8.12
From the “Conference of the Peoples of Bandung” to the “Appeal of Bamako”

1.The “Conference of the Peoples of Bandung”
To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bandung meeting, Samir Amin and François Houtart1 organized a meeting in Bamako (Mali). Both are prominent committed intellectuals, major actors of the WSF and figures of neo-Marxist, third-worldist and dependency theories. The “Conference of the Peoples of Bandung – A reconstruction of alliances of the South” was scheduled on 18th January 2006, the day before the beginning of the “Polycentric World Social Forum” in Bamako. Due to delays in the meeting’s progress, it finally concluded on the following morning, just a few hours before the WSF Opening March.

The conference was held on the major site of the Bamako WSF and announced on the first page of the WSF program that mentioned the “participation of eminent personalities of the five continents”. The two organizers indeed invited some leading alter-globalisation intellectuals. Most of them were French-speaking (B. Cassen, J. Nickonoff, G. Massiah, I. Ramonet, S. George, R. Petrella, A. Traore…) and/or Marxist/pro-Cuba activists (M. Harnecker). These cosmopolitan intellectuals were to play a major role in the meeting and its final document. The conference was open to the public and attended by some journalists and around 400 activists. Malian and African people only represented a small minority of the conference audience that was dominated by relatively old, white, committed intellectuals, and with few people under 30 years old.

The conference plenary session started by a long introduction speech by Samir Amin. It was chaired by François Houtart, and had Ignacio Ramonet and Aminata Traore among the speakers. The discourses given during this plenary session and some of the workshops weren’t especially innovative. Most proposed a rather classical “third-worldist” analysis with a strong anti-imperialist emphasis. One might for example regret the absence of distinction in the proposal of “support to all Iraqi resistances”, as expressed by some participants, which was very different to the position of earlier anti-war meetings held during the WSF that insisted that we should “not to put all kind of resistance to the occupation in the same package” (to quote an Italian delegate during a 2005 WSF anti-war assembly).

As a chair of the conference, F. Houtart absolutely wanted to avoid the meeting resulting only in a long list of theoretical propositions “with no one involved to set them into practice”. He wanted this “day of reflection and exchanges” to be centred on “concrete propositions”: “The aim is to come to strategies and actors. We must try to put things in concrete form and do it in a very realistic way”. Nevertheless, despite the repeated attention on this practical outcome, many discourses and proposals remained disconnected from existing actions and social actors.

After the opening plenary, the second phase of the encounter was organized around two sets of five workshops that would later constitute the chapters of the “Bamako Appeal”: a multipolar world system; the global finance and economic system; regionalisations and reinforcement of the south in global negotiations; the preservation of natural resources; agricultural policies; workers and globalisation; democracy and democratisation; women oppression and patriarchy; media and cultures; and international organisations and institutions. The first five were held in the morning, the last ones in the afternoon.

Following a process proposed by supporters of “open space dynamics”, the plenary audience was split into five smaller workshops. This helped to avoid the unidirectional dynamic that usually characterizes big meetings. (In this approach, smaller groups give the opportunity to a large number of participants to take an active part in the discussions, and a rapporteur is in charge of preparing a synthesis of the major ideas and concrete propositions that he or she then presents to the next plenary session.) In this case, the international intellectuals who had been invited by S. Amin and F. Houtart were appointed as chair and reporter of each session. They also presented an introduction speech on this issue, giving an important orientation to the subsequent discussion.

An average of 40 people attended each workshop. In some cases, the chairs basically maintained the discussion within a small group of committed intellectuals, but most workshops implemented an open and participatory discussion dynamic. This was notably the case in the groups working on gender and international institutions. In the latter, every single participant had the opportunity to share his ideas and opinions on the issue. The workshop on democracy, chaired by G. Massiah (France), was also especially interesting. The participants insisted on the importance to “acknowledge the failures of the sovietism and of decolonisation movements, largely due to the under-estimation of the importance of democracy or to its negation”. Others emphasized the necessity to “struggle against the vision of democracy given by imperialism that equates democracy to markets, elections, and a spectacular conception of human rights”. The fundamental relation between political and social democracy was then underlined, as well as a strong support to the participatory democratic processes that should complement representative democracy.

On the second day morning, all reporters read their personal syntheses of the workshops to a 200-person audience. Some activists in the audience raised a few questions and comments but no general discussion was held. After the last workshop report, a Belgian Green activist asked how the text would be adopted, “Who [is going to] to take the final decision about the text” and “what the organizers planned to do with it”. S. Amin replied that each reporter would send a final copy of his text and that the organizers would then decide about it, possibly bringing in some minor changes. “It will then be diffused online as the ‘Appeal of Bamako’ and we hope it will get a large adhesion and that it will be signed by other organisations.”. There was hence no concrete form of endorsement of this text by the conference audience in Bamako, neither by vote nor by acclamation. Nor was the Bamako Appeal presented or discussed at any Bamako Polycentric WSF workshops and assemblies that started the following day.

2. Reactions to the Bamako Appeal

a. Enthusiasm and criticisms
The Bamako Appeal has raised many comments within the alter-globalisation (global social justice) movement, whereas it has received a warm and enthusiastic reception in communist and Marxist milieus. The French philosopher J. Bidet could not have been more excited. In the 21st February 2006 edition of L’Humanité, the daily newspaper internal to the French Communist Party, he wrote: “The appeal was adopted by the Social Forum of Bamako [sic] and then in Caracas. It has great antecedents: the 1848 Communist Manifesto and the Bandung Declaration. (…) The novelty of this third universal address lies not as much in the objectives it enunciates as in the audacious attempt it represents to give rise to a ‘new historic subject’ during this neoliberal epoch, when capitalism has come to merge in the imperialist configuration”. Without sharing such an enthusiasm, many alter-globalisation activists acknowledge the quality, clarity and interest of such a programmatic text. However, the Bamako Appeal has also generated many critiques, especially concerning the way the document has been presented as a general statement of the global movement, the form of the follow-up process that has resulted from such an approach, and the risk it represents for the open space nature of the WSF: “Is the WSF really open if the Bamako Appeal was written and finalised even before the Bamako Forum started?”.

Some committed experts and more politically oriented alter-globalisation activists believe that text’s grouping of a set of clear propositions and alternatives may help both to clarify the alter-globalisation movement’s purposes and also to influence political decision-makers. They don’t seem to consider the rather top-down process by which the Appeal was prepared as a major problem. Other activists however, are much more “process oriented” and insist on the implementation of the values of the movement in our own practices, especially by developing participatory assemblies and internal democracy. While the first category may appreciate the clarity and the efficiency of the Bamako Appeal, the second has strongly criticized the absence of any approval assembly and the fact that the Bamako Appeal was not put forward and discussed at the Bamako Polycentric WSF. They regret the redaction process was dominated by a small group of intellectuals mainly representing one particular political orientation of the alter-globalisation movement. Aside from this, many alter-globalisation activists strongly reject the vanguardist logic that led to some major failures in social and political initiatives during the 20th century. Some aspects of vanguardist attitudes were clearly present in the Bamako Appeal process and discourses. Rather starting the debate at the bottom, the organizers’ proclaimed aim was to “find actors that could be able to uphold this kind of propositions [they were defining]”. They saw the “Bamako Appeal” as “a contribution to the formation of a new historical and popular subject”.

b. A risk for open space Social Forums?
Many commentators on the Bamako Appeal have referred to the nature of the World Social Forum as an “open space”2. To preserve the Social Forums as a place that can be used by diverse actors, its Charter clearly prohibits the WSF from adopting itself any text or political statement but instead emphasises that all groups of participants have the right to publicise their declarations in their own name. This arrangement clearly allows the group around S. Amin and F. Houtart to write and publish a statement related to the WSF. It might even be considered as important that such an influential network as the “World Forum for Alternatives” would promote its proposals in the Forum, contributing to the diffusion of alter-globalisation ideas.

The major issue generated by the enunciation of the Bamako Appeal lies in the way it has been presented - a way that leaves it ambiguous as to whether it is a text written by a specific group of activists or a statement accepted and promoted by the whole Bamako Polycentric WSF. Such confusion would have been avoided by choosing titles that made clear the nature of the text: such as “The Manifesto of the Group of 19 of Porto Alegre” or “The Appeal of the Bandung People’s Conference in Bamako”, or even “The World Forum for Alternatives Appeal”, rather than “The Bamako Appeal” – where even the singularity suggests only one such document emerging from Bamako / the Bamako Forum.

The possibility of such confusion was explicitly raised before and discussed with the two main organizers of the conference before the text became public, by the author, and we may therefore consider the choice as deliberate. The strategy indeed reveals a certain efficiency. Before the Bamako meeting, a Malian newspaper explained what the World Social Forum was about, and there said that the “Porto Alegre Manifesto” that was announced during the previous year WSF – and which was signed by the organisers of this conference and several of its prominent participants - was a statement by the WSF and moreover that it was the only fully published document among the 250 declarations made by the 2005 WSF participants.3 Similarly, the French philosopher quoted above presented the Bamako Appeal as a text adopted by (and not even at) the WSF in Bamako.

Supporters of the “open space” character of the WSF have therefore criticized the way in which this group of leading committed intellectuals representing a specific orientation within the WSF have tried to appropriate the voice of the whole movement. In the previous years, B. Cassen precisely criticized the declarations of the “Social Movements and Activists network” for seeking to appear as a final statement of the whole forum. In what way does the process followed by the “Porto Alegre Manifesto” and the “Bamako Appeal” differ from the initiatives he earlier opposed?

c. The WSF and cosmopolitan alter-globalisation intellectuals
The alter-globalisation movement has heavily relied on the prestige and fame of committed cosmopolitan intellectuals for its expansion and its internationalisation. They have played a major role in the diffusion of ideas opposed to neoliberalism as well as in the alter-globalisation movement construction. The creation of the World Social Forum has widely relied on their commitment, dynamism, and affinity networks. Conversely, the burgeoning of international meetings has led to the rise of an informal but very influent global affinity group of elite international activists. These people have been responsible for highly strategic formal or informal decisions – like the host cities for the WSF meetings and on the organisation of the World Social Forums. Some smaller groups of these international leaders have taken other important initiatives, among which are the “Social Movement and Activists’ Assembly” held at successive Forums and its annual statements, the Porto Alegre Manifesto in 2005, and the Appeal of Bamako in 2006, the latter two being initiated by more or less the same group of committed international intellectuals.

In 2005, B. Cassen, F. Houtart, and S. Amin were among the major protagonists of the “Porto Alegre Manifesto”, a document presented to the press at a five-star palace hotel and signed by 19 prominent intellectuals without any consultation of the 150,000 participants in the WSF that was then going on in the city. The strong criticism towards this initiative and its elitist process did not lead them to abandon their projects of clear, programmatic documents that they consider useful and important for the global justice movement. The process they set up in Bamako was in some way more participatory that that of the Porto Alegre Manifesto, notably with the open participation in the conference workshops. However, the process of redaction of the document remained under control of a small group of selected committed intellectuals.

The “Conference of the Peoples of Bandung” was open and many activists who did not belong to the group of intellectuals invited by S. Amin and F. Houtart also took an active part in some of its workshops. Nevertheless, their real impact on the final document seems limited. For sure, the Appeal did include some interesting ideas raised by some participants, but the imprint of the two main organizers of the Appeal is especially strong in the final text frame, its general arguments, and the major ideas it puts forward. This is due both to the important sections that they either wrote or co-wrote and also to the choice of the distinguished committed intellectuals who they invited? These guests introduced, chaired, and synthesized every workshop. The introductions they gave to their respective workshops, and their interventions during the respective debates, in most cases remained as the general frame of the final text they wrote for the respective sections in the Bamako Appeal.

The organizers and most of their guests actually shared a very similar sociological profile and strong common political orientation. Most of them were white men over 55 years old, and intellectuals – many of them university professors – with a long experience of international activism, travelling all around the world to take part in meetings and global movements. A clear and strong neo-Marxist, dependency and third worldist, pro-Cuba and pro-Chavez political orientation dominated the group. This orientation is for sure important among the global justice movement but only constitutes one of its components. Its overwhelming representation among the writers of this text do not reflect the diversity of orientations that is a core characteristic of this global movement. Besides, such a relative homogeneity of the protagonists often leads to a focus on particular issues while other points remain unattended. Global justice activists from other cultural backgrounds or political orientation indeed have therefore pointed out important missing issues in the Bamako Appeal.

The most productive position with respect to the Bamako Appeal is probably to take this declaration only for what it is: a clear and interesting text that contains a set of proposals that a specific group of intellectual activists strongly committed to the WSF and to the global social justice movement has put forward. It aims to promote a set of measures and ideas that they consider as indispensable steps on a path toward another world that the broader movement wishes to build.

10. FNRS Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Louvain (Belgium), associated researcher at the Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques (EHESS-Paris) and at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance (London School of Economics). He has attended the first five World Social Forums as well as the “Conference of the Peoples of Bandung” and the Polycentric WSF in Bamako in January 2006. Geoffrey.Pleyers@anso.ucl.ac.be.

11. The conference was officially organized by a few overlapping alter-globalisation research centres and networks: the World Forum for Alternatives (whose president is S. Amin and director F. Houtart), the Third World Forum (president: S. Amin, based in Dakar), ENDA (a development NGO based in Dakar) and the Malian Social Forum (represented by A. Traore that took part in the introductive plenary session).

12. Whitaker F. (2004) The WSF as open space, in: Sen J., Anand A., Escobar A. et Waterman P. eds., World Social Forum : Challenging Empires, New Delhi: Viveka Foundation, pp. 111-122, and Sen J., Keraghel C. eds. (2004) Explorations in Open Space. The World Social Forum and cultures of politics, International Social Science Journal, N° 182.

13. Group of Nineteen – ‘Porto Alegre Manifesto’, dated February 20 2005. Accessed 041006 @ http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-02/20group_of_nineteen.cfm.