Alliance 21: Making Another World Possible
Evaluations, Visions, Proposals, and Projects
Alliance for a Responsible, Plural and United World
April 2003

The first three parts :

- Evaluation and Vision of the Future
- Proposals and Projects
- Report on the Participatory Process Used for the Evaluation and Future of the Alliance

- The second stage of the Alliance :

• First stage of the Alliance :
  - First Steps
  - Structuring the Alliance
  - Elaboration of the “Proposal Papers”
• Present Assets and Weaknesses
• Perspectives for the Second Stage

THE SECOND STAGE OF THE ALLIANCE

By Pierre Calame pic@fph.fr

First Contribution to a Collective Thinking Process

A/ First Stage of the Alliance: an Attempt to Put Things in Perspective

2. Structuring the Alliance (1998-1999)

During this second period, the Alliance was structured in two aspects: through the adoption and the development of communication tools; and through a collective organization and governance of the Alliance.

The adoption of common communication tools, i.e. the means both for Allies to carry on discussions and facilitate their collective work and for the Alliance to be given public viewing, had been a concern since the beginning, supported by a newsletter. As of 1998, however, the abundance of the material produced and the diversity of systems in use made it necessary to upscale. For this, the Alliance benefited from the development of the Internet, which soon became indispensable, given its international nature and the new possibilities, therefore the new momentum, it offered for the structuring of a Òworld civil society.Ó The FPH financed the release and operational costs of a new magazine in three languages, Caravan. It also contributed to setting up and structuring an Alliance Web site and began to finance the development of tools and methods for remote communication, in connection with the Web site: a Directory of Allies, a research data base, and the first Internet e-forums.

All of this, which was indispensable for the AllianceÕs continuity, also produced growing operational costs.

The collective organization of the Alliance occupied, during that period, a relatively small number of AlliesÑprobably less than 200, and at some moments as few as thirty. But those were the most active, most committed Allies. This led them naturally to raising, more explicitly than the others, the question of the AllianceÕs collective orientation. This question proved to be especially difficult, or even contradictory, for a series of reasons mainly due to the originality of the Alliance:

We did not know how to overcome these contradictions. The long debates in 1998 wore out some of the Allies, who then found in the Alliance the usual tensions of the world of nonprofit organizations and unions, which they thought had been avoided in the Alliance. The outcome of those debates resulted in fact in a tenuous solution: the Alliance would not be institutionalized and would therefore have no formal members nor executive bodies; nevertheless, the Allies designated, by voting for candidates that most of them did not know, an International Facilitation Team (IFT), made up partly, moreover, of FPH employees.

As soon as the IFT began to advance priorities that differed from those of the FPH, a dead end was ahead. The visibility of the perspectives darkened and suspicion set in. These tensions and contradictions did not stop the work of the Alliance from progressing, the proposals from being developed, and the methods from becoming clearer.

During this period, the international context also changed. Isolated at the time of its birth in its project of progressively structuring a world civil society, the Alliance was soon caught up with and quickly left behindÑat least in terms of numbers and visibilityÑby more traditional nonprofit movements, such as ATTAC, the lightning success of which revealed the aspiration, ten years after the fall of the Berlin wall, to a collective resistance against the rapid unhindered spread of Òneoliberal globalization.Ó

Many other pre-existing movements felt the need for new forms of coordination to make this resistance more effective. In addition, the success of the citizensÕ campaign against the more-or-less secret negotiation of the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment), the success of international boycott actions, and the considerable media impact of the demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle showed that the development of the Internet had changed the political and social hand and had enabled global actions spurred by the short-lived coordination of social movements and NGOs. The appearance and success of the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in January 2003 would be the concrete expression of these hopes.

These new structures and forms of action brought the Alliance to redefine its position within the whole of the construction dynamics of a world civil society. On the one hand, the visibility and activism of the latter made these considerably appealing to many Allies. On the other hand, those movements made it possible to clarify the position of the Alliance, torn, at that point, between the AlliesÕ contradictory aspirations. The Alliance, a pluralistic proposal-building process, was in a complementary, not a competitive position with regard to these other dynamics.

Affirmation of this specificity led to underscoring the AllianceÕs specific characteristics: long-term continuity, insistence on the methods; the determination to draw up solid proposals, the search for dialogue; the determination to reflect the diversity of the whole world.