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Globalisation opponents - the favourite ones of the EU?

Repressive tolerance

The real news of the orgies of violence of the government authorities is not the murder of Carlo Giuliani but the ostentatively exposed self-assurance of the rulers. Genoa was the stage for the last act of that reality show to which Minister of the Interior, Otto Schily, and high-ranking representatives of the Green Party wrote the script.

Gothenburg set standars. Demonstrators are driven from their congress centre and hounded through the city. When they try to resist the police force with their modest means, three opponents to the summit are shot into the back. One dangerously hurt demonstrator survives only by chance. Sweden´s government is composed of Social Democrats and tolerated by the Green Party. The chairwoman of the Green parliamentary group in the European Parliament (EP), Heidi Hautala, did not criticise the procedure of the police in Gothenburg, but the behaviour of their victims as "pure hooliganism".
Representatives of the red-green federal government in Berlin also aggravated the atmosphere. The German Minister for Foreign Affairs, Joseph Fischer, tried to discredit the requests of the globalisation opponents: "The question of a fairer world is the topic of the summit. Actually one would have to organise a demonstration of joy." The Minister of the Interior, Otto Schily, committed himself - fortunately, so far without success - to urging his EU colleagues to a European data bank of regime opponents and a "riot police".
The provision of body bags and the renting of cold storage rooms prior to the Genoa summit he accepted as normal and thereby legitimised the brutal repression already in advance. Ehrhart Körting, Social Democrat Senator for the Interior in the red-green federal state government of Berlin, made it clear: "There is no fundamental right to emigration." The red-green coalition had already set the foundation for the exit ban against regime opponents one year before, by changing passport law in the Bundestag.
Hate against anti-capitalists was unlimited in the EU before the G8 summit in Genoa. It will probably never be clarified whether the execution of an anti-capitalist demonstrator was openly planned on the ministerial level, whether the assessin was only given the order by the Italian government, or whether he had acted in tacit agreement. However, this question is secondary. The crucial point is the political climate in the EU before Genoa. It was arranged by the so-called centre-left governments in such a way that the murder of a demonstrator was the logical result. The red-green governments with their 70s experience were perfectly suited to the creation of such a climate. Back then, Joseph Fischer himself had protested militantly against the police. Now he publicly brands demonstrators as terror monsters, even if violence is only directed against shop windows. Italy´s parliamentary left, too, made its contribution to the repression not only with the preparation of the summit in Genoa. They also developped the police organisations with their fascist tradition further and further, and even created those Carabinieri who now became executors by transforming a military unit into a special police troop.
Beyond the expected repressive measures, the Italian police stood out especially by their planned maltreatment of many sleeping demonstrators. The 21-year-old student Daniel A. reports: "They ordered us to sit down and began immediately to beat up people with all their might, directly aimed at the heads of people and in an unbelievably brutal manner." In police barracks and hospitals, further physical and psychological abuse took place. The central aim of these actions was probably to spread the warning by verbal propaganda amongst the demonstrators: Don´t take part in anti-capitalist actions, keep away from critics of the globalisation - if not you´ll get beaten up and end up in prision. However, the calculation of the G8 did not fully work out. Even conservative newspapers wrote about the brutality of the police operation. In Germany the globalisation opponent was the favourite child of the nation this summer. Even within the CDU people distance themselves from their own party´s exit bans. What was before seen as "idiotic" (Cohn-Bendit), all of the sudden turns out to be "the movement if not of the century, at least of the decade" (Cohn-Bendit). The members of the Green Party in the European Parliament demand space available for the forums of the globalisation critics in Brussels. The author of this text, against whom an order procedure tribunal before the party is pending because of too left policy, is suddenly wanted by the same party for election campaigns.
In order to develop a strategy against the anti-capitalist protests, no think tank is necessary. Rather, one could easily split the movement into an illegalised wing and absorb the remaining globalisation opponents in established political structures. The leader of the parliamentary group of the Green party in the Bundestag, Kerstin Müller, was already surprised about the moderate nature of some demands of the globalisation opponents. After a few months of symbolic trouble the Greens will foreseeably find an agreement with the lobbyist wing of the movement: The Tobin tax will be included as "to be seriously examined" in the basic party programme, and sanctions against financial paradises will be aggravated although no politician was ever publicly opposed to that. A high-ranking representative of the (still) NGO ATTAC runs as a Green candidate for the Bundestag 2002. With the good reputation of being a globalisation opponent he will achieve enough votes to also bring a further three normal-liberal, capitalist and neocorporatist party members from the bottom of the voting list into the parliament.
The same game is possible in other EU member states. While the nationalisation of certain parts of the anti-nuclear-power movement or the peace movement lasted decades, today it looks like the same process will be finished rapidly with the institutionalisable wing of the movement critical of globalisation. Contrary to ex leftists like Angelika Beer, cracks in the biography will hardly be provable for the reform-oriented part of globalisation opponents. Already now, their demands are those of the "extra-parliamentary arm of social democracy" (BUKO).

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