Move on world - Paul Hilder (March 2005)

The global "movement of movements" is dizzyingly diverse, and has many notches on its belt - No Logo, street battles in Seattle and Genoa, Jubilee 2000, the protests against the Iraq war. But squeezed between the forces of al Qaeda, the war on terror and the global challenges of climate change and poverty, it pales. One constellation just met in Porto Alegre, where by some accounts the World Social Forum is at risk of disappearing into its own collective navel, over-freighted with stale ideologies. Another NGO-led faction is pushing the Make Poverty History campaign to retrieve the fast-receding Millennium Development Goals. Civilians quail before the indiscriminate lethality of the war on terror, and the environmental movements are in disarray.

The EU is introverted and dominated by bureaucracy. The UN struggles like Sisyphus to reform itself, hamstrung by its constituent states. The G8, pressed to creativity, fails to agree. Neither empire nor global government offers a silver bullet, and the bottom-up alternatives so far have proved inadequate. This is a problem of collective action writ very, very large. We need to try new paths.

As the impeachment of Bill Clinton neared in the US, a husband and wife sent round an email petition saying "Censure him and Move On". Within weeks they had collected hundreds of thousands of signatures. Barely half a decade later, MoveOn.org has become one of the biggest para-political forces in the US, raising millions of dollars and mobilising tens of thousands of activists. More importantly, it spawned a whole ecology of new collective action platforms, many of them more democratic in their operations, which are enabled by network technologies but rooted in real-world problems and actors. MoveOn.org today is called out in the US for using supporters as a Cashpoint machine. That very challenge testifies to a political maturing.

It's time we started using these techniques to enable transnational constituencies to mobilise for progressive change. The millions at anti-war protests were described as "the second superpower". But they lacked a positive agenda and real capabilities, and they failed. Still, some of us believe global civil society is on the brink of self-organising into awareness and building real power. There are people taking the leap of faith to create architectures of global collective action, drawing on individual donations and volunteering, on foundations and NGOs, on private diplomacy and networks that penetrate state and transnational institutions. These emergent networks are the mirror image of al-Qaeda: committed to peace, democracy and justice, and open to the light of day. The path to a better global governance leads necessarily through a global republicanism that is echoing the revolutionary networks of the European 19th century. The contemporary techniques range from meetups to civilian peacemaking, and from public protest to public policy campaigning.

One opportunity is the Summit on a democratic response to terror on the first anniversary of the 11 March bombings in Madrid. The Club de Madrid communiqué will scarcely do justice to the millions of Spaniards who took to the streets to say in response to the terror wars, "We are democrats, we are together, and we choose a different path." But from the parallel debate on openDemocracy.net and elsewhere, a bottom-up alternative is emerging for the weeks and years after the Summit. Some of us are building it now. Watch this space.