Letter From London (Page 2)

In the past, European resentment of American dominance was largely confined to intellectuals, politically active leftists and those who had been personally or professionally displaced (the post-Suez anti-Americanism of the British colonial classes, for example). The cold war also froze political alignments across Europe. But the antiglobalization movement has mobilized a generation of Europeans too young to remember the cold war, and too alienated from conventional politics to care who won or why.

In November nearly half a million people filled the streets of Florence for the European Social Forum. Intended as a sequel to antiglobalization protests in Seattle and Genoa, which were marred by sporadic violence and by the inability of the disparate elements to agree on anything resembling a common program, Florence was notable both for its peaceful atmosphere and for the discovery that there was one issue that could unite anarchists and academics, Greens and trade unionists, Catholics and gay liberationists: opposition to war in Iraq. Even the Pope eventually came out against the war.

Here in Britain a January organizing meeting for the Stop the War Coalition brought together union activists, Trotskyist veterans, stalwarts from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), antiglobalization campaigners, and a variety of Palestinian and Muslim groups. Holding such a disparate alliance together isn't easy, and the Coalition, whose organizing sinew comes largely from the Socialist Workers Party and from the more militant unions, isn't exactly a model of participatory democracy. At the meeting I attended the organizers kept tight control of the agenda, and though many items were put to a vote the results still hadn't shown up on the Coalition website nearly a month later. There was also the sense, familiar to those of us with memories of sectarian politics, that much had been decided beforehand, and that certain groups were immune from criticism. As I walked into the room a speaker from the Muslim Association of Britain was explaining why the Mombasa hotel bombing should not be seen as terrorism, and though a few people walked out, and even fewer expressed agreement, there was little appetite for confrontation on this or any of the other questions that divided the participants. Nor, despite all the references to Iraqi suffering, was there more than lip service paid to Saddam Hussein's role in his people's immiseration.

These are all serious flaws, and if the antiwar movement in Britain is going to do more than provide occasions for people to take to the streets these issues will have to be confronted. At the moment, it seems enough of an achievement to give people a chance to express their opposition to the war--an opposition denied an outlet by conventional politics. In late September a similar coalition (but without CND) managed to get over 250,000 people out in London. This was an incredibly diverse demonstration, and though it is likely that very few of them shared the organizers' sectarian priorities, the things they did share were sufficient: suspicion of American intentions, anger at a policy that excuses Israel but punishes Iraq, dismay at the rush to a war in which thousands of civilians will die, fear that we are sowing the seeds of many more 9/11s. On February 15 the antiwar movement will again seek to fill the streets--not just in London, but across Europe from Amsterdam to Warsaw. There will also be demonstrations across the United States.

If that happens there will be plenty of time to cultivate the grassroots, plenty of time for the French and Italian unions, which have so far been mostly spectators, to commit themselves, plenty of time for the people in Britain working to keep Wal-Mart from swallowing another chain of supermarkets here to make common cause with the campaigners organizing against the Blair government's decision to let the radar tracking station at Fylingdales in Yorkshire become an outpost of Bush's missile defense program.

Right now European opposition to the war is broad but shallow--probably too shallow to prevent war. But if the United States goes to war with imperial disdain for European opinion, the resulting cries of outrage and impotence may mark something else as well--the birth pangs of anti-imperialism as a genuine popular movement in Europe for the first time since 1968.

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