The grand finale of this year’s World Social Forum (WSF), which returned to Porto Alegre, Brazil in January, was a speech by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the Gigantinho — a huge indoor concrete cauldron of a stadium packed with the factionalised Brazilian left. Many thousands more listened outside. During the final stages of the speech a lone figure struggled through the audience carrying a massive Brazilian flag. Tolerated by the socialist masses, the appearance of the flag in the dying moments of this year’s WSF typified a kind of persistent ‘unmentioned presence’ afforded to the nation throughout the forum.
Around 155,000 people attended this year’s WSF, marking another dramatic increase in the level of participation in each successive year since its inception in 2001. Porto Alegre was the site for the first three World Social Forums, with the fourth held in the Indian city of Mumbai last year. In stark contrast to Mumbai, where the forum was held on an enclosed former industrial site in the north of that huge Indian metropolis, the venues in Porto Alegre followed a long narrow trajectory along the city’s lake edge. With Porto Alegre so much smaller a city than Mumbai, the struggle for accommodation meant that a tent city — the acampanmeto intercontinental da juventude — rimmed much of the WSF site.
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The event program, an immense newspaper document split into two volumes, carried with it some possible 2500 formal events across eleven thematic terrains.
Extremely long days, intense discussions and a wearing heat all took a toll, as did many of the logistical problems the event itself faces — a reality borne of the lack of resources that progressive movements face everyday. The WSF, however, remains an extraordinary event, not least for its ambition for contesting neo-liberalism and its institutions, such as the World Economic Forum meeting held in Davos, Switzerland, with which the WSF is timed to coincide.
It also draws together the most astonishing range of activists from all over the world, and gives participants in-person access to thinkers that would otherwise be impossible. More importantly in many ways is the sheer scale of sociality of the event. The experience of being with many tens of thousands of others committed to contesting neo-liberalism, imperialism and corporate-led globalisation from around the world can in itself be deeply radicalising. And vitally for its own future, the WSF appears thus far able to reproduce a kind of hyper-reflexive culture. This often means that the participants are more self-critical than those who might ideologically oppose the event.
In among all of the petit narratives that play out through the forum it can be difficult to track a more general theme such as the nation. In writing on the World Social Forum in Mumbai in this magazine last year (Arena Magazine No. 69), I argued that the kinds of political and identity-based differences that underpinned the WSF process — a world of many worlds — remained to a significant degree grounded in an assumed national identity.
As the lone flag bearer during Chavez’s speech illustrates, the same was true for Porto Alegre. As in Mumbai in 2004, local political conditions in Porto Alegre influenced the event, and many people brought testimony derived from struggles that have a strong association to a very localised place. However, the idea of ‘place’ in the WSF appears all too readily to uncritically translate to the more generalised ‘nation’. For instance, in 2004 the major symbol for the WSF — a world map projected against red and yellow — had been adapted so as to incorporate the colours of the Indian flag. The place Mumbai had become inextricably tied to the nation India.
This year’s WSF concluded much as it had begun, with the other dominant figure in South American politics, Brazilian President Lula, speaking in the Gigantinho. Draped across the stand behind him was quite possibly the same huge Brazilian flag that had shadowed Chavez’s speech. While these two national leaders framed the five days, the role of the nation throughout the forum was rarely so overt. Rather it tended to exist at an assumed level in two ways.
At one end of the spectrum, the nation lived on as a central actor in many intellectual scripts played out across the forum. The nation is central to arguments of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, two of the most influential thinkers on forum-style politics, in their twin tomes Empire and now Multitude. Yet even in these massive works it remains relatively unexplored. For all the debate on Empire during the forum — and of globalisation for that matter — one barely hears the nation named. In one exemplary debate played out in front of a sweat-filled warehouse, Michael Hardt, John Holloway, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Teivo Teivannen tackled the question ‘can the world be changed without taking power?’ The speakers concentrated their efforts on concerns over power and the state, and typically left the nation completely to one side.
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At the other end of the spectrum, the nation in progressive politics remains difficult to write about as it is often in the cast-aside comments, in the unfinished ends of sentences and in the draped background of a speaker that the nation makes its appearance. Yet it is all the more powerful, sitting uncontested in the peripheral vision of the rebellious many.
Speaking to the Guardian last October during the European Social Forum (ESF) in London, the former Labour MP George Galloway quoted the BBC motto ‘Nation shall speak unto Nation’ as a way of explaining the character of the ESF. In a critique of this year’s forum and the WSF’s ban on political parties, Chris Nineham and Alex Callinicos opened with a statement of gratitude: As two participants from Britain, we greatly enjoyed sharing all this, [as] well as encountering once again the warmth and hospitality of the Brazilian people and the dynamism of their social movements.
Both quotes exemplify how the nation still stands as the primary point of reference for many of those who participate through the WSF process. Of particular concern is the ease with which a division between nationally based movements is conveyed in both quotes, an assumed position that seems a far cry from the demand that ‘resistance needs to be as transnational as capital’.
For all the talk of global struggles, these different instances suggest that the WSF represents a kind of internationalism — albeit one that is being carried via global processes. In other words, the dominant subjective attachment of participants to identity is not to movements or to other possible forms of social categorisation (forget about class), but to the nation from which they are derived. The sense of attachment to nation is being carried, however, by a conjunction of social practices, notably but not exclusively communicative in form, carried out across a global terrain that enables an event such as the WSF to occur.
To think genuinely about ‘another world’ would require challenging the idea of the nation, especially insofar as it is presumed to be the primary political foundation of our social identities. There are a range of critiques that could be made of the nation that would sit well with other ideas that dominate the WSF. For instance, many consider a world of nations as compounding ecological crises, while for others the hard, territorially based borders that nationhood seems to demand give rise to inhuman policies of incarceration and exclusion.
Equally important to consider is the ideological accompaniment of nationalism. It is difficult to imagine a world of nations genuinely free of nationalism, with the latter the ideological support for the actualisation of the former. Furthermore, and though still not translated into ongoing debate, is an examination of how an end to modern forms of imperialism would be very difficult without a fundamental transformation of national communities.
This lack of debate would not in itself be a great concern if it were part of a change in the primacy given to national identity in comparison to other forms of social connectedness. However, this is not the case. The absence of a challenge to the primacy of national identity can be understood in several ways. The nation remains a principle site of resistance for anti-colonial struggles, and thus is connected in the minds of many to the possibility of emancipatory politics. The wars in Iraq and in Palestine dominated discussion at the WSF, with the Iraqi resistance often supported to the extent that it is a nationalist insurrection against western imperialism. In addition, the nation has come to be seen as a line of defence against global capital. As such, it is not uncommon to hear calls for stronger state regulation at the national level, especially of the economy, by a left who may have once seen the nation as far more divisive a force in overcoming capital. In both instances, the nation lives on as the logical location for the defence against state-based imperialism or global capital.
The ‘unmentioned presence’ of the nation may also be sustained by the fact that a whole host of organisations involved in the WSF process, from Via Campesina through to Friends of the Earth, remain principally structured through federation-style systems that are in turn based on nationally structured organisations. People attending the forum then often come via organisations from within nations, even while the event as a whole is organised significantly through de-territorialised social relations.
A further reason can be suggested to explain why the nation lives on in the politics of the left in a relatively uncritical manner. Relationship to place, like language and other expressions of particular culture, are constant themes through the WSF, forming part of a general pattern of defence against homogenising global market forces. Yet to fuse ‘nation’ and ‘place’ as one and the same is a worrying assumption, especially when the homogenising demands of the nation have all too often seen the decimation of difference. A sense of place, and for that matter social connection, can be imagined in many ways that lie outside the contemporary nation. This is not just by moving towards the local or the global, but by taking into consideration far more complex systems of governance that could straddle different levels and kinds of human communities, both temporally and spatially.
The form of the next WSF in 2007 may help bring the unmentioned presence of the nation to the fore. The event will be held simultaneously across a variety of sites across the world. This will potentially allow for far greater participation by people otherwise excluded, and also signal back to all those involved the genuine global dimensions of the event — hopefully above and across nations rather than overwhelmingly from within.
Damian Grenfell works with the Globalism Institute at RMIT University and attended the World Social Forum as a member of Friends of the Earth.
