Europe is now alive with debate about the meaning of Europe, so it’s no surprise that activists are engaged in equally broad arguments. At least as much as they did 30 years ago, the radicals are not only declaring opinions but creating a way of life. Without any central organization whatever, they have created a modus operandi in record time, a bare year and a half since they burst upon the public consciousness in Seattle. They already lay claim to a tradition. They share a calendar and a list of stations of their cause: Seattle, Washington, Prague, Nice, Quebec City, Porto Alegre, Goteborg. (Next stop: Genoa.) They think in what the sociologist Barrie Thorne once called “event time,” living from epiphany to epiphany, extrapolating the next tactics from the last. Taking advantage of Europe’s new visaless borders, they have made a scene out of “summit hopping,” as some of them call it. What to do between jamboree demonstrations is not clear to them, but they post information about encampments, as well as ride sharing and places to stay, on a Canada-based Web site.
Internal debates run fierce on the meaning of this movement, a phenomenon so complex and far-flung that there isn’t even agreement about what to call it. Opponents like to wrap it all up under the label “anti-globalization,” and some of the activists surely are that, while others reject some aspects of globalization while welcoming others. Some, more radical, say they’re anticapitalist, claiming it’s time to “resurrect the R word,” meaning revolution. Others, of a reformist bent, press specific demands like the “Drop the Debt” campaign, which, as the name suggests, wants to cancel debts by the poorest of poor nations. The most radical sometimes despise the reformers as naive wimps. Any international meeting is a provocation for these ultras. Most recently in Goteborg, anarchist mobs tore a hole in police preparations and public esteem for the movement.
As countersummit violence becomes increasingly familiar, the debates about tactics are increasingly ferocious. One peaceful demonstrator in Goteborg, Angharad Jones, wrote in the online magazine open Democracy.net that whereas a peaceful demonstration of 25,000 against President George W. Bush got little publicity, the cameras predictably rushed to the riots. She deplored rioters’ “risking people’s lives by chucking bricks and fireworks around… destroying things in a senseless, random way (burning a whole pile of wooden chairs from a local restaurant–such a disgusting waste of resources), but they also managed to hijack the whole debate.” Meanwhile, in the eyes of the anarchists, mere demonstrators get nowhere by simply exhibiting their sentiments in some godforsaken zone where the police will herd them. Some rioters in Goteborg even beat up demonstrators who tried to get them to stop smashing shop windows.
The dance of escalation takes two partners. Between them, the anarchists and the police hold the initiative. The more inflammatory the former, the more the latter crack down, and on it goes, each party crying, We told you so. As the riotous reject what they see as draconian police restrictions (having inspired some of them, of course), some of the civilly disobedient want to seal off and denounce the violent anarchists, while others argue that exclusion only makes them more violent. Sometimes the police beef up the anarchists by cracking down on the nonviolent folks in their vicinity. The anarchists count on that.
Sooner or later, demonstrators at large will probably start staying away from these confrontational festivals in droves. The tactical debates have already become so fierce, they “detract from the substance of the issues,” cautions the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, author of the movement-inspiring book “No Logo,” in openDemocracy.net. (The fact that this debate goes on in a transnational Internet magazine is itself a sign that the movement is globalized.) When a movement’s central preoccupation is police brutality, its means have become its ends. Its agenda is determined by its enemy.
Still, for now, it is more fun, if you don’t mind risking a riot, to join the adventuresome caravan from countersummit to countersummit than to undertake the focused work that might change the policies of specific corporations and governments, or win local (let alone national) power. There seems to be more elan among the Eurocaravans, for example, than in the transnational coalition of Green groups trying to get activists to focus on boycotting corporations like ExxonMobil, let alone the more grueling, decidedly unfun work of electing governments and shaping policies to clamp controls on the worst depredations.
If one thing Europe means is a place where debates take place on the meaning of Europe, then one thing the current Euromovement means is debating where that movement should go. The debate will likely become more supercharged. Opponents who dismiss the protesters as “spoilers who achieve nothing useful,” as Flora Lewis recently wrote in the International Herald Tribune, might think a bit about where the movement’s energies ought to be focusing. It is true that, if they were strictly Gandhian, they’d probably garner greater public support, but they wouldn’t automatically have any more influence for the good on the policies of international bankers or Brussels bureaucrats.
The Eurodemonstrators, along with their Western Hemisphere counterparts, have opened some channels of influence, but remain as far from political power as a national debt is from a Swedish shop window. Many are likely soon to discover that diminishing returns will set in–or already have done–from the current line of tactics. The question the protesters have to wrestle with now is whether they will be anything more than a lifestyle, a Eurocultural fashion statement. It is normal for movements to go that route, but if you want staying power, you need to be more than a symptom of modern rootlessness. You need to convince the hugely unrevolutionary majority that their actions will bring results and that these results will be good.
