Abstract
This chapter introduces into the topic of the book and presents the two cases in the light of key debates about globalization and democracy. Democracy assistance is one means of the EU to engage with a globalized world. The EU promotes an ambivalent concept of democracy which allows for more intermediate citizen participation in transnational politics but also prioritizes a technocratic style of politics. The WSF is a form of transnational cooperation of civil society actors. It is a citizen-driven attempt to create transnational political agency. The Forum focuses on democracy within the cooperation of (global) civil society, which might contribute to democratizing globalization. The chapter shows how both, the EU and the WSF, have developed the capacity to act in a globalized era, each in their own way.
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Notes
- 1.
I have chosen the year 2014 for pragmatic reasons as the end point of my analysis: the interviews with EU officials were – except for one – conducted in the first half of 2014 and my interview questions referred to the policy development prior to that date. Furthermore, the second Barroso Commission’s term in office had ended in October 2014. This seemed like a suitable closing point.
- 2.
Harvey (2005, 2) defines neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”
- 3.
Oded Grajew, the coordinator of Brazilian Entrepreneur’s Association for Citizenship (CIVES), Bernard Cassen, chair of the Association pour la Taxation des Transactions financière et l’Aide aux Citoyen (ATTAC), and Chico Whitaker, a roman catholic activist, were the key founders of the Forum (see Teivainen 2002). The organizing process was joined by the local and regional governments as well as various Brazilian civil society groups, among them trade unions, the Landless Workers Movement, and the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis (IBASE) (see Gautney 2010, 47). Since then, the WSF has become supported by a geographically and thematically diverse range of civil society actors, but a significant presence of French and Brazilian activists in the organizational process has remained.
- 4.
Apart from the WSF, other social forums have been organized at the regional and the local level. The European Social Forums and the US Social Forum are among the most prominent ones (see e.g., della Porta 2009a; Juris et al. 2011). These forums were not coordinated by the WSF, but they shared many features with it.
- 5.
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Fiedlschuster, M. (2018). Introduction: Democracy and Globalization. In: Globalization, EU Democracy Assistance and the World Social Forum. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70739-6_1
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