Tuomas Ylä-Anttila
University of Helsinki
Department of Sociology
tuomas.yla-anttila@helsinki.fi
From the Great Revolutions to the World Social Forum: The Globalization of Social Movements and Public Spheres
Abstract
Political decisions taken on one side of the world impinge upon people’s lives everywhere more rapidly and profoundly than ever before. From the point of view of democracy, this requires us to ask, how people from around the world could participate in the process of democratic deliberation and will-formation regarding these decisions. In this article it is argued that social movements played an important role in the formation of national public spheres in the time of the great bourgeois revolutions, and that the seeds of global democratic public spheres should be looked for in the global social movements of today. The most important attempt at participating in global public debates by these movements is the World Social Forum. Analysis of the historical connections between social movements and public spheres shows that trom the classical heyday of the national bourgeois public spheres, public debate has been continued by the means of collective action in social movements. The networks of associations and media that provide the institutional basis for public spheres have developed hand in hand with social movements, and there have always been counterpublics, linked to these movements, that have questioned the limits of public/private and political/apolitical drawn by hegemonic publics. In the light of these historical developments, this article examines the repertoires of collective action, the associational networks and the use of media, and the counterpublic discourses of the global movements associated with the Word Social Forum.
Introduction
A central feature of democracy is that citizens have the right to freely debate, form opinions, and that these opinions are given consideration when political decisions are made. The turn in political philosophy towards deliberative models of democracy has laid particular emphasis on the role of public debate and will-formation as essential feature of robust democratic regimes (see e.g. Benhabib 1996; Cohen 1989; Dryzek 2000; Gutmann & Thompson 1996; Habermas 1996; Young 2000). The central principle in such conceptions of democracy is that all citizens affected by certain political decisions should be able to participate in public debate concerning those decisions.
In the present state of development of the world system, decisions taken on one side of the globe impinge upon people’s lives everywhere rapidly and more profoundly than ever before. When the Chinese economy is opened to foreign investment, workers in Europe are laid off, when the US decides to show its military force in the face of international terrorism, a Polish NATO-soldier is sent off to Iraq and so on. From the point of view of democracy, this invites us to ask whether there are possibilities of global public debate, where people from around the world could express their opinions about decisions that may affect their lives. Where should we look for to find seeds of such global publics?
The answer I offer in this article is: in social movements that are born as a result of political conflicts. Social movements have played a decisive role in the process of the formation of national public spheres, and I shall aim to show that the same will most likely hold true for public spheres that are global.
With the rise of networks of more intense global economic, political and cultural interaction, public debates have also acquired new global dimensions. Social movements that have been born to criticize certain features of the present system of global governance, have played an important role in raising public debates on global issues. These movements received much attention in public through globally coordinated mass demonstrations, targeting meetings of institutions of global governance (Seattle 1999, Prague 2000, Genoa and Gothenburg 2001). The most important activity of these movements today is the World Social Forum (WSF), the largest annual world meeting of social movements and NGOs, organized for the fourth time in 2004 in Mumbai, India. The WSF has grown from a single annual event to a worldwide process: continental forums have been organized in Asia, Africa and Europe, national and local forums number at least several dozens a year. 
The Social Forums are important for the process of globalizing democracy, I shall argue, because they contribute to the creation of global public spheres, essential for democratic deliberation on global issues. They take on a global level the process that was initiated by national social movements contributing to the creation of national public spheres, a central feature of nation-state democracies. 
In the first four chapters following this introduction, I shall show that social movements played an important role in the birth of present-day democratic regimes, and in particular the ideals and institutions of public debate that are essential to the success of these regimes. I shall proceed by critically scrutinizing Jürgen Habermas’ (1989) well-known account of the birth of national bourgeois public spheres. From the point of view of social movements, Habermas’ account is incomplete in at least three ways: It neglects the role of collective action in the formation of public spheres, the networks of associations and media institutions that developed hand in hand with social movements, and the fact that there have always been counterpublics, questioning the limits of the public sphere.
In the following sections I look at the World Social Forum and the global social movements that meet there, in the light of the three remarks I have made concerning Habermas’ account of national public spheres. First I shall present the repertoires of collective action that these movements employ to raise their concerns to agenda of global public debates. Then I examine the development of the institutional basis of the WSF: the networks of associations behind it, their interaction with global media institutions and their attempts to create new forms of independent media production. Third, I shall elaborate on the role of the counterpublics of the WSF that aim to broaden the scope of public debate and the group of legitimate participants by politicizing questions concerning global economic governance.
Habermas’ Account of the Birth of National Public Spheres and Its Three Shortcomings
According to Jürgen Habermas’ renowned account (Habermas 1989), the idea and institutions of national bourgeois public spheres started to take form in Britain around the turn of the eighteenth century, and somewhat later in other European polities. The national public spheres developed hand in hand with the capitalist economy and the rise of the bourgeoisie. They were a challenge to the social order of feudalism.
“Nothing is required for this enlightenment, however, except freedom…the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters”, declared Immanuel Kant in 1784 (Kant 1991 [1784]. The enlightenment brought about the idea that free men are allowed to question authority and govern themselves by political decisions taken as the result of free and equal public debate. The arbitrary rule based on hierarchical order of status given at birth was to be replaced by rule based on truth, arrived at through rational argumentation; veritas non auctoritas facit legem (Habermas 1989, 82).
The principle of equality of public debate required bracketing out the differences of status between the debaters (ibid, 36). For the first time it was thought that the best rational argument carries the day, not the debater with the highest status. Though continually breached, this principle was important, as it allowed participants to at least demand during the course of a debate that their arguments be heard regardless of their status. The result of the debate was taken to be a consensual, best possible resolution from the point of view of all participants.
The institutions making possible the debate were print press and cafés. As trade routes reached to remote areas, printed newsletters of merchants became indispensable for success in business. It was soon discovered that regularly distributed printed word was an efficient political tool, and the modern political press began to take shape. Public face-to-face debates took place in cafés of the bourgeoisie, which often functioned also as editorial offices (Ibid, 15-21).
According to Habermas, the ideal of rational-critical public debate is no longer realized in the late modern capitalist welfare societies. This structural transformation of the public sphere for the worse occurred as a result of the development of capitalism and the subsequent intensification of the conflict between capital and labor. As this conflict became the central political divide and the working masses became political participants, public debate turned from rational consensus-seeking to power struggle of interest groups. Rational debate in the bourgeois cafés was replaced by collective action in the streets; the force of the better argument itself was replaced by the force of the number of people backing the argument. The creation of the corporatist welfare state led, according to Habermas, to the fusion of the state and civil society, and electronic mass media seemed not to be made for critical debate but consumption.
This bleak picture of the decline of the public sphere is, however, strongly exaggerated. As Craig Calhoun (1992, 33) felicitously puts it, “Habermas tends to judge the eighteenth century by Locke and Kant, the nineteenth century by Marx and Mill, and the twentieth century bu the typical suburban television viewer.” This exaggeration seems to be, as we shall shortly see, by and large due to the fact that Habermas neglects the role of social movements in the birth of the national bourgeois public spheres.
Calhoun’s remark can, first, be supplemented by noting that while looking up to great philosophers and eloquently debating companies, Habermas misses a host of demonstrators, petitioners and boycotters. Looking for the ideal of the public sphere in its history, Habermas does not notice that the bourgeoisie did not bring down the feudal order by mere debate, but also by collective action in social movements. The practices engaged in by social movements were equally important in the process of formation of modern democratic public spheres as the philosophical ideals that guide them and the media institutions and cafés that provided their institutional basis.
Second, Habermas fails to recognize that networks of civic associations were an indispensable institutional prerequisite to the formation of public spheres, and that these networks, as well as the media institutions (which he does analyze) developed hand in hand with the functioning of social movements. Papers may have been published by individuals, but their birth was often sparked by wider cycles of political mobilization.
The third important shortcoming of Habermas’ account is, in a sense, the flipside of the first one. Because he sees the bourgeois public sphere as constituted of mere debate, it becomes all too easy to juxtapose it with struggles of the working class that may seem to be conducted more by collective action. In fact, such a rupture does not exist. Like workers, the bourgeoisie resorted at times to collective action, and like the bourgeoisie, workers and also women engaged in public debate, even though they were excluded from the bourgeois public sphere. Counterpublics of workers and women existed alongside the bourgeois public sphere and aimed to challenge its hegemony. Instead of one national public sphere there have always been several public spheres which have struggled for power.
In the following three sections, I shall discuss in more detail each of Habermas’ three shortcomings in turn.
The Collective Action of the Bourgeoisie: Boycotts, Petitions and Demonstrations
Habermas’ attempt to look for the ideal of public debate in its history misses, first, the fact that national bourgeois public spheres developed through various political conflicts, and that these conflicts were resolved not only by debate, but also by engaging in collective action.
As soon as the idea developed that public opinion, formed in rational debates, should guide political decision-making, citizens developed a host of measures to back up the opinions they had formed in the course of such debates. Charles Tilly (1986) has famously called these measures the modern repertoire of collective action. Paraphrasing von Clausewitz, collective action can thus be seen as continuation of debate by other means. The bleak picture sketched by Habermas in which the bourgeoisie debated calmly and “the pressure from the streets” became a nuisance for the debate only with the rise of the conflict between capital and labor, is clearly erroneous. The social movements making use of the modern repertoire of collective action developed hand in hand. In the following I shall present this repertoire through three examples.
The boycott, as a part of the modern repertoire of collective action was born when the British decided, in 1765, to levy a new stamp tax in their American colonies, to finance the expanding Empire and its military forces. In addition to rioting, the Americans opposed the new tax by new, more organized and less violent means: by boycotting the products of the mother country. The network of associations created to enforce the boycott and the pamphlets encouraging it later offered institutional prerequisites and models of action in the struggle that finally led to the declaration of independence in 1776. (Tarrow 1994, 40-41, 48-51).
Petitioning the parliament became a part of the modern repertoire of collective action during the course of the conflict over the abolition of slavery in Britain in 1787. The great anti-slavery petition, like the boycott in the American colonies, was supported by networks of associations, pamphlets and the press. Public meetings were organized to collect signatures, and for the first time in history a petition was signed not by an individual interest group but a large part of the whole population: 11 000 people, amounting to some 20 per cent of the whole population of Manchester, for example, signed. The petition thus became a common tool for campaigns aimed to influence the public opinion on a moral issue pertinent to the whole of society (Tarrow 1994, 41-42; Drescher 1987).
The urban uprising, to give a third example, entered the modern repertoire of collective action in Grenoble, in a prologue to the French Revolution of 1789. The protest was initiated by officials threatened by unemployment after the decision of Louis XVI to dismantle the local parlements. The public meeting of Chateau de Vizelle, however, gathered participants from high officials to clerks and craftsmen, even women – somewhat surprisingly those days – were present. The meeting, a precursor to modern social movement organizations, coordinated the events and articulated the demands of the people participating in them. During the course of the conflict, the idea of people’s right to assemble, act “in the name of the law and the people” and demand a contractual relationship with the state. The idea had far-flung consequences. The modern repertoire of collective action was expanded with the move from sporadic riots towards uprisings and demonstrations as a way to present opinions of a broader public and express demands for the increase of citizens’ political power. (Tarrow 1994, 41-43; Egret 1977.)
Boycotts, petitions, demonstrations and other types of collective action are today relatively widely accepted is means to exert political influence, and the constitutions of states that we consider democratic guarantee their citizens the rights to use such measures. The repertoire of collective action has become modular, meaning that the “same forms serve many different localities, actors and issues” (Tilly 1993, 272).
The examples also show that movements leading to large-scale social transformations are often sparked by debates around single political issues, publics that are formed to debate these issues, and the means that are taken to make heard the opinions arrived at during the course of such debates. The controversy over stamp taxes in America struck the spark to ignite the powder of the revolutionary movement, as did the dismantling of the parlements in France a few years later.
Networks of Associations and Media Institutions Developed Hand in Hand with Social Movements
A second point missed by Habermas’ account on the birth of the bourgeois public spheres is that the institutional basis for democratic debate is provided by networks of civic associations and media institutions that developed in interaction with social movements. 
The movement boycotting British goods in the American colonies to oppose the new stamp taxes gave rise to a network of associations that enforced the boycott and coordinated protest action. One of the first of these organizations was the Loyal Nine, a club of merchants in Boston, which was turned into the city’s Sons of Liberty organization during the course of the boycott. A host of voluntary fire brigades, religious associations and others soon followed suit. The resulting network of Sons of Liberty organizations played an important role in the colonies’ struggle for independence (Tarrow 1994, 50; Maier 1972). A similar development can be observed in conjunction with the British anti-slavery movement. The industrialists’ associations had, in the beginning of 1780’s, networked for petitions to oppose new taxes and a customs union with Ireland. The networks and expertise conjured in campaigns to defend the interest of a small, privileged group were later mobilized for a cause of a wide moral concern by the anti-slavery movement. (Tarrow 1994, 41-42; Drescher 1987.)
Not only the associational networks, but also media institutions developed in interaction with social movements. The struggle for the independence of Britain’s American colonies was waged by over four hundred pamphlets between 1750 and 1776. At the same time, the thirty-eight newspapers published in the colonies were flooded with debate on the issue. Besides acting as a forum for a struggle in words, the papers functioned as a facilitator for struggle waged by other means: they spread the news of collective action and turned local events into waves of protest flushing all over the colonies. The news of the February riots in 1765 spread in newspapers of New York, Philadelphia and Portsmouth and within a few days similar actions took place in New Jersey and Connecticut (Tarrow 1994, 49-52; Maier 1972, 56-57). In addition to utilizing the existing press, social movements gave rise to new newspapers. Preceding the French revolution of 1789, papers published in Paris numbered 184; a year later their number had surged to 335. The wave of revolutions that swept over Europe in 1848 resulted in a similar growth of the press all around the continent: French, German and Italian language papers were established in large numbers. (Tarrow 1994, 54).
Nation-wide social movements would not have been possible without networks of associations and newspapers that reached over vast geographical areas. The process, however, was bidirectional, with movements giving rise to new networks and newspapers. The institutions of civil society and media, which are today regarded as essential for a robust democracy, were, for an important part, born as consequences of social movements.
The Counterpublics of Workers and Women and the Struggle for the Limits of the Public Sphere
A third feature of the history of of public spheres neglected by Habermas are the counterpublics of groups excluded from the hegemonic bourgeois public sphere. Habermas’ exaggerated view of the decline of the public sphere is, in other words, a result of presenting the bourgeoisie as rational debaters and the workers as champions of pressure-group politics and collective action. As a matter of fact, both groups used collective action as well as debate as means of advancing their political goals. Ultimately, the flaw here is that in his quest for the ideal of consensus-seeking debate, Habermas forgets that public debate is always also a matter of struggles for power.
Even though the principles of equality and open access to all citizens were important parts of the self-understanding of bourgeois publics, “all citizens” here included only property-owning white males. Workers and women were excluded from the public sphere both by institutional arrangements and discursive use of power in public. The rules guiding the political institutions denied workers’ and women’s electoral participation, and the institutions of the public sphere – newspapers and cafés – were equally off-limits to these groups. Discursive use of power in public cemented the exclusionary rules of these institutions: women and workers were portrayed in public debate as unqualified for independent, rational political reasoning and debating (see Fraser 1992; Ryan 1992).
To gain the rights of political participation in the level of institutional rules, workers and women had to struggle against the discursive power portraying them as politically incompetent. This struggle took place in counterpublics excluded from the hegemonic public sphere. Elite women founded charities and other organizations that functioned as sites of debate. The non-property owning classes participated in debates in various associations and political movements of their own, and working-class newspapers and pamphlets were strong already in the early days of modern public spheres (Fraser 1992, 115-117; Eley 1992, 303-306; Curran 1991).
Counterpublics, then, can be defined as publics that aim to make new things public and include new groups as legitimate participants of public debate (see Fraser 1992; Warner 2002; Negt & Kluge 1993 [1972]). The counterpublics of workers and women made workers’ and women’s rights public issues and their discourses penetrated the hegemonic bourgeois public sphere, resulting, in the end, in formal inclusion of both groups as legitimate participants in the public sphere. By the means of debate and collective action the position of the two groups in question was politicized and both finally achieved the formal rights of participation written in the rules of political institutions.
Even though the formal rights of these groups are instituted in the countries we regard as democratic, the struggle against discursive power structures is far from being over. Arguments presented, for example, with a working-class or an ethnic minority accent or those offered by women are still labeled as less worthy in certain debates (see Fraser 1992, 199; Mansbridge 1990, 127).
To conclude, public debate is not only about trying to settle certain political issues; it is also a field of discursive power struggles over the norms the debate itself. The borders between the included and the excluded, and the issues that are to be public and those that are left to the safe haven of privacy, are continually drawn and redrawn during the course of the debate. The struggles over the limits of publicness are often waged, besides by words, by other means – collective action.
Habermas’ Three Shortcomings and the Consequential Three Questions on Global Social Movements and Public Spheres
The investigation of the historical interdependencies between national public spheres and social movements has led us to three conclusions. First, it is evident that the idea and institutions of the modern public sphere have developed as a result of political conflicts, involving collective action in social movements. From the twilight of modern public spheres, citizens have used repertoires of collective action to raise questions – that would otherwise have been silenced to death – to the agenda of public debate. Second, the associational networks and media that form the institutional basis of public spheres have developed hand in hand with social movements. Third, there have always been counterpublics, like those of workers and women, which have contested the boundaries of what is public and aimed at the inclusion of new issues and new groups of participants in the public sphere. They have politicized questions previously defined as private and, thus, apolitical, and questioned the mechanisms of discursive power that exclude some groups from the list of legitimate participants in public debate.
What are the questions that these remarks raise, concerning the emerging global public spheres? If social movements and collective action have been important for the development of national public sphere, we must ask, first, what are the global movements today like, and what kind of repertoires of action they utilize. Second, as regards the associational networks and media that are the basis of public spheres, the question is: what kind of networks are today’s global movements built on, how do they make use of the existing media institutions, and how to they contribute to the creation of new types of media? Third, if public debate is a continual struggle over the limits of who and what is public, what are the groups and the issues that today’s global movements wish to raise to the public agenda? In the following three chapters, I shall sketch brief answers to these three questions as they regard the so-called Global Justice Movement and, in particular, one of the aspects of this movement, The World Social Forum.
Collective Action in Global Social Movements: World-Wide Demonstrations and Parallel Summits
The repertoire of collective action developed by social movements linked to the formation of national public spheres has, for a long time, been used also in political struggles not confined within the borders of a single nation-state. An example is the anti-slavery movement, referred to above, that spread from Britain to the United States. The labor movement and women’s movement also have traditions of international activity stretching well over a century (Keck & Sikkink 2000). The increased facility of long-distance travel and development of communication technologies has, however, enhanced the possibilities of transnational movement action so dramatically, that speaking of a mere difference of degree seems a gross understatement. The globally coordinated demonstrations and counter-summits of the so-called Global Justice Movement can justly be referred to as new repertoires of collective action.
What is often dubbed by the press as “The Anti-Globalization Movement” caught the spotlight of the global media through mass demonstrations at the sites of the international summits at Seattle (1999), Prague (2000), Genoa and Gothenburg (2001). The movement actors themselves prefer to talk about alternative globalization or The Global Justice Movement. The use of the term anti-globalization is, indeed, misleading. Most aims of the movement relate not to the opposition to any kind of globalization of the economy, but globalization of many other things besides the economy. Proposals have been made for the globalization of workers rights, women’s rights, taxation and income distribution and environmental protection, to name a few examples. Moreover, the movement itself, built on transnational networks, is a form of globalization itself – the globalization of civil society.
“The Global Justice Movement” escapes attempts at definition. More than a single movement for a single issue, it has been a series of waves of mobilization that surge rapidly and fade again. Both the movement activists themselves and academic commentators have a tendency to define “the movement” trough the huge protest events listed above (e.g. Seoane & Taddei 2002). However, the movement has deeper historical roots in many parts of the word. For example in Latin America, the structural adjustment programs of the IMF and the World Bank have been protested against since the 1970’s (Teivainen 2002, 1991), and in France, the movement to cancel the debts of the poorest countries gained much attention with a massive outdoor concert event at Place de la Bastille on the day of bicentennial commemoration of the French revolution in 1989 (Agrikoliansky 2003). But it is only after the development of a new repertoire uniting a host of different actors, that we can talk about a global movement in the proper sense of the term. The central elements of this repertoire are globally coordinated demonstrations and counter-summits.
The demonstrations staged at the summits of the institutions of global governance differ from earlier forms of collective action by being global in two ways. First, huge numbers of people from several countries have been mobilized to the main site of demonstration by clever use of the internet. And it is not only in the main site where events have taken place: tens of thousands of people in hundreds of cities around the world have participated in demonstrations staged at the same time (Almeida & Lichbach 2003). The largest of such demonstrations took place in February 2003, when the protests against the war in Iraq, organized using the internet and the networks of the Global Justice Movement, gathered 11 million participants in 800 cities. This amounts, most likely, to the largest one-day protest in history, leading the New York Times to declare global public opinion “the second superpower of the world” (Anheier&Glasius&Kaldor 2003, 3). Secondly, these protest events are global in the sense that they lay their claims not only to national governments, but also directly to institutions of global governance: the WTO, IMF, The World Bank, The World Economic Forum, the G8 and so on.
Like their precursors at the national level, the global movements of today combine collective action with public debate. From town meetings and pamphlets, the sites of debate have been changed to global counter-summits and the internet. Counter-summits have been organized at an increasing pace starting at least from 1984, when a group of economists and activists countered the meeting of the G7 in London (Agrikoliansky 2003, 4). They have evolved into a new element in the repertoire of global movements, the most important example of which is the World Social Forum (WSF), a permanent institution for conducting public debates by movement activists from all around the world.
The WSF was born as a counterpoint to the thirty-year old institution of meetings of the global business elite, today known as the World Economic Forum. In the year 2000, the French periodical Le Monde Diplomatique and the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC) led the organization of The Other Davos meeting at Zürich. Soon afterwards, a group of Brazilian organizations contacted the arrangers and agreed on organizing a large counter-summit to the WEF in Brazil. The number of participants at the first World Social Forum at Porto Alegre in Southern Brazil took the organizers by surprise; more than five thousand registered delegates from 117 countries plus thousands of Brazilian activists participated. In 2002 the number of official delegates rose to 12 000, and 2003 saw the Forum at Porto Alegre grow to a mega-event of more than 100 000 people, out of which more than 20 000 were registered as delegates (Patomäki & Teivainen 2003, 132). WSF 2004 in Mumbai, India, gathered nearly an equal amount of participants.
Associational Networks, Media and the World Social Forum
The social movements that participated in the creation of national public spheres were made possible by associational networks and media that reached over vast geographical distances. On the other hand, these movements gave rise to new networks and new media institutions. Similarly, the WSF is made possible by networks of associations and media that are global, and it also contributes to the creation of new global civil society networks and new forms of media production.
The past decade saw a veritable explosion in the number and membership of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). Their membership of grew by 70% in the 1990’s, and the steady growth rate of their number since WWII increased sharply during that decade. The growth has been particularly rapid in the field of development cooperation. At the end of the decade, the monetary value of aid channeled through INGOs had surpassed that of all national governments combined (Anheier&Glasius&Kaldor 2003, 11-14). The large majority of INGOs concentrate on implementation of development aid programs, but the strengthening of their international networks has led also to the emergence of a new political force. INGOs and social movement organizations have become important participants in global public debates, and the most important institution for conducting these debates is the World Social Forum.
Behind the first WSF, there was a global network of organizations which had worked on issues dealt with at the Forum for a long time. The coalition that took the initiative was formed in the node of a network of European and Brazilian organizations as described above. After the first forum, the decisions concerning the forum have been made by the international council, which has also been built on pre-existing associational networks. The IC was composed by all participant organizations inviting groups that they had worked with on previous occasions.
The role of associational networks in organizing the WSF does not stop at the IC. In fact, the council only organizes a minority of the events at the Forum; most are set up by networks of organizations independent of the IC. Any organization, or a network of such, can arrange an event at the Forum, provided that they adhere to the WSF Charter of Principles.
Besides being a prerequisite for organizing the forum, global networks of associations are also produced and strengthened at the WSF. The IC has become an important node in global networks of civil society, and the events at the Forum are sites of creation of connections – formal, inter-organizational ones as well as more informal personal ones – that function as basis for future cooperation.
Global forms of media production are another prerequisite for, and at the same time a product of, the debates at the WSF – just like national media were in the case of national social movements and public spheres. One obvious reason for organizing a large event like the WSF and holding it at the same time with the World Economic Forum is, according to the organizers, to attract the attention of the global media (Teivainen 2002b). Thousands of journalists from around the world have arrived at the WSF each year. The organizers have treated these gatekeepers of the global public sphere well. Numerous press conferences are organized, press centers with internet and telephone connections are provided free of charge and a press card opens the doors to all events even if they are too full for anyone else to enter.
This strategy seems to have worked. Many media institutions quasi-global distribution, such as newspapers like the Financial Times and Le Monde have reported on the Forum, and in national public spheres of various European countries the WSF has gained much more attention than its counterpart, the WEF. This is particularly true of France, which has been the European country to send the largest amount of delegates to the WSF and where the altermondialiste movement seems strong in many other respects as well. Comprehensive data on the reporting on the WSF around the world does not exist, as of yet. Despite, looking at some examples points to the direction that even though the media has concentrated rather heavily in a few global mega-corporations (see Held et. al. 1999; 347-349), the counterpublics critical of these corporations do have possibilities to surface in the mainstream of the global flows of information.
Besides making use of the existing global media institutions, the actors at the WSF criticize these institutions and create their own forms of media production. The consequences of marketization and concentration of the media to free and equal public debate has been one of the central themes of debates staged at the WSF. In addition to this debate, the Forum has contributed to the creation of new internet-based media. The vast, four-language website of the Forum (www.forumsocialmundial.org.br) has been supplemented by various sites giving documentation on the subjects debated at the forum in advance and summarizing some of the debates after the forum (e.g. www.portoalegre2003.org). Thousands of participating organizations, publish texts, pictures, video and audio reports in their own web pages, and also broadcast events of the forum live on the web.
One interesting example of innovative media production engaged in at the WSF is ciranda.net, applying the principle of copyleft, pioneered by the developers of Linux and other free software, to news production. Instead of holding on to their copyright to their stories, each of the participating journalists posts their stories to the websites, to be used for free by any other participating journalist in their paper or webpage, gaining in return the right to use all the material produced by others. The participants are selected among professional journalists or those working for publications of NGOs. The stories themselves are not selected in any way, the idea being that when everybody chooses the best stories of ciranda.net to their own publications, the highest quality texts end up in the widest circulation.
The Counterpublics of the WSF and the Struggle to Politicize Global Economic Governance 
Besides consensus-seeking debate, the public sphere is always a site of discursive power struggles. The counterpublics of workers and women, excluded from the nascent bourgeois public sphere, succeeded their struggle to make public and politicize their own position as members of society and legitimate participants in politics and public debate. These discursive power struggles led later to their formal acceptation as equal citizens also at the level of explicit rules guiding political institutions. What, then, are the institutional arrangements and discursive power structures that the counterpublics of the WSF aim to contest? What are the questions they wish to make public and whose role as debaters they would like to strengthen? According to it’s Charter of Principles, the WSF is:
“…an open meeting place for...groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism… The alternatives proposed at the World Social Forum stand in opposition to a process of globalization commanded by the large multinational corporations and by the governments and international institutions at the service of those corporations’ interests…They are designed to ensure that globalization in solidarity will prevail as a new stage in world history.” (The WSF Charter of Principles 2001, emphasis added).

The institutional arrangements that the WSF challenges are, then, the influence of multinational corporations in directing the processes of globalization and the international institutions that are seen as serving these corporations’ interests, in particular the World Trade Organization (WTO), The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The mechanism of discursive use of power supporting these organizations is referred to, in the quotation above, as neoliberalism.
In a situation where democratic decision-making structures do not exist at the global level, the international economic institutions have, indeed, taken a place as important instruments of global governance. The more democratic institutions of global governance, such as the UN General Assembly have, during the past decades, been largely bypassed in the playing field of global politics, while the economic institutions’ power has rapidly increased (Patomäki & Teivainen 2003, 30-38).
The decision-making processes of these institutions are not democratic. The WTO formally applies the principle of one country one vote, but in practice voting has never taken place. Negotiators of rich countries, pressured by multinational corporations, prepare the decisions into packages, and poor countries, with much less resources to conduct the negotiations, have often no choice but to accept them (Dutt 2001, 30-31; Stegemann 2000). The votes in the IMF and WB are distributed by the principle one dollar one vote, with the top five funding countries (US, Japan, Germany, France and UK) in practice dictating the decisions and the organizations (Patomäki & Teivainen 2003, 75).
At the WTO, the conflicting interests of countries have begun to show, in particular since the meeting at Cancun in 2003, where the unwillingness of the US and the EU to cede to the demands of the developing countries led to a halt of all negotiations. The negotiators have had to admit that contrary to what is often claimed, all free trade is not equally beneficial to all, but a political question of negotiating compromises. The IMF and the WB, on the other hand, are explicitly undemocratic organizations. Since they are, formally, only crediting institutions aiding countries in economic trouble, it seen as natural that they should not decide matters democratically. As in business as usual, he who pays, decides.
This view is grounded on the doctrine of economic neutrality written in the charters of the organizations. The doctrine states that the Bretton Woods Twins are creditors that do not meddle in political decision-making of the debtor countries. In practice, the debtors face strict conditions on the content of their economic policy. Even this is not seen as contradicting the doctrine of economic neutrality, since the policy recommendations of the creditor institutions’ economists are presented as objective, politically neutral expert advice on the best possible economic policy. As a matter of fact, however, the recommendations lead to a certain model of the ideal society, the choice of which is a political issue. The public sector is being downsized, public ownership (of water distribution, schools, health care facilities etc.) is privatized, trade unions are discouraged and so on. Despite their formal neutrality, the experts of the economic institutions dictate, for the large part, the political decisions of debt-dependent countries (Patomäki & Teivainen 2003).
At the discursive level, the undemocratic institutional arrangements described above, is backed by an economistic power-knowledge constellation. More apt in this context than the concept of neoliberalism used in the WSF Charter, is the concept of economism as defined by Teivo Teivainen. Economism is “a strategy of defining certain institutions and issues as ‘economic’ and using the doctrine of economic neutrality to produce a boundary between the ‘economic’ and political spheres.” (Teivainen 2002, 1). Economism, then, is a strategy used in scientific-political public debate to demarcate “the economy” as a sector whose governance is founded on rational optimization and to protect it from critical public debate by ordinary citizens by accepting as legitimate only arguments based on a certain type of rationality and presented by experts with certain qualifications.
The counterpublics of the WSF contest this power-knowledge constellation and the demarcation of the economy as an apolitical sphere of society, outside the scope of democratic public debate. The measures required of the debtor countries by the Bretton Woods institutions are a case in point. Presented by these institutions as politically neutral (like privatizing water distribution to make it more efficient and thus better for all) are insisted by the counterpublics of the WSF to be political, serving the interests of some more than others (a company may, for example make profit by purchasing a privatized water distributor, but the ensuing hike in prices may leave some with no water at all). The counterpublics of the WSF demand the scope of publicity to be widened to include economic issues, and the group of legitimate participants of debates concerning decisions on economic policy to be expanded beyond a small group of experts. It is demanded that, in principle, all that may be impinged upon by such decisions should be able to participate in debating them.
This discursive power struggle led by the counterpublics of the WSF aims, like the counterpublics of workers and women in the preceding centuries, to changes also at the institutional level. The alternatives proposed at the WSF that are to “ensure that globalization in solidarity will prevail as a new stage in world history” include proposals for institutions that globalize democratic decision-making, taxation and redistribution of income, environmental protection and human rights.
Conclusions
Political decisions taken on one side of the globe affect the lives of people everywhere more rapidly and strongly than ever. From the point of view of democracy, this invites us to ask how people around the world could take part in public debate concerning those decisions. In this article, I have tracked down the seeds of global public spheres where their national counterparts sprung up: in political conflicts and social movements.
Our inquiry to the history of national public sphere has shown, first, that as long as the modern idea of democratic public debate has existed, social movements have risen to continue the debate by other means – collective action. Second, it has become evident that the associational networks and the media, that form the institutional backbone of critical public spheres, have developed hand in hand with social movements. Third, from the early days of modern public spheres, there have been counterpublics, waging struggles over the limits of public and private.
These three observations mean that social movements are important for democracy in that they contribute to the creation of social practices and institutions of democratic public debate, and the continual redefinition of the scope of democratic politics by questioning the limits of what is public. Therefore, research of today’s globalizing social movements helps us to realistically evaluate the possibilities of formation of democratic public spheres that are global.
The Global Justice Movement has gained public attention by a novel addition to the repertoire of collective action: global mass demonstrations, involving hundreds of thousands of participants in hundreds of cities around the world, coordinated via the internet. But more importantly, the movement has created a permanent institution for conducting global public debates on global matters: The World Social Forum process.
Like the nascent national public spheres, the global counterpublics of the WSF are built on associational networks and media that are, in the latter case, global in their reach. Besides utilizing the existing networks and media institutions, the Forum strengthens the networks of global civil society, and contributes to the invention of new forms of media production. The counterpublics of the WSF question the legitimacy of the international financial institutions that have become important actors of global governance. They do this both at the level of institutional arrangements and rules, and at the level of the discursive, economistic power-knowledge constellation that legitimizes the institutions in question.
National public spheres were born as a part of wide-ranging social change. The transformation of feudal societies into capitalist democracies occurred over an extended period of time, involving the great bourgeois revolutions and various phases of progress and reaction. Therefore, the globalizing publics associated with the Global Justice Movement cannot be directly compared to the process of formation of national public spheres, as regards both the span of time involved, and the scale of social transformation that has occurred. The Global Justice Movement has, so far, existed only a few years, and a large part of actors involved do not even seek far-reaching revolutionary transformation of society. What is certain, however, is that the counterpublics associated with this movement contribute to the creation of global public spheres. Whether this leads to democratization of the institutional structures of global governance remains an open question.
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