed space for the plurality of activities that made up the resistance to neo-liberalism and war. But the reality was a programme dominated by plenaries organised by an increasingly unrepresentative though well-intentioned organising committee.

After a successful experience of significantly reducing the official plenaries at the fourth WSF in Mumbai in 2004, the International Committee of the WSF took the risky decision to eliminate the official programme altogether. Instead, it initiated a ‘consulta’ with the all past participants in the Forum asking them to propose the main themes of the Forum, using keywords to summaries their priority themes. The results formed the basis of 11 clusters or ‘terrains’ around particular themes: militarism, trade and debt, common goods, social movements and democracy and more. Organisations then proposed and registered their activities within these terrains which were also the physical focal points of the WSF.

The theory was that groups would put their plans on the WSF website, other groups would notice an overlap or a connection with their activities and there would be a process of merging and connecting. A team of facilitators was appointed to encourage and help this process.

It was a radical experiment. It would provide a test as to whether there really was the capacity and will to go beyond a social and political market place and make contact, common cause and shared effort to develop alternatives both in day to day practice and ways of living and policies and visions. In other words it would test whether there really existed the basis connecting the plurality of initiatives, of a self conscious, purposeful force for global transformation, a ‘new subjectivity’ – as the Italians put it; or whether the WSF is simply an event which, because of its welcoming organisation, interesting locations and charismatic platforms, attracts a variety of campaigns and initiatives which vaguely share common values but little more.

In practice, the new methodology was only half implemented – more of the self-management than the co-ordination and facilitation. The electronic tools had not been developed for people to use the website to make connections and mergers. And the facilitators were generally not very active.

As a result things often felt scattered and fragmented, but most people I talked to found the break from the centrally planned programme a real liberation. ‘ I came to one Forum under the old system and sat for three hours listening. I did n’t get to know anyone else; this time I’ve come back with a notebook full of new contacts and lines of common action’ said Camilla Lundberg, part of a 20 strong Swedish delegation of trade unionists and popular education activists. My own experience was similar in Terrain F on Social Movements and Democracy. The registration of self-managed activities produced an interesting pattern of very similar seminars around themes of ‘new politics,’ ‘participatory democracy’; ‘knowledge, democracy and power’ from different continents, proposed by groups who had not even heard of each other. The facilitator for Terrain F brought us all together and after several meetings we created a new global network of activist researchers working on the new thinking and practice around democracy, political parties and the innovative political power of social movements. Far more productive and exciting than sitting listening to worthy lectures arranged by well intentioned committee second guessing what we want.

It was clear that people had come primarily to talk to each other, across cultures, experiences and projects, to organise, to plan and collectively to find the tools to make their visions feasible.

The desire to connect was strong. People invented their own ways of building cohesion, using the bare framework provided by the organisers. For example in each terrain there was a well sign-posted tent where people wrote up the proposals coming out of their activity on a specially provided ‘wall.’ The aim was to create a living memory of the five days’ collective work. How useful it will be depends on how well the hundreds of proposals are collected and presented on the web-site.

If you wanted to be spoon fed, you could pick up a copy of the rather lifeless free sheet Terra Viva which announced on day four of the Forum that 19 people – 18 of whom were men – had drawn up a ‘consensus’ of the Forum in an effort to give coherence to the process. The names were impressive including Edward Galeano and Samir Amin. It appeared, however, ‘from on high’ and did not reflect the new ‘bottom up’ methods of consensus building being worked on in the tents alongside the river Guiaba. Nevertheless it served a purpose, provoking discussions about more rooted ways of both bringing together and giving powerful expression to the work of the Forum.

No one has the answer. Evidence that people are working for a solution, that they journeyed to Southern Brazil not just to consume but to plan and organise was the Social Movement Assembly held on the final day. Tent G 901 was overflowing. Representatives of different groups – Anti-war campaigns; groups working for democratic control against water; campaigns around debt, around the WTO and the world wide attack on public service; feminist organisations; the growing movements on climate change came to the microphone one after the other to announce agreed action plans negotiated across different seminars and campaign sessions during the Forum: March 19th global action for the withdrawal of troops in Iraq; April 17 peasants and small farmers converging to act against subsidies to agri-business, against GM food and for local control over the production of food; July 8 pressure on the G8 in Scotland to cancel the debt and for action to impose a global tax on financial transactions to finance development; October, 30th the end of global march of women from Sao Paulo to Burkino Faso; other actions included policies around the democratic ownership of water as a common good, the changes needed to avoid the mounting climate chaos.

It was only a beginning, however, involving only a fraction of the Forum’s participants. But it reflected a recognition that the WSF itself is not the embryonic framework of a new political force but rather the catalyst for the variety of assembled collectivities building the links between themselves. What this new ‘subjectivity’ will be is also an open question. Certainly, it will not be singular. The old agencies of left politics were socialist parties, providing leadership of different kinds for the broader working class movement. The development of Social Forums is leading the more innovative left political parties to rethink their role, their understandings of leadership and representation. The traditional organisations of labour are also using the Forum to create new alliances and develop new tactics in the face of capital’s global reorganisation. At its best, the new self-organised Forum provides an opportunity for developing the mutual understanding across cultures, generations and political traditions that is a precondition of sustained common action. The co-ordinated demonstrations against the Iraq war on February 15th 2003 was the first proof that the Social Forums – both the WSF and continental forums like the European Social Forum – can act as catalysts for a power greater than the sum of those who attend their meetings. Next year, the WSF will be held on three different continents, the year after in Africa. This decentralisation and new location will be a test of whether the cohesion of Feb 15th was a ‘one off’ or whether the experiments at this year’s World Forum stimulated a further maturing of an new, innovative source of political power.

Impressed by this apparent realisation of genuine internationalism, the role of language in global social transformation might even have briefly flickered across your mind before the long pauses, broken sentences and occasional loss of sound drove you mad.

But for how long did you think about the person behind the voice in your ears, hidden away in a claustrophobic booth at the back of the room? How much did you reflect on the skills, technology, resources and, above all, politics involved in enabling you to understand the myriad different languages that define and bring social forums to life?

Our guess is not a lot. Most people tend to take the indispensable role of language, and those interpreting it, for granted; many even assume interpreters to be paid professionals. The truth could not be more different. Simultaneous and consecutive interpretation and document translation are provided free in political solidarity by Babels, the growing international network of volunteer interpreters and translators at the heart of the social forum process.

Babels was born in the run-up to the Florence ESF in 2002. The dubious politics and huge cost of hiring professional interpreters for the World Social Forum (WSF) in 2001 and 2002 led a group of communication activists linked to the French branch of the alternative globalisation network Attac to propose that only volunteers be used for interpreting.

Scepticism about volunteer ‘quality’ gave way to pragmatism at the 11th hour when the high cost of the traditional market route began to bite the Italian organisers. An emergency call for volunteers was made. Three hundred and fifty volunteer interpreters and translators were eventually used. Cathy Arnaud, an interpreter at Florence and now a coordinator with Babels Spain, paints the scene: ‘It was complete chaos, but miraculously it worked. We had to fight the organisers just for a space to work in; eventually we took our own initiative and squatted a medieval tower. It was beautiful but freezing and we had no money, computers, phones: nothing. Coordinators hung planning sheets on washing lines; some people stayed up all night to finalise everything. As for the quality of the interpretation: well, that was definitely a mixed bag.’

The success of Florence led to the spontaneous emergence of new Babels coordinations in Germany, the UK and Spain alongside the original French and Italian pioneers. It also prompted more consideration of language issues by the Paris ESF organisers, who gave Babels decent office facilities, computers, a longer preparatory process and a relatively large pot of money (£200,000). The 2003 Paris ESF drew on more than 1,000 Babelitos.

Following the 2004 WSF in Mumbai and the first Social Forum of the Americas in Ecuador, the Babels database had almost doubled to more than 7,000 people by the time of the London ESF.

In October 500 volunteers from 22 countries were gathered, enabling some 20,000 participants from more than 60 countries to express themselves in 25 different languages.

Impressive number-crunching aside, however, the real story of Babels lies in its embodiment of the innovatory but difficult process of ‘pre-figurative politics’. By attempting to put into practice the principles of solidarity, pluralism, equality and horizontality, Babels is creating not only alternative systems and practices to free-market capitalist society, but also the social counter-power needed to defend and embed them permanently.

Underpinning the Babels philosophy is the organisation’s willingness to reflect upon its role in each forum and then learn and develop from practice. For example, following the unhappy experience of a two-tier workforce of voluntary and paid interpreters in Florence, Babels now makes the principle of 100 per cent volunteer interpretation and translation a precondition of its involvement.

Most important of all is Babels’ affirmation of ‘the right of everybody to express themselves in the language of their choice’. To this end, Babels is orchestrating a conscious process of ‘contamination’ in which the excellent language skills of the politically sympathetic trained interpreter interact with the deeper political knowledge of the language-fluent activist to develop a reflexive communications medium organic to the social forum movement. A good example is the Lexicon Project: an ongoing effort by volunteers from a wide range of backgrounds and countries to create a comprehensive glossary of words and phrases for interpreters and translators to best reflect different meanings according to national, cultural and historical contexts.

Unfortunately, the nice sounding rhetoric of diversity and inclusion within the WSF Charter of Principles still remains largely unrealised in many social forums, especially the ESF. Just as at Florence and Paris, the large majority of the 20,000 participants (and interpreters) in London were mainly white, able-bodied western Europeans. This failure over three years to significantly include those either living in or originating from central and eastern Europe and the global south, not to mention from the disabled and deaf communities, cannot simply be explained away by the systematic refusal of visas (witness London), problems of disability access or the gargantuan cost of international travel from outside the EU.

For both Florence and Paris, the inherent bias of the forum’s organisers led to English, French, German, Italian and Spanish being designated as the ‘official’ ESF languages. And although Babels successfully insisted on this formal language hierarchy being dropped for London, informally the same old colonial languages dominated the website, outreach materials, press releases, platforms and programme.

Curiously, ESF organisers tend to justify this status quo through the market discourse of ‘supply and demand’. While it is true that language hierarchies are an inevitable reflection of the continued dominance of western European political movements in the ESF process, their existence also act as a major outreach barrier to the social movements of ‘majority Europe’ and beyond: if people do not believe their languages will be spoken, then they will be less likely to attend.

Babels cannot shy away from its own responsibility in this regard. Because its development has been inseparable from that of the ESF, the majority of nationalities and languages of Babels interpreters, translators and coordinators belong to the same western Europe elite. And while it may dislike being treated as a service provider, it has generally followed the market model imposed on it by the ESF organisers.

Emmanuelle Rivière, an interpreter and a coordinator with Babels-UK, believes a period of self-reflection is required: ‘We must think carefully about our own role in reproducing the existing patterns of political, economic and cultural domination in the world through not challenging this language hierarchisation.’

Making the ESF and all social forums genuinely internationalist requires that trade unions, NGOs, social movements and networks work hand in hand with Babels to make connections with social movements in marginalised countries and pass on the experiences and knowledge gained so far to create new Babels coordinations. This is especially urgent for the next ESF, scheduled for Athens in 2006: there is a dearth of Greek interpreters within Babels. Without a genuine commitment to an unprecedented process of linguistic and popular outreach, and to the resources this implies, the ESF risks having the microphones turned off altogether.Stuart Hodkinson and Julie Boéri are coordinators with Babels-UK