In seiner Dissertation an der Universität Cambridge, UK, zu „Social Movements and Resistance to Neoliberalism in America, 1979-2000” wirft Richard Saich auch einen Blick auf verwandte Initiativen in Europa, insbesondere auf die IWF/Weltbank-Kampagne von 1986 bis 1988 und den Gegenkongress zum „Weltwirtschaftsgipfel“ in Bonn 1985 sowie meine jeweils führende Rolle. Cambridge 2022, S. 49-54. Hier die entsprechenden Ausschnitte.
(Fußnoten von mir in Endnoten transformiert und Schreibfehler korrigiert.)
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/d1a95897-667b-4523-aa1a-ecb847159c25
The Other Economic Summits: London, Bonn, Berlin, and Houston
In the late 1980s these two strands of counter-hegemonic activism – structural adjustment and the debt crisis on the one hand, and the environment and indigenous rights on the other – were also beginning to converge in their criticisms of the World Bank and the IMF. As Rudoph Rÿser had argued in his testimony before the Congressional committee in 1983, large dams and other energy projects were a major feature of the controversy over the World Bank.[77] Just as U.S. groups were organizing the MDB campaign, activists in other countries were beginning to make similar connections. In the mid-1980s the British environmentalist Edward Goldsmith published of a series of books on the social and environmental impact of large dams.[78] Grassroots anti-dam movements in the Global South were also beginning to form a bridge between land movements and environmental movements and forming alliances with northern environmental groups.[79]
European groups joined the growing chorus of criticism of the Bank. One important transnational connection that was made during this period was with the West German Greens, Die Grünen.[80] The Greens had their roots in the New Left and the social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.[81] The transition from protest movement to parliamentary party began in the late 1970s but was secured when the Greens entered the national legislature following federal elections in 1983.[82] Members of the parliamentary group were familiar with analysis coming from left thinkers such as Johan Galtung and André Gunder Frank, as well as German political scientists who were critical of the structural inequalities of the global economic system. At the initiative of Ludger Volmer, one of the key people involved in Third World solidarity work within the parliamentary group, they sought to make global justice a political issue. Just as U.S. environmental groups were pushing for Congressional oversight hearings regarding the MDBs, the German Greens managed to make IMF and World Bank policies the subject of a parliamentary debate in the German Bundestag.
Volmer was selected as part of a delegation that travelled to Washington in September 1984 for the annual meeting of the Bank and Fund, where he met with U.S. activists, including Bruce Rich and Doug and Steve Hellinger.[83] Following the protests at the 1986 Bank/IMF annual meeting, U.S. activist Chad Dobson had founded the Bank Information Center (BIC), which acted as an international clearinghouse for information about Bank projects.[84] Subsequent meetings provided an arena for The Development GAP to further its efforts to link structural adjustment with the environment and facilitate the construction of a common agenda. At the 1990 annual meeting, The Development GAP joined International Rivers Network, an organisation that was active on the issue of dams, to launch Bank Check Quarterly, a newsletter that critiqued IFI lending from both an environmental and economic justice perspective.[85]
The meetings in Washington took place against a background of growing transnational linkages. In 1984 a group of British activists who were concerned with formulating alternative development models came together to create The Other Economic Summit (TOES), a countersummit to the meeting of the G7, which was gathering that year in London.[86] The following year, TOES was held in Bonn, and was hosted by the German Greens.[87] The Bonn summit saw the first large demonstration by groups who were concerned about the debt crisis and development and environmental issues.[88] When Volmer returned from the annual meeting of the IMF and World Bank in 1986 he brought back news that the 1988 meeting would take place in West Berlin. Now that they were established as a parliamentary party, the German Greens had access to the resources needed to plan an event for 1988 that would adopt the model pioneered in Bonn. Organised out of Volmer’s parliamentary office by two staff members, Babarba Unmüßig and Thomas Fues, the Berlin events lasted from 25 September 1988 to 27 Sep tember 1988 and consisted of an alternative convention of perhaps 3,000 representatives and a hearing of the Lelio Basso Foundation’s Permanent Peoples‘ Tribunal (PPT) on the Policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.[89] Many other Berlin-based groups also participated, having already mobilized to protest a visit by Reagan to the city in July the previous year.[90] Green activists were joined by U.S. allies, peace groups and third world solidarity groups, as well as autonomists and anarchists from the radical Kreuzberg neighbourhood of the city. Around 70,000 people took to the streets, and authorities were poorly prepared for this level of popular opposition. At least 552 people (and as many as 850) were detained, and the West Berlin police attacked and beat protestors.[91] Nevertheless, the counter-summit declaration ended on a hopeful call for participants to develop “a new internationalist movement.”[92]
The TOES format therefore provided a means for fostering transnational advocacy networks that brought together diverse groups from around the world. In 1990 TOES was held in the United States for the first time, in Houston, Texas. By this time the summit had been more fully conceptualised as “an expanding grassroots network of networks,” and was reimagined each year by a new secretariat in a different country. The theme for Houston was “The Voice of the People for a Change,” and was chosen to highlight the unrepresentative nature of the G7 as a governing body. G7 leaders, it was noted, represented just 20 per cent of the people of the world, and yet their decisions had a disproportionate impact on global affairs. “TOES 1990,” it was added, “will send the further message that the springs of democratic renewal have not dried up in the United States.” Indeed, day three of the conference was dedicated to the theme of “Democratizing the Economy.”[93] Trent Schroyer, a scholar of philosophy and the Program Director, argued that democratic renewal was needed because “it is our responsibility to confront the policy of the U.S. government that has blocked the path for a resolution of the world debt crisis.”[94]
The loose structure of the summit made it possible to address a huge array of topics, from “the economics of jails, prisons, political prisoners and the death penalty” to “feminist perspectives on the economy” and “Africa takes the lead: alternatives to structural adjustment.” Indeed, workshops attracted participants from around the world, including politician Jesse Jackson and union leader Cesar Chavez; AFSC Women’s Program Director Saralee Hamilton and environmental justice campaigner Robert Bullard; Native American community organiser Winona LaDuke from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota; Mexican opposition leader Cuahtemoc Cardenas and Brazilian politician (and later President of Brazil) Lula de Silva; Martin Khor of Third World Network; and South Asian intellectual Ashis Nandy. There were even representatives from the El Salvadoran FMLN and the Japanese Minamata movement in attendance.[95] The major advantage of this approach was that it emphasised the interconnectedness of economic, social, and environmental problems. The primary disadvantage was that it tended to sacrifice coherence for a nebulous agenda. Nevertheless, three characteristics of the Houston summit would become foundational for the global justice movement of the 1990s: the strategy of organizing through activist networks; grassroots democracy as a value central to the construction of a fair society; and the attempt to construct an integrative analysis of global justice.
Fussnoten
[77] The interest of U.S. NGOs in such projects was consistent with their earlier involvement in opposition to domestic dam projects in the 1960s, but this time the stakes were different. The Sierra Club was involved in campaigns in the 1960s to save old-growth redwood forests in California, and to oppose the creation of hydroelectric dams in the Grand Canyon. However, these remained more purely preservationist campaigns, lacking any sort of social agenda. In these years, many large environmental organizations like the Sierra Club were split on the issue of nuclear power. The integration of indigenous peoples and unions into the MDB campaign signalled the emergence of a broader social agenda. There were already several important differences between the environmental movement of the mid 1960s and the environmental movement of the mid 1980s. In the intervening years the movement went through a period of significant diversification, growth, and internationalization. Tom Turner, David Brower: The Making of the Environmental Movement (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), pp. 105–29; First, the environmental ideas of the scientist Barry Commoner, the writer Edward Abbey, the radical political thinker Murray Bookchin, the poet Gary Snyder, and Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss led to the evolution of a more systematic critique of human exploitation of the natural world, known as “deep ecology.” Second, in North America a new generation of groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth broke more decisively with the “preservationist” ethos of the earlier conservation organizations, and more radical groups that adopted more adversarial methods, such as Earth First!, were founded. Lastly, organizing around issues such as nuclear power, animal rights, and pollution had produced a more globally oriented agenda and fostered the creation of transnational networks. Carson; Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Confronting the Environmental Crisis (London: Cape, Jonathan Cape, 1972); Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang (London: Picador, 1982); Murray Bookchin, Our Synthetic Environment, Revised Edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Gary Snyder, Turtle Island, A New Directions Book (New York: New Directions, 1974); Arne Naess, ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A Summary.’, Inquiry, 16.1–4 (1973), 95–100.
[78] Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard, The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams, Three vols (Camelford, UK: Wadebridge Ecological Centre, 1984), VOLUME ONE.
[79] For example, in Brazil the Regional Committee of Those Displaced by Dams (Comissão Regional de Atingidos por Barragens, CRAB) developed links with the San Francisco-based International Rivers Network (IRN). Franklin Rothman and Pamela Oliver, ‘From Local to Global: The Anti-Dam Movement in Southern Brazil, 19791992’, Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 4.1 (1999), 41–57. (Eine meiner ersten parlamentarischen Aktivitäten 1983/84 – noch als sog. „Nachrücker“ der Bundestagsfraktion – war die kritische Thematisierung des Polonoroeste-Staudamms in Brasilien in enger Zusammenarbeit mit den US-Umweltgruppen. So begann die internationale Kampagne zum Schutz des Amazonas-Regenwaldes, die Ende der 1980er Jahre zur globalen Klimapolitik verbreitert wurde. LV)
[80] Transnational connections between American and German activists had already been established in the 1970s. Stephen Milder, ‘Thinking Globally, Acting (Trans-)Locally: Petra Kelly and the Transnational Roots of West German Green Politics’, Central European History, 43.2 (2010), 301–26; Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and JanHenrik Meyer, ‘Global Protest against Nuclear Power. Transfer and Transnational Exchange in the 1970s and 1980s’, Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, 39.1 (147) (2014), 165–90; Michael L. Hughes, ‘Civil Disobedience in Transnational Perspective: American and West German Anti-Nuclear-Power Protesters, 1975-1982’, Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, 39.1 (147) (2014), 236–53; Jan-Henrik Meyer, ‘“Where Do We Go From Wyhl?” Transnational Anti-Nuclear Protest Targeting European and International Organizations in the 1970s’, Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, 39.1 (147) (2014), 212–35.
[81] There are many parallels between these movements in West Germany and the United States, and as noted above there were important transnational connections between activists in the feminist, nuclear, and environmental movements. The German Greens placed a strong emphasis on grassroots democracy, to the extent that they were often labelled the “antiparty party.” Raymond Dominick, ‘The Roots of the Green Movement in the United States and West Germany’, Environmental Review: ER, 12.3 (1988), 1–30; The creation of the U.S. Green Party was influenced by the success of the West German Greens. However, the German Greens were aided in their rise by the fact that the West German Republic had a proportional electoral system. It was much harder for third parties to make advances in the less democratic American system. Greta Gaard, ‘The U.S. Greens: From Movement to Party’, in Ecological Politics (Temple University Press, 1998), pp. 53–87 (pp. 55–56).
[82] E.Gene Frankland, Between Protest and Power: The Green Party in Germany (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).
[83] Ludger Volmer, interview with author, 2020; German language readers may consult the relevant archival documents that are kept at the Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis in Berlin, as well as the works of Ludger Volmer, in particular. Ludger Volmer, Die Grünen und Die Aussenpolitik: Ein schwieriges Verhältnis (Münster, Germany: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1998); Ludger Volmer, Die Grünen: Von Der Protestbewegung Zur Etablierten Partei: Eine Bilanz (Munich, Germany: C. Bertelsmann, 2009).
[84] Dobson had considerable experience as an activist, having earlier been a coordinator for a demonstration involving 800,000 people in New York for the Nuclear Freeeze campaign. Keck and Sikkink, p. 148.
[85] Doug Hellinger, ‘Bank’s Poverty Report Whitewashes the Past Decade: Sets Stage for More Adjustment and Suffering in the 90s’, Bank Check Quarterly, 1990 <https://www.developmentgap.org/uploads/2/1/3/7/21375820/banks_poverty_report_whitewashes_the_pa st_decade.pdf>.
[86] The original idea for the summit came from Ecology Party activist Sally Willington. Willington persuaded Jonathon Porritt, soon to be appointed director of Friends of the Earth UK, to assemble a coordinating committee to organise the first TOES event. News from Somewhere: A New Economics Reader, ed. by David Boyle and Andrew Simms (London: New Economics Foundation, 2004); TOES was inspired by an effort to create a ‘new economics’ that rejected the growth politics of both Keynesian and neoliberal models of growth. This led to the founding of the New Economics Foundation in London in 1986. Key members of the British Jubilee 2000 campaign were associated with the foundation. The Other Economic Summit, ‘The Other Economic Summit, 6-10 June 1984: Report and Summary’, pp. 5–7, Box 1, Folder 19, The Other Economic Summit (TOES), 1990, UA 248, Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University. [Hereafter cited as TOES]. The new economics was needed, it was argued, to tackle a number of pressing problems that were not being addressed by mainstream thinking. These problems included overconsumption in the Global North and the associated depletion of the Earth’s resources, the impact of the international banking system and the exploitative practices of multinational corporations on the peoples of the Global South, the persistence of unemployment in the postindustrial economies, and the channelling of productive resources into the arms trade.
[87] 18/02/2023 14:26:00 88
[88] Papers from the first two TOES meetings are collected in The Living Economy: A New Economics in the Making, ed. by Paul Ekins (London: Routledge, 1986) Ekins was instrumental in the establishment of TOES North America when he visited groups there in 1986. It should be noted that whilst most of the contributors were from the Global North, there was also some attempt to include voices from the South. Notable in this respect was a paper by the Kenyan scholar, feminist, environmental activist, and later politician Wangari Maathai. Maathai was the founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, which integrated social and environmental objectives by mobilising women to plant trees to combat deforestation and promote women’s empowerment. Maathai was also active on the issue of debt and served as cochair of the Jubilee 2000 Africa Campaign. On the Green Belt Movement and Maathai see Wangari Maathai, The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience (New York: Lantern Books, 2004) and; Tabitha M. Kanogo, Wangari Maathai (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2020); On Maathai’s critique of mainstream development thinking and globalization see Besi Brillian Muhonja, Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2020), pp. 90–112. (Auf u.a. meinen Vorschlag hin bekam Wangari Maathai, die ich 1999 in Kenia als Staatsminister ausführlich sprechen konnte, 2004 den Friedensnobelpreis. LV )
[89] Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, ‘Tribunal About the Policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank: Verdict’, 1988 (Ich gehörte der Jury des Tribunals an, LV), The Development Group for Alternative Policies. Private Collection. Folder NGO Forums/WB-IMF-AMS.; On the roots of nongovernmental tribunals in the 1937 Dewey Commission and the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation’s tribunal on Vietnam see Arthur W. Blaser, ‘How to Advance Human Rights without Really Trying: An Analysis of Nongovernmental Tribunals’, Human Rights Quarterly, 14.3 (1992), 339– 70.
[90] 90 Jürgen Gerhards and Dieter Rucht, ‘Mesomobilization: Organizing and Framing in Two Protest Campaigns in West Germany’, American Journal of Sociology, 98.3 (1992), 555–96.
[91] 91 Thomas Fues, interview with author, 2020; Volmer, ‘Interview with Author’; Amnesty International, ‘West Berlin: The Anti-IMF/World Bank Protests of September 1988’ (Amnesty International. International Secretariat Archives, Inventory Number 519, AI Index EUR 23/01/89, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 1989).
[92] ‘International Counter-Congress: West-Berlin Declaration’, 1988, The Development Group for Alternative Policies. Private Collection. Folder NGO Forums/WB-IMF-AMS.
[93] In this respect, early global justice advocates confirmed neoliberals’ suspicion that democracy was a threat to the global market order. Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 271–72.
[94] The Other Economic Summit, ‘The Other Economic Summit, The Voice of the People for a Change, July 6, 7, & 8 in Houston, Texas, Background and Draft Program Overview’, 1990, Box 1, Folder 2, TOES.; Schroyer reprised his role as Program Coordinator for the 1997 summit in Denver. By that time TOES was addressing itself more directly to the problems of what was by then being referred to as ‘globalization.’ See A World That Works: Building Blocks for a Just and Sustainable Society, ed. by Trent Schroyer (New York: Bootstrap Press, 1997).
[95] ‘TOES ’90 Houston, Texas: Report and Summary’, ed. by Susan Hunt, Box 1, Folder 19, TOES. Two of the leaders of the MDB campaign, Bruce Rich and Brent Blackwelder, were also present. ‘Martin Khor: Fighting to Save Rain Forests and the World Environment’, Los Angeles Times, 29 July 1990 <https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-07-29-op-1632-story.html> [accessed 13 October 2021]; On Minamata see Timothy S. George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
