Fences and Windows (20 page)

Besides, much of the anger directed at the U.S. stems from a belief—voiced as readily in Argentina as in France, in India as in Saudi Arabia—that the U.S. already demands far too much “consistency and discipline” from other nations; that beneath its stated commitment to democracy and sovereignty, it is deeply intolerant of deviations from the economic model known as “the Washington Consensus.” Whether these policies, so beneficial to foreign investors, are enforced by the Washington-based International Monetary Fund or through international trade agreements, the U.S.’s critics generally feel that the world is already far too influenced by America’s brand of governance (not to mention America’s brands).

There is another reason to be wary of mixing the logic of branding with the practice of governance. When companies try to implement global image consistency, they look like generic franchises. But when governments do the same, they can look distinctly authoritarian. It’s no coincidence that historically, the political leaders most preoccupied with
branding themselves and their parties were also allergic to democracy and diversity. Think Mao Tse-tung’s giant murals and Red Books, and yes, think Adolf Hitler, a man utterly obsessed with purity of image: within his party, his country, his race. This has been the ugly flip side of dictators striving for consistency of brand: centralized information, state-controlled media, re-education camps, purging of dissidents and much worse.

Democracy, thankfully, has other ideas. Unlike strong brands, which are predictable and disciplined, true democracy is messy and fractious, if not outright rebellious. Beers and her colleagues may have convinced Colin Powell to buy Uncle Ben’s by creating a comforting brand image, but the United States is not made up of identical grains of rice, assembly-line hamburgers or Gap khakis.

Its strongest “brand attribute,” to use a term from Beers’s world, is its embrace of diversity, a value Beers is now attempting to stamp with cookie-cutter uniformity around the world, unfazed by the irony. The task is not only futile but dangerous: brand consistency and true human diversity are antithetical—one seeks sameness, the other celebrates difference; one fears all unscripted messages, the other embraces debate and dissent.

No wonder we’re so “mixed up.” Making his pitch for Brand U.S.A. in Beijing recently, President Bush argued that “in a free society, diversity is not disorder. Debate is not strife.” The audience applauded politely. The message might have proved more persuasive if those values were better reflected in the Bush administration’s communications with
the outside world, both in its image and, more important, in its policies.

Because as President Bush rightly points out, diversity and debate are the lifeblood of liberty. But they are enemies of branding.

 

V
WINDOWS TO DEMOCRACY

In which glimmers of hope are found in a politic of radical power decentralization, emerging from the mountains of Chiapas and the urban squats of Italy

March 2001

“We are here to show the world that another world is possible!” the man on stage said, and a crowd of more than ten thousand roared its approval. We were not cheering for a specific other world, just the possibility of one. We were cheering for the idea that another world could, in theory, exist.

For the past thirty years, a select group of CEOs and world leaders have met during the last week in January on a mountaintop in Switzerland to do what they presumed they were the only ones capable of doing: determining how the global economy should be governed. We were cheering because it was, in fact, the last week of January, and this wasn’t the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It was the first annual World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. And even though we weren’t CEOs or world leaders, we were still going to spend the week talking about how the global economy should be governed.

Many people said they felt history being made in that room. What I felt was something more intangible: the end of the End of History. And fittingly, Another World Is Possible was the event’s official slogan. After we’d
seen a year and a half of protests against the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the World Social Forum was billed as an opportunity for this emerging movement to stop screaming about what it is against and start articulating what it is for.

If Seattle was, for many people, the coming-out party of a resistance movement, then, according to Soren Ambrose, policy analyst with 50 Years Is Enough, “Porto Alegre is the coming-out party for the existence of serious thinking about alternatives.” The emphasis was on alternatives coming from the countries experiencing most acutely the negative effects of globalization: mass migration of people, widening wealth disparities, weakening political power.

The particular site was chosen because Brazil’s Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, the PT) is in power in the city of Porto Alegre, as well as in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The conference was organized by a network of Brazilian unions and NGOs, but the PT provided state-of-the-art conference facilities at the Catholic University of Porto Alegre and paid the bill for a star-studded roster of speakers. Having a progressive government sponsor was a departure for a group of people accustomed to being met with clouds of pepper spray, border strip searches and no-protest zones. In Porto Alegre, activists were welcomed by friendly police officers and greeters with official banners from the tourism department.

Though the conference was locally organized, it was, in part, the brainchild of ATTAC France, a coalition of unions, farmers and intellectuals that has become the most public
face of the anti-globalization movement in much of Europe and Scandinavia. (ATTAC stands for Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens, which, admittedly, doesn’t work as well in English.) Founded in 1998 by Bernard Cassen and Susan George of the socialist monthly
Le Monde Diplomatique
, ATTAC began as a campaign for the implementation of the Tobin Tax, the proposal by the American Nobel laureate James Tobin to tax all speculative financial transactions. Reflecting its Marxist intellectual roots, the group has expressed frustration with the less coherent focus of the North American anti-corporate movement. “The failure of Seattle was the inability to come up with a common agenda, a global alliance at the world level to fight against globalization,” says Christophe Aguiton of ATTAC, who helped organize the forum.

Which is where the World Social Forum came in: ATTAC saw the conference as an opportunity to bring together some of the best minds working on alternatives to neo-liberal economic policies—not just new systems of taxation but everything from sustainable farming to participatory democracy to co-operative production to independent media. From this process of information swapping ATTAC believed its “common agenda” would emerge.

The result of the gathering was something much more complicated—as much chaos as cohesion, as much division as unity. In Porto Alegre the coalition of forces that is often placed under the banner of anti-globalization began collectively to recast itself as a pro-democracy movement. In the process, the movement was also forced to confront the
weaknesses of its own internal democracy and to ask difficult questions about how decisions were being made—at the World Social Forum itself and, more important, in the high-stakes planning for the next round of World Trade Organization negotiations and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas.

Part of the challenge was that the organizers had no idea how many people would be drawn to this Davos for activists. Atila Roque, a co-ordinator of IBase, a Brazilian policy institute and a member of the organizing committee, explains that for months they thought they were planning a gathering of two thousand people. Then, suddenly, there were ten thousand, more at some events, representing a thousand groups, from 120 countries. Most of those delegates had no idea what they were getting into: a model UN? A giant teach-in? An activist political convention? A party?

The result was a strange hybrid of all of the above, along with—at the opening ceremony, at least—a little bit of Vegas floor show mixed in. On the first day of the forum, after the speeches finished and we cheered for the end of the End of History, the house lights went down and two giant screens projected photographs of poverty in Rio’s
favelas
. A line of dancers appeared on stage, heads bowed in shame, feet shuffling. Slowly, the photographs became more hopeful, and the people on stage began to run, brandishing the tools of their empowerment: hammers, saws, bricks, axes, books, pens, computer keyboards, raised fists. In the final scene, a pregnant woman planted seeds—seeds, we were told, of another world.

What was jarring was not so much that this particular genre of utopian socialist dance had rarely been staged since the Works Progress Administration performances of the 1930s, but that it was done with such top-notch production values: perfect acoustics, professional lighting, headsets simultaneously translating the narration into four languages. All ten thousand of us were given little bags of seeds to take and plant at home. This was Socialist Realism meets
Cats
.

The forum was filled with these juxtapositions between underground ideas and Brazil’s enthusiastic celebrity culture: moustachioed local politicians accompanied by glamorous wives in backless white dresses rubbing shoulders with the president of the Landless Peasants Movement of Brazil, known for chopping down fences and occupying large pieces of unused farmland. An old woman from Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, with her missing child’s name crocheted on her white head scarf, sitting next to a Brazilian soccer star so adored that his presence provoked several hardened politicos to rip off pieces of their clothing and demand autographs. And José Bové was unable to go anywhere without a line of bodyguards protecting him from the paparazzi.

Every night the conference adjourned to an outdoor amphitheatre where musicians from around the world performed, including the Cuarteto Patria, one of the Cuban bands made famous by Wim Wenders’s documentary
The Buena Vista Social Club
. Cuban anything was big here. Speakers had only to mention the existence of the island
nation for the room to break out in chants of “Cuba! Cuba! Cuba!” Chanting, it must be said, was also big: not just for Cuba but for honorary president of the Workers Party Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva (“Lula-Lula”). José Bové earned his very own chant: “Olé, Olé, Bové, Bové,” sung as a soccer stadium hymn.

One thing that wasn’t so big at the World Social Forum was the United States. There were daily protests against Plan Colombia, the “wall of death” between the United States and Mexico, as well as George W. Bush’s announcement that the new administration will suspend foreign aid to groups that provide information on abortion. In the workshops and lectures there was much talk of American imperialism, of the tyranny of the English language. Actual U.S. citizens, though, were notably scarce. The AFL-CIO barely had a presence (its president John Sweeney was at Davos), and there was no one there from the National Organization for Women. Even Noam Chomsky, who said the forum “offers opportunities of unparalleled importance to bring together popular forces,” sent only his regrets. Public Citizen had two people in Porto Alegre, but their star, Lori Wallach, was in Davos.
[Much of this changed for the second World Social Forum in January 2002: Chomsky attended, as did Wallach, along with a larger contingent of U.S. activists.]

“Where are the Americans?” people asked, waiting in coffee lines and around Internet link-ups. There were many theories. Some blamed the media: the U.S. press wasn’t covering the event. Of fifteen hundred journalists registered, maybe ten were American, and more than half of those were from
Independent Media Centers. Some blamed Bush: the forum was held a week after his inauguration, which meant that most U.S. activists were too busy protesting the theft of the election to even think about going to Brazil. Others blamed the French: many U.S. groups didn’t know about the event at all, in part because international outreach was done mainly by ATTAC, which, Christophe Aguiton acknowledged, needs “better links with the Anglo-Saxon world.”