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Language and Democracy ‘in Movement’:Multilingualism and the Case of the European SocialForum ProcessNicole Doerr aa European University Institute , Florence, ItalyPublished online: 02 Apr 2009.

To cite this article: Nicole Doerr (2009) Language and Democracy ‘in Movement’: Multilingualism and the Case of theEuropean Social Forum Process, Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 8:2, 149-165, DOI:10.1080/14742830902770290

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Language and Democracy ‘in Movement’:Multilingualism and the Case of theEuropean Social Forum Process

NICOLE DOERREuropean University Institute, Florence, Italy

ABSTRACT In recent years new cross-European protests and movements have developed on globaljustice and within the loose platform of the European Social Forum (ESF). One of the majorchallenges for transnational communication and grassroots democracy within the Social Forums islinguistic communication problems and the ‘work of translation’ required to create a democraticsetting. In the willingness to provide open access beyond linguistic communication problems,activists and organizers involved in the ESF preparatory process therefore hold their regularEuropean preparatory assemblies to the ESF summits within a multilingual setting. Given thepotential challenges of working transnationally, and of multilingual meetings, the ESF provides agood case study to test whether such processes work effectively in practice in comparison withnational social movement assemblies: to what extent is democratic discussion and decision makingpossible in such emerging multilingual meetings compared to national meetings in which themajority of participants speak the same language? Being interested in linking the theoretical groundof discourse and deliberative democracy to the subject of the emerging Social Forums, I have studiedthe extent to which democratic discussion in the sense of deliberative debate might or might not takeplace within the multilingual and Europe-wide preparatory assemblies in the ESF process. Thefindings of my comparison between Europe-wide Social Forum preparatory assemblies and thosetaking place at the national level in Germany and the UK show that the absence of one commonlanguage within the European assemblies, contrary to what one might intuitively suppose, does notreduce the quality of democratic deliberation as compared to the national context. Therefore,informal power structures and gatekeeping mechanisms frequently rooted at the national level ofSocial Forum processes, together with a lack of transparency and asymmetries of information, seemto have indirectly reduced the accessibility of European meetings.

KEY WORDS: European public sphere, multilingualism, social movements, deliberation, exclusion

In recent years new cross-European protests and movements have developed on global

justice and within the loose platform of the European Social Forum (ESF). The newly

emerging Social Forums and various organizations and individuals coming together in the

ESF process address their critique towards European policy makers and institutions,

mobilizing thousands of participants in the ESF summits (della Porta et al., 2006; della

Porta, 2007). One of the major challenges for transnational communication and grassroots

1474-2837 Print/1474-2829 Online/09/020149-17 q 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14742830902770290

Correspondence Address: Nicole Doerr, European University Institute, Badia Fiesolana, Via dei Roccettini 9,

I-50014 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI), Italy. Email: nicole.dorr@eui.eu

Social Movement Studies,Vol. 8, No. 2, 149–165, April 2009

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democracy within the Social Forums is linguistic communication problems and the

‘work of translation’ required to create a democratic setting (see Santos, 2005). In the

willingness to provide open access beyond linguistic communication problems, activists

and organizers involved in the ESF preparatory process therefore hold their regular

European preparatory assemblies to the ESF summits within a multilingual setting.

Thanks to a self-organized interpretation system, activists from all over Europe in these

meetings come together to discuss and make collective decisions in different languages.

This is possible through the involvement of the non-commercial translation network

known as ‘Babels’, composed of voluntary interpreters and activists (see Boeri, 2006).

Given the potential challenges of working transnationally, and of multilingual meetings,

the ESF provides a good case study to test whether such processes work effectively in

practice in comparison with national social movement assemblies: to what extent is

democratic discussion and decision making possible in such emerging multilingual

meetings compared to national meetings in which the majority of participants speak the

same language? Being interested in linking the theoretical ground of discourse and

deliberative democracy to the subject of the emerging Social Forums, I have studied the

extent to which democratic discussion in the sense of deliberative debate might or might

not take place within the multilingual and Europe-wide preparatory assemblies in the ESF

process. The findings of my comparison between Europe-wide Social Forum preparatory

assemblies and those taking place at the national level in Germany and the UK show that

the absence of one common language within the European assemblies, contrary to what

one might intuitively suppose, does not reduce the quality of democratic deliberation as

compared to the national context. Starting from this puzzle, I will, after a brief review of

the literature on democracy and participation in emerging transnational spaces created by

social movements at the European level, discuss the findings of my case study of the ESF

process.

This article provides a ‘bottom-up’ perspective on the European public sphere (see della

Porta & Caiani, 2007) through the study of the ESF process as a critical case of citizens

communicating across linguistic boundaries within a face-to-face setting within social

movements. In the academic debate about the opportunities and difficulties of citizens’

participation in the emerging European public sphere, possible linguistic and cultural

barriers have rarely been studied empirically. While much attention has been directed

towards the mass media level of the public sphere (for a critical position on this see

Spichal, 2006), only a few research projects were directly interested in processes of

Europeanization ‘from below’ (see, for example, Imig & Tarrow, 2001; della Porta &

Caiani, 2007). To fill this gap in research, the Social Forums in Europe are a particularly

interesting object of research, coming as they do from the grassroots level of civil society

and being open to virtually anyone who wants to participate and who agrees to the Porto

Alegre Charter of Principles.1 The Social Forums’ experimentation with radically

democratic and deliberative decision making in their public assemblies can be understood

as rooted within a wider tradition of ‘deliberative talk’ within left libertarian movements

(Polletta, 2002, p. 1). Their alternative practice of democracy and consensual decision

making ‘recalls an ancient element of democratic theory, which calls for an organization

of collective decision processes variedly defined as classical democracy, populist,

communitarian, strong, grassroots or direct, against democratic praxis in contemporary

democracies defined as realist, liberal, elitist, republican or representative democracy’

(Kitschelt, 1993, p. 15, quoted in della Porta, 2005, p. 337). In this sense, the Social

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Forums are of particular interest for the study of democracy in the broader context of the

crisis of representative democracy, the problem of the ‘democratic deficit’ at the EU

institutional level, and the economic and political challenges of neoliberal globalization

(Manin, 1995; Pizzorno, 2001).

Studying Deliberative Discussion Processes and the Problem of Exclusion

in the ESF Process

For several reasons, it makes sense to study the opportunities for democratic participation

‘from below’ in the Europe-wide preparatory assemblies within the ESF process through

the concept of democratic deliberation. Firstly, in the cases I studied, the activists

themselves constantly use and underline the importance of the procedure of deliberation

and consensus as their guiding model for discussion and decision making within their

meetings, while voting is rejected. The various progressive movements engaged in the

European Social Forums thus can be read as a critically inspired attempt ‘from below’ to

create ‘in practice’ the communicative space identified by theorists of deliberative

democracy (cf. Habermas, 1989, 1990 [1962], 2005).

The concept of deliberation applied here is based on Donatella della Porta’s definition of

deliberative democracy in movements:

[W]e have deliberative democracy when, under conditions of equality, inclusiveness

and transparency, a communicative process based on reason (the strength of the

good argument) is able to transform individual preferences and reach decisions

oriented to the public good. (della Porta, 2005, p. 340)

Thereby I expect activists’ grassroots practices of deliberation in the ESF process to differ

from other, more institutionalized ‘deliberative settings’ such as parliaments or

international organizations (see, for example, Joerges & Neyer, 1997) in the sense that

I expect inclusiveness of public discourse and diversity of voices to represent core values

of the practice of deliberation as ‘adopted and adapted’ by movements (della Porta, 2005,

pp. 340–341; Young, 1996). Given this emphasis on inclusiveness in the cases, my

analysis of the ESF process will focus on one particular relevant aspect of deliberative

discussion processes – their inclusiveness. I will critically assess relevant problems of

exclusion in both the internal discursive settings (Young, 2000, p. 107) and in terms

of external exclusionary biases inherent in the accessibility of European meetings

(see Bedoyan et al., 2004).

I distinguish between, firstly, the external exclusionary biases such as the difficult

accessibility of transnational meetings for grassroots activists who lack material resources

(ibid.) and, secondly, exclusion within the discourse structure of a deliberative and

participative setting itself. This has been a theme of feminist theorists, who point to the

historical roots of the public sphere in Western societies and the continued exclusion of

women, less privileged men and talk on private issues (Phillips, 1991, pp. 130–133, 162;

Fraser, 1992, p. 115; Young, 1996, 123). This suggests that the practices of deliberative

discussion within the Social Forums might be limited by culturally specific and

historically bound ‘dialogical possibilities’ that might reproduce various discriminations

within discourse (Wodak, 1996). This second possible internal exclusionary bias of

discourse within a formally open deliberative setting (see Young, 2000, p. 116) can be

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investigated by building on the tools developed by sociolinguists within the school of

critical discourse analysis (CDA). Moreover, I looked for possible ‘distortions’ of

democratic discourse and deliberation taking place in the micro-interactions of public

speech within the Social Forum preparatory meetings, as well as in the social context

surrounding the meetings (Wodak & Meyer, 2001). I worked with an applied concept of

democratic deliberation in social movements as a criterion for identifying asymmetries of

power, restrictions on access to discourse, and other inequalities within existing, formally

open and democratic discursive practices (Wodak, 1996).

Research Design and Operationalization

I compared national and Europe-wide preparatory assemblies to the ESF summit for the

period 2003–06. As a vital part of the ESF process, a number of European preparatory

assemblies take place at least four times yearly, gathering between about 100 and 400

activists from across Europe in order to collectively prepare the next ESF (see Haug et al.,

forthcoming). I thus explored the influence that the switch from a single language at the

national level to multilingualism at the European level would have on the practice of

deliberation and democratic participation ‘from below’ in the ESF preparatory process.

Based on the research focus on deliberative decision making and the above-mentioned

possible exclusionary biases in the discursive setting or the accessibility of Social Forum

meetings, two questions guided my research: firstly, was deliberative discussion

observable within the assembly of the European preparatory meetings to the ESF as

compared to meetings at the national level? Secondly, how accessible are these meetings

for interested citizens, that is, grassroots activists within social movements? The first

criterion, deliberation within the assembly of the preparatory meetings, studies the degree

to which the power of arguments of potentially less privileged actors with fewer resources

effectively counts in the discussion (see Young, 2000). Behind this is the question of

whether the arguments of ‘potentially less privileged participants and groups’ will

effectively be included within the public deliberation and eventual decision making

(Young, 2000; see also Risse, 2000). I define as ‘potentially less privileged participants

and groups’ activists with scarce material resources who were continuously mentioned by

the Social Forum organizers as an important category of the movements to be included in

the process of discussion and decision making. This first indicator thus explores the

possible internal exclusionary biases of public discourse within the Social Forum

assemblies.

The accessibility of the deliberative space is studied by my second indicator of analysis,

i.e. access to the ESF preparatory assemblies. Here, I assessed the transnational character

of the assemblies by taking into consideration possible external exclusionary biases within

the material and non-material resources needed to gain access to them such as time and

money (see Bedoyan et al., 2004). Both indicators were studied through a triangulated,

interdisciplinary approach. Firstly, I analysed the perceptions of the actors on democratic

deliberation and accessibility using a survey and interviews. In order to operationalize

deliberation in the survey and in-depth interviews I asked activists to compare European

and national preparatory assemblies, based upon (1) how transparent they perceived

European as compared to national preparatory assemblies to be; (2) the opportunities for

all participants to make a claim in European as compared to national meetings; (3) how

they perceived attention from the facilitators at each level; and (4) their impressions of the

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quality of mutual respect and recognition within the European and national meetings.

Secondly, I compared these data with the actual communicative practices by studying the

speech acts in the assemblies. This was done using a strategy derived from the theoretical

framework of CDA. The aim was to consider the interactions between the (often

informally powerful) facilitators of the meetings with other participants as well as the

social context surrounding the meetings (Wodak, 2000, p. 77).

I collected three types of data: (1) field notes on the preparatory meetings at the

European and national level, (2) recordings as well as in vivo transcripts of the discussions

within the sessions, and (3) the perceptions of the actors themselves about accessibility

and democratic discourse through a survey as well as in-depth interviews. In the

participant observation of multilingual meetings, I transcribed the plenary discussions in

the original language version of speakers, myself relying on simultaneous translation by

the ‘Babels’ activist-interpreters for those languages that I could not understand.2 The

survey (n ¼ 100) and the qualitative in-depth interviews (n ¼ 80) are each based on a

balanced sample based upon activists’ political orientation, organizational background,

gender, nationality, time of participation and age. The questionnaires were distributed in

the preparatory meetings taking place at the European and national levels where most of

the interviews were conducted with activists, facilitators and interpreters. The cases at the

national level were the German and British national preparatory meetings to the ESF,

which were selected for being different cases in terms of their more (UK) or less

(Germany) conflictual interrelations between the participating movements, NGOs, unions

and parties. I expect that more or less dialogical interactions between different groups

within a social forum preparatory assembly could stimulate or prevent deliberation, which

would provide interesting results in cross-national comparisons. The German Social

Forum process (cf. Rucht et al., 2007) was more cooperative and open compared with

Britain, which reflected the recent decades’ cleavages within left-wing movements and

parties in the UK (see Rootes & Saunders, 2005). In the following, I will explore my

findings on European and national preparatory assemblies to show that it was not so much

linguistic communication problems but other, internal and external exclusionary biases

that made democratic participation difficult in the case of the ESF preparatory assemblies.

I start with an overview of the results on multilingualism in the European meetings.

Findings: Multilingualism in the ESF Preparatory Process

Multilingual communication in the ESF process can be described as part of a self-

organized practice to facilitate transnational communication and collective decision

making ‘from below’. In other words, activists from all over Europe communicate in

different languages with the help of the non-commercial translation network ‘Babels’.3

The findings from triangulation show that the linguistic skills of participants were of a

mixed quality: within interviews, the majority of the participants reported difficulties with

English while at the same time mentioning their (re-)learning of foreign languages learnt

at school through participation in the meetings. Among the participants who answered my

questionnaires, nearly two-thirds evaluated themselves as being able to speak English

fluently (63 per cent); however, 10 per cent said they did not speak English at all. Table 1

illustrates these results.

While these results from the survey on self-evaluation of activists’ linguistic skills

indicate that a majority of participants were able to speak at least one foreign language

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actively, it is interesting, however, that two-thirds of the participants in European meetings

said that they made use of the simultaneous translation provided by Babels’ activist-

interpreters. This wide reliance on simultaneous translation had the effect of creating a

somewhat slow and ‘mixed’ style of communication in the meetings composed of several

working languages, a point which will be taken up below.

Considering the potential of linguistic misunderstandings inherent within a multilingual

setting, it is interesting that the participating activists perceived linguistic communication

problems as only a minor exclusionary problem for participation in the preparatory

meetings at the European level. Other potential obstacles were perceived to be more

serious, in particular the difficult accessibility of European meetings, and an internal

exclusionary bias within the discursive structure of the meetings.

Linguistic Communication Problems as a Perceived Minor Exclusionary Bias

To learn more about the potential exclusionary effect of language at the European level of

the Social Forum preparatory process, I asked activists participating in meetings at the

national level within the survey to state all the problems that restricted their participation

in European meetings. Several answers were possible. Sixty per cent of the respondents

answered ‘lacking financial resources and lacking time’ as an obstacle to participation,

followed by a ‘lack of information’ (24 per cent), with a comparatively smaller relevance

of ‘linguistic communication problems’ (8 per cent). Participation in the European

meetings did not depend primarily on activists’ linguistic skills but rather on their material

ability to travel to the transnational meetings, even though the majority of them were in

receipt of external finances from social movement organizations or political parties to pay

their travel expenses. I turn now to the findings from the interviews.

Effects of a Multilingual Setting: Procedural Slowness and Intercultural Socialization

The interviews complement the results from the survey. They provide significant evidence

for a very important effect of multilingualism in the ESF process: its procedural slowness.

In other words, the need to translate discussions into different languages at European

meetings had the effect of lengthening discussions and increasing the effort required by

participants to listen to each other. The interviews with participants illustrate that there

seems to be a link between the more inclusive procedural setting for discourse in European

meetings and the institutionalization of multilingual discussion and decision making, itself

related also to its procedural slowness:

Table 1. Participants’ answers to several questions on linguistic skills

Level of linguistic skills Percentage of participants

Participants who spoke English fluently 63Participants who did not speak English 10Participants who spoke at least one foreign language actively 64Participants without foreign language skills 4Total number of cases (N) 100

Note: The percentages add to more than 100 per cent because multiple responses were possible.

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In comparison to the national preparatory meetings in Germany, European

preparatory assemblies are very time-consuming [ . . . ] Right now within this

European assembly we need a lot of time at the beginning of every discussion in

order to get to carefully find out what exactly is the position of the others. I think this

has to do with all the different languages and backgrounds [ . . . ] Here within the

European assembly everything is discussed so that it is really ‘democratic’.4

Different languages are problematic without translation, as they are open to

manipulation. However, the main effect of multilingualism is to make everything go

more slowly, which is important, because then it gets politically more balanced. The

European level is more public and pluralistic; people speak in front of many people

who are backed by many movements.5

These extracts reveal a frequently mentioned aspect of multilingualism in the ESF process:

its effect ‘to make everything go more slowly’. Nevertheless, there are differences

between the answers of long-term participants and less experienced activists. The first

interviewee, as a relative newcomer participating for the first time in a European meeting,

problematizes the ‘time-consuming’ effect. The second interviewee, a participant who had

participated in several European meetings when the interview was taken, frames the lack

of translation as problematic and positively emphasizes slowness (‘because then it gets

politically more balanced’). These findings on the interrelations between multilingualism,

slowness and high levels of attention to formalized procedures are in line with

observations in previous research on the effects of multilingual communication in

discussions in the European Parliament (Kraus, 2004).6

The differences in the perceptions of multilingualism by newcomers as compared to long-

term participants within the interviews intersect with another important effect of the

multilingual setting in the ESF process: the intercultural socialization processes7 through

which activists were passing when participating in the multilingual meetings. By this I mean

that as a ‘side-effect’ of their participation in European meetings, individual activists acquired

a new, intercultural ‘activist linguistic repertoire’, as the following example illustrates:

I am here in the European preparatory assembly in Istanbul together with my

Turkish Cypriot friends. We try to mobilise activists in our countries to work

together and to mobilise for peace in the ESF 2004 in Athens [ . . . ] When we talk

with friends from the other side, we use a mix of Turkish and Greek – actually, we

talk Greekish, which is a mixture of everything: Turkish, English, Greek.8

Another long-term participant said:

I have participated in the ESF process for two years and I learnt the languages within

the movement [ . . . ] We invent a special type of language here, our own one, and we

invent a culture of communication [ . . . ] I have learnt consensus and the culture of

mutual understanding within the movement, I also learnt the languages here. I speak

English and Spanish actively and Italian passively. It was first based on my school

knowledge, the rest comes all from practice [ . . . ] At the beginning, the Italian activists

had a very high level of mistrust towards ‘French culture’. They perceived us as rigid

and authoritarian. We had to get together with the Italians to build confidence [ . . . ]9

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The above extract again emphasizes the socialization towards multilingualism in which

intercultural communication problems (e.g. ‘mistrust towards “French culture”’; ‘We had

to get together’) were overcome though a long-term learning process that led to the

emergence of a ‘culture of mutual understanding’ ‘consensus’ or ‘confidence’.

Despite the claims of positive socialization through multilingualism in the majority of

the interviews, the participant observation and analysis of discourse indicate that language

use in the European meetings was not free of power. Moreover, the unequal material

power positions of speakers were expressed discursively in the activists’ choice of which

language to use. In the European meetings, activists from Central and South Eastern

Europe and Turkey who had fewer financial resources to travel to the meetings would

frequently bring forward their claims in French or English in order to receive attention

from the Western European organizers in the ‘core’ of the ESF process. On the other side,

Western European activists would virtually never switch to a Central and Eastern

European language or Turkish. In this sense, the external bias of unequally distributed

material resources that was already limiting access to the meetings was also manifest in an

unbalanced practice of multilingualism in the meetings themselves. Despite these

problems it is interesting, however, that linguistic communication problems were not

perceived as a major exclusionary problem of European meetings by the majority of

participants, including non-Western Europeans and resident migrants. Obstacles to an

inclusive process, on the other hand, seemed to reside within the organizational setting and

internal hierarchies in the roles of facilitators and informal leaders, clearly dominated by

Western European activists (see Andretta & Doerr, 2007).

Perception of the Activists: European Meetings as More Inclusive

As an unexpected result, participants perceived European preparatory meetings as

proceeding in a more ‘democratic’ and ‘deliberative’ manner than preparatory meetings at

the national level. The findings of the in-depth interviews and the survey both indicate that

participants believed that European preparatory meetings were more inclusive and

participatory as compared to national preparatory meetings in Germany and the UK:

I asked activists participating both in European and national preparatory assemblies to

give their opinion on potential barriers to internal democracy within meetings, comparing

European meetings with the national level. The findings of the interviews and the survey

both indicate that the majority of activists perceived discussions and decision making in

the European assemblies as more inclusive and transparent than in the national preparatory

meetings. In the survey, 66 per cent of the respondents who were participating in meetings

both at the European and national levels perceived decision making in European meetings

as more inclusive of all the voices present as compared to national meetings (see Table 2).

Just over half of the respondents (59 per cent) perceived decision making in European

meetings as more transparent than at the national level, while 27 per cent were of the

opposite opinion.

It should be noted, however, that only 30 participants were responding to these

questions – the majority of whom had already made their way to the European meetings –

and in this sense the small number of valid answers reflects the external exclusionary bias

of the difficulties in attending European assemblies. To contextualize these results, a look

at the interviews with activists who were not regularly participating in European meetings

is needed: Interestingly, the interviews with participants in local Social Forums and other

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grassroots activists only occasionally participating in European assemblies indicate that

the reasons why European meetings were perceived as more ‘democratic’ were more to do

with negative views of national preparatory meetings than positive views of the European

level. An activist from the UK described this as follows:

If you ask about the atmosphere within the meetings I have to say that the national

meetings are less democratic. In the UK this has to do with internal cleavages. Power

games are more acute and meetings are not at all participative. The European level is

more complex, diversified and in this sense more public. There is more space

for possible alliances and contingency for negotiations. It is more ‘public’ in this

sense [ . . . ]10

The above interview narrative contains several patterns that were frequently mentioned by

activists commenting on preparatory assemblies in the UK: the interviewee links the

perceived ‘less democratic’ and participative atmosphere of preparatory assemblies at the

national level to ‘internal cleavages’, ‘power games’ and the lack of ‘space for possible

alliances’ – in comparison to the perception of a more ‘complex, diversified and in this

sense more public’ European level. Moreover, the interviews indicate that one reason for

the difficulties experienced by some of the activists in participating in European meetings

seemed to reside in a lack of transparency and willingness to publicly share information

on the part of professional activists who participated regularly in the meetings both at the

European and at the national level. An extract of an interview with a participant from the

UK illustrates this:

It was very complicated to get information about the meeting (of the European

preparatory assembly) and the location here [ . . . ] There is no information on the

ESF-homepage, not a single concrete piece of information about this meeting and

where and when exactly it is taking place. All the preparation for this European

assembly was organised in a very? untransparent way. Also, within the meeting,

those decisions which count most were made at a moment when the non-

professional activists had already returned home.11

Table 2 Percentage of answers to two questions on democratic decision-making procedures

Inclusiveness (%) Transparency (%)

Level of decision making

At which layer of meetingsdid you perceive

decision making to bemore inclusive?a

At which layer of meetingsdid you perceive

decision making to bemore transparent?b

Preparatory assemblies at national level 24 27European preparatory assemblies 66 59No differences observable 10 14Number of cases (N) 30 30

a ‘In which of the following places (European preparatory assemblies or preparatory assemblies at thenational level) do you have the impression that people do care more about the fact that decisions are madetogether by all of the participants?’.b ‘In which of the following places (European preparatory assemblies or preparatory assemblies at thenational level) do you have the impression that the process of decision making is more open andtransparent?’.

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The above interview extract points out a frequently mentioned problem – informality and

asymmetries of information – that seemed to pose an important internal obstacle for

democratic participation at the European level as a result of the multi-level structure of

meetings and some activists participating more regularly than others. These findings,

together with the evidence from the survey, indicate that multiple external and internal

exclusionary biases rendered grassroots participation in European meetings difficult.

Interestingly, in the UK this also included an internal democratic deficit originating at the

national level of meetings in which leading professional activists did not sufficiently

diffuse relevant information to the grassroots level.

Why were European Meetings Seen as More Inclusive and Transparent?

Why were European meetings seen as proceeding in a more ‘inclusive’ and ‘transparent’

way? Complementing the results of the survey and the interviews, the findings from the

discourse analysis support the perception of activists that there was a qualitative difference

between European and national levels. The comparatively high procedural quality in the

European meetings can be explained by three patterns: firstly, there is the particular

procedural setting that developed in relation to the multilingual context of meetings, in

which facilitators and interpreters institutionalized mechanisms of consensual and

inclusive decision making. Secondly, there is a relative pluralist structure of participation

related to the new transnational space in the European meetings despite their difficult

external accessibility. Thirdly, there is a more problematic exclusionary bias observable

within the discursive setting at the national level as compared to European meetings.

Let me start with the first pattern. To provide effective participation in different languages,

European meetings worked with more formalized procedures of decision making than

national meetings, so that domestically underrepresented or potentially marginalized groups

(e.g. women, migrants or small horizontal groups) found it easier to make their claims in

public. The discourse analysis (based on the comparison of transcripts of European and

national plenary discussions) shows a more inclusive facilitation style within European

meetings in both quantitative and qualitative terms. In the micro-analysis of participants’ and

facilitators’ speeches in public discussions and decision making, European preparatory

assemblies showed (a) a higher frequency of active public participation by less privileged

activists; (b) a stronger inclusion of the latter’s claims in the actual decision-making process;

and (c) more gender equality within the board of facilitators and among speakers. In

particular, within delicate situations of conflict, participants in European assemblies were

also given more time to express themselves, which increased the chances for less experienced

participants or those lacking material resources to have an impact on decision making.

The opportunity to give everyone a voice was furthermore institutionalized in European

meetings in an informal way by the presence of the network of activist-interpreters, the

‘Babels’. Owing to the effective need for simultaneous translation, the Babels-interpreters

had the power to implement certain rules structuring discussions. As an example, the

Babels would spontaneously make use of their self-accorded ‘veto’ to stop interpretation

in cases in which some groups or activists tried to dominate or manipulate the debates

(Doerr, 2008, see also Boeri, 2006).

More evidence of the discourse analysis shows that in European preparatory assemblies –

as opposed to those taking place at the national level – participants would, for instance,

greet and address each other more respectfully and accord a longer time to participants to

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express themselves, which increased the chance of those less experienced or those lacking

material resources to express their claims publicly within the decision making. Given these

results from the discourse analysis, the high quality of deliberation observed in European

assemblies can be interpreted alongside the results on the occurrence of a long-term

intercultural socialization process among activists towards a multilingual setting, observed

in the earlier section on linguistic communication problems in which participants and

facilitators acquired a sensitivity for inclusive, consensual procedures. Taken together, the

particularity of this multilingual and transnational situation of communication seems to

have increased the attention paid to formalized procedures, fostering an inclusive and

dialogical process of decision making in European meetings.

A second pattern to explain the observations on the high internal quality of deliberation in

the European meetings is the pluralist structure of the meetings at the European level. By

this I mean that the meetings were more diverse both in quantitative and qualitative terms;

there were comparatively more groups and individuals with different national backgrounds

involved and who spoke different languages. In terms of ideological backgrounds, it should

be noted that the European meetings seemed to be similarly composed to the country-wide

preparatory meetings studied at the national level. In all cases studied, there was a slight

overbalance of activists associated with unions and political parties of the ‘old left’ (varying

between 55 per cent for the European level and 60 per cent, respectively, in the British and

German cases); the remainder coming from various backgrounds of ‘new’ social

movements and other groups working on global justice issues. These results are based on the

results of my questionnaires distributed in the European and national preparatory

assemblies of the ESF. They are complimented by the notes of lists of participation collected

within national and European preparatory meetings. In both cases, in European and national

preparatory assemblies, the number of activists from radically oriented groups such as

anarchist, autonomous and direct-action movements was consistently low. A pre-selection

process thus seemed to have produced a certain homogeneity in terms of fewer activists

from the ‘radical’ sectors of Social Forums. Professional activists representing big social

movement organizations or small political parties with a professional staff (in the case of the

UK, for instance, the SWP12 and its front organization ‘Globalise Resistance’) were a

continuous presence within the European meetings and had at their disposal higher material

resources compared to others. However, they remained far from a majority, representing

just one group among other participants complemented by others from a background in new

social movement organisations and ‘newest’ movements, NGOs and radical left groups in

the EPAs (cf. Andretta and Reiter forthcoming). The interviews with the former group of

activists from the grassroots level, though, indicate that this pre-selection process seemed to

have already taken place in the scale shift from the local to the national level of Social Forum

meetings. Interestingly, though, a few interviewees from local Social Forums and migrant

groups, interviewed on several occasions during the period of analysis (2003–06), refrained

from participating in national preparatory meetings after an initial phase of high

involvement. The motivations behind these cases of partial exit seem to be that activists

perceived European preparatory meetings as politically more interesting and less

‘dominated’ than national assemblies, and so they concentrated their available resources

and commitment to participating in transnational meetings or the ESF only:

Within the internal preparatory process in Germany, things have improved a bit.

New people came in. But you know how it is with the Leftists, they always have

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vanguards, and those who were the first over time have enlarged their power

position. To the preparatory meetings in Erfurt [German national preparatory

process], I could not come because I don’t have the money to travel there [ . . . ] I

prefer European meetings, where I meet my friends. When I do not understand the

languages, for instance French, my friends translate for me [ . . . ] Recently, many

Iranians joined in to participate, and I hope I can come to the fourth ESF in Athens. I

am unemployed [ . . . ], but I save money.13

Despite the pre-selection process taking place from the local to the national level, these

findings in the diachronic perspective indicate that the European preparatory meetings

continued to be an attractive space for grassroots activists (see also Andretta & Reiter,

forthcoming), while national meetings were perceived to be increasingly dominated by a

number of leftist groups seeking dominance. Relating these findings to the study of

language and communication in the public sphere, one might suspect that the emerging

European level of communication in the ESF process might be a more open and less

dominated space for mutual exchange and deliberation, being in its very structure

constituted by a diversity of languages, worldviews and movements, whose experiences

open up unexplored opportunities for transnational alliances.

The third pattern I have found so far is the relevance of a problematic internal

exclusionary bias for deliberative discourse to take place within preparatory meetings at

the national level. Moreover, discourse analysis and interviews show that in national

preparatory meetings the claims of newcomers or other less privileged groups ran a

structural risk of being pushed aside by the facilitators or the better informed ‘insiders’ of

the process in a much tougher way than observed in European assemblies. The way in

which this happened was different, however, depending on case-specific nationally

varying movement constellations, the place-specific resource distribution and the specific

(public) communication styles in each case. In the UK, it was groups lacking the financial

resources to contribute to the organizational process of the ESF 2004 whose right to have a

say in the decision making was contested by the official organizing committee and the

small Marxist parties (e.g. the groups SWP and Socialist Action) involved in the ESF

organization together with the Greater London Authority. An interview with one of the

activists identifying with ‘horizontal’ networks involved in the ESF organization describes

how this manifested in the discourse structure at the national level:

Some of the unionists or the SWP [Socialist Workers’ Party] and Socialist Action

depart from the position that the right to participate in decision-making depends on

money. They warn to put back their money if decisions are not taken the way they

would like them to be taken [ . . . ] The autonomous groups within the London Social

Forum had a completely different perspective [ . . . ] This of course created problems

of communication and also of trusting each other.14

In the discursive setting of British meetings, the cleavage between professional activists

from political parties and NGO and smaller so called ‘horizontal’ networks and grassroots

activists from direct action groups manifested constantly in a very difficult situation of

communication, in which people were shouting at each other, leaving the room or not

being invited to meetings at all (see, for example, Doerr, 2005; Boeri, 2006; Harrison,

2006). The micro-analysis of speech acts thereby shows that a dialogical exchange in the

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sense of deliberation seemed difficult in this context as speakers were contesting each

other’s truthfulness. This led to a situation in which the mentioned small Marxist parties in

the alliance with the participating trade unions and the Greater London Assembly

continually tried to frame discussions and decision making within the meetings alongside

their own traditional socialist culture of decision making based on voting and caucuses. In

the diachronic perspective, these groups ended up controlling the preparatory process in

the UK, while the various ‘horizontal’ groups felt marginalized and created their own

autonomous spaces (see Juris, 2005).

In the case of Germany, the national preparatory meetings proceeded with less conflict

as compared to the UK, although they seemed to rely on an internally controversial ‘top-

down’ style of decision making. In the discursive setting, power asymmetries among

different groups of participants did not manifest in discussions on the basis of resources,

like in the UK. Instead, the facilitators of German preparatory assemblies frequently

turned to the argument of ‘efficiency’ to avoid an open and interactive debate on decisions

to be taken. Thus facilitators whose positions overlapped with the position of a few

professional activists backed by big organizations within the meetings seemed to practise a

patronizing strategy of silencing15 grassroots activists or of migrants’ claims to bring

controversial topics to the table. Two interview extracts with activists who participated

within the national preparatory meetings in Germany – one from a migrant group, another

a newcomer – give a sense of these internal exclusionary patterns within discourse:

It is always the same. We are treated as if we were air. They talk about us but not

with us, even if we are there and sit in the same room as them. There is just no

reaction concerning questions which we migrants consider. In Florence this was

different. Also at the European assembly in Berlin there was a different atmosphere

[ . . . ] During the preparations for Florence, I made proposals for the speakers [for

the ESF summit], for example I proposed a speaker from Iran. But he was not

accepted by the Social Forum here in Germany.16

These people have no respect for new participants! [ . . . ] The meeting [national

Social Forum preparatory meeting in Germany] was dominated by a certain culture

of discussion and a certain way of speaking. A little bit like in a kindergarten: When

you wanted to ask the questions that matter, you got unclear answers. You were not

allowed to ask the wrong thing [ . . . ] This was no true forum.17

The asymmetric discussion style within the national preparatory meetings illustrated by

the above statement testifies to a problematic bias in what was labelled by the organizers of

the meetings as formally free and open public discourse and deliberation. Together, the

findings of discourse analysis and the interviews show the problematic exclusionary bias

and incommensurabilities of positions becoming relevant within the discursive setting and

interactions taking place in the meetings themselves.

In comparative perspective, one might suggest that within the observed meetings at the

national level a discourse on ‘efficiency’ (Germany) or on ‘money’ as a precondition for

having a say in the decision making (UK) reflected the dominance of the reasoning of the

more influential and bigger organizations as gatekeepers18 in the national preparatory

processes. While within the European multilingual assemblies, speakers seemed to make

an extra effort to tolerate and assess speakers of different countries and their concerns, this

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‘culture of mutual listening’ – and the sensibility for a need of an inclusive procedural

setting to facilitate deliberation – was lacking at the national level. Not that European

meetings were less relevant sites of decision making in the multi-layered ESF process.

Quite the contrary – European meetings were frequently a more ‘neutral’ chance to

resolve structurally blocked conflicts of interest occurring at the national level (see Doerr,

2005). It seems that the mentioned more pluralist, interculturally mixed and new emerging

feature of European meetings made them more suitable for communicative problem

solutions and discussions to happen – and more difficult to be dominated by specific

groups and gatekeepers. As an example of this, ‘chatting in the corridor’ seemed to be a

well-established collective ritual for discussing and mediating within the social context of

the European meetings (Doerr, forthcoming), while decision making in the meetings

studied in the UK and Germany would often take place outside the preparatory meetings in

a priori agreements among the facilitators. Within European meetings, facilitators

explicitly allowed conflict to be expressed within the plenary assemblies which in the

comparative perspective seems to have stimulated a more participative atmosphere for

deliberative talk to take place.

Conclusion

This article has analysed the effects of multilingualism within the ESF process. In my

empirical case study I examined the opportunities for democratic discourse and

participation to take place ‘from below’ in multilingual face-to-face settings between

activists, comparing European and national Social Forum meetings. I suggest that

linguistic difficulties of communication were not the decisive obstacle to obtaining access

to and actively participating in transnational discussion and decision making. In

comparison, linguistic communication problems within European meetings did not seem

to cause great problems, although some languages were more central in practice than

others. Therefore, informal power structures and gatekeeping mechanisms frequently

rooted at the national level of Social Forum processes, together with a lack of transparency

and asymmetries of information, seem to have indirectly reduced the accessibility of

European meetings and their internal quality of discourse and deliberative discussion.

These findings indicate that the emergence of a functioning multilingual public sphere is

not limited to existing multilingual national states like Switzerland or Belgium (see Van de

Steeg, 2002; Kantner, 2004; Koopmans & Erbe, 2004), but also applies to emerging

processes of grassroots communication and face-to-face settings of activists at the EU

level.

Acknowledgements

For their inspiration and comments the author would like to thank the editors of Social Movement Studies,

Massimiliano Andretta, Donatella della Porta, Klaus Eder, Christoph Haug, Cathleen Kantner, Alice Mattoni,

Lorenzo Mosca, Daniela Piccio, Marianne Van de Steeg, Ruth Wodak, and two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. See the Porto Alegre Charter of Principles (World Social Forum, 2001).

2. In the meetings I observed, the latter were Greek, Hungarian, Kurdish and Turkish.

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3. The languages that the Babels volunteer interpreters translated included: English, French, German, Italian,

Spanish, Russian, Greek, Turkish, Czech, Rumanian, and Serbo-Croatian. See www.babels.org/alis

(accessed 1 March 2006). The Babels network of interpreters work closely together with the media activist

network ALIS (Alternative Interpretation System) that has created for the worldwide Social Forum process

economical techniques providing a digital interpretation system working with radio transmitters.

4. Interview with Ron, an activist from Germany, during the European preparatory assembly in Berlin, 2004.

5. Interview with Souad from London, participating in the European preparatory assembly in Berlin, 2004.

6. In the EP, however, multilingualism seemed to have the effect of reducing the liveliness seen in national

parliamentary debates (Kraus, 2004), which was not the case in the informal, spontaneous and lively setting

of activist communication in the European preparatory assemblies to the ESF.

7. I derive the concept of socialization to multilingual, intercultural communication following Doug McAdam’s

definition of socialization as a process of transformation in which people’s ideas and interests change over

different stages through participation in activism, for instance from occasional apolitical attitudes to strong

political commitment (McAdam, 1988, p. 51).

8. Interview with an activist from Cyprus, European preparatory assembly in Istanbul, September 2005.

9. Interview with a facilitator in the ESF process, Attac France, ESF Paris, November 2003.

10. Interview with an activist from London Social Forum, Berlin, June 2004.

11. Interview with an activist from London Social Forum during the European preparatory meeting in Paris,

2003.

12. Socialist Workers’ Party.

13. Interview with an activist from a migrant network, Erfurt, 21 July 2005.

14. Interview with an activist from London Social Forum, Berlin, June 2004.

15. By silencing, I refer to a politics of exclusion in which less powerful groups, despite their actual permission to

participate in meetings, ‘are silenced, encouraged to keep their wants inchoate, and heard to say “yes” when

what they have said is “no”’ (Mansbridge, 1990, p. 127).

16. Extract from an interview with Ayuna from a migrant organization.

17. Interview with Leila, an activist who participated for the first time in a national preparatory meeting of the

ESF process in Germany.

18. On the concept of ‘gatekeepers’ see Wodak (2002, p. 21).

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