[fse-esf] Presentations made by Nordic OC in Stockholm

[Sara Andersson]

Dear all,
and especially those of you who were not at the EPA in Stockholm! I
send you the presentation on the ESF in Malmö made by the Nordic OC,
the propsal for submitting suggestions for themes at the ESF. We also
presented a schedule for the preparation work but since this has been
updated since the EPA according to the decisions taken there, the new
one will be sent out after the weekend when we have discussed it in
the OC.
For those of you who can't read attachments, please see the texts below.

/Sara Andersson
Attac Swedens representative in Nordic OC.

1. Presentation by the Nordic Organising Coommittee to the EPA in Stockholm,
Saturday 15th September

Since the EPA in Lisbon in April, the respective initiative committees
on both sides of Öresund started a process of finding out the specific
conditions and possiblities of the two venues in order to decide which
would be the best one. At the same time, the political mobilisation
for the ESF  started, both in terms of enlarging the network around
the initiative, and creating interest for the ESF itself. There were
increasing contacts between the Scandinavian countries, and we have
had several Scandinavian network meetings during the last half year.

The decision about the venue was taken at the end of July, after some
delay due to the need from the Danish side to investigate the
financial possibilities a bit further. After having done this, the
Danish withdrew the offer of hosting the main event, and it was
decided that the forum venue should be Malmö. There will however be a
pre-conference in Copenhagen, in the days running up to the ESF, in
order to connect the two cities, and to mobilise for the ESF. But the
ESF itself will take place in Malmö.

Malmö is the third largest city in Sweden, with about 300 000
inhabitants, and in the most densely populated area of Sweden. Malmö
became the first Fair Trade city in Sweden and is run by a social
democratic majority. The municipality of Malmö are very positive
towards hosting the ESF, and have given us a lot of support so far. We
will have our own contact person employed by the municipality to work
with the project of organising the ESF, and they are letting us use
land and many of the venues for free as well as helping with the
neccessary permits. The tourist board of Malmö will help with bookings
of hotels. The financial support from the city of Malmö is still under
negotiations, but we have very good indications in that respect.  One
good aspect of choosing Malmö instead of Copenhagen is of course that
it is a smaller city and the ESF will create a lot of attention there,
but also because the price level is 30 % lower than that in Copenhagen
(and indeed, also lower than Stockholm.)

We are really enthusiastic about the choice of venue, it is in the
center of Malmö and will be highly visible to the inhabitants of
Malmö. The venue is centered around what is called the Peoples Park
and makes use of other meeting rooms in the area, all within easy
walking distance. Malmö is  a multicultural city, but it is also one
of Swedens most segregated citys, there is basically a divide straight
across the city, and we see it as a special bonus that the venue goes
straight across this devide and connects the two parts.

The number of organisations and individuals involved increased  fast
after Lisbon, especially in Sweden after the decision on the venue,
particularly on the local level in Malmö, but also nationally. All
kinds of organisations are taking part in the preparation work,
ranging from environmental organisations, solidarity organisations,
educational institiutions, social movements, immigrant and right to
asylum organisation, feminist organisations and of course trade
unions. The trade unions especially see the ESF as an important event
for them because of the loss of members they've had recently due to
policies decided by our right wing government coalition. And all of us
of course see the ESF as an important step on the way towards throwing
the government out of office in the next elections, or earlier if we
can...

Two weeks ago, we formalised the cooperation in a Scandinavian
organising association, or the organising committee, at a very
succesfull Scandinavian network meeting. The aim of this organisation
is to take care of the organising of the frameworks around the event,
like logistics, finance, translations and visa etc. We have tried, as
far as possible, to separate the political mobilisation for the forum
from the organising of the framwork of the forum, in order to work as
efficiently as possible. We have two persons working with ESF as part
of their regular jobs today, and plan to employ our first own staff in
October, and the first positions will be centered around finance, visa
and translation. In January there will be a fully functional
secretariat in Malmö, with employes and volunteers.
Today we have 10 different working groups with volonteers, on the
local, national and regional level.

The media attention for the ESF has been good so far, especially
compared to usual standards in reporting on movement issues in Sweden.
We have had very good press in both regular and alternative media, and
the word is spreading about the forum. After some rocky years in the
media after the EU summit in Gothenburg in 2001, we now sense a
different climate for talking about the issues of the movement, and we
would like to thank our friends from Germany for organising such a
great event in Rostock for the G8-summit, that also helped create a
better media climate for the meetings of the global justice movement
in Sweden. But of course, we are also preparing for the counter attack
when the neoliberal-dominated media realises how important and big the
ESF will be.

Finance
We estimate the ESF in Malmö to cost about 1,5 million euro.

Methodology
By organising the next ESF, we want to help creating a more democratic
and open process, building on our common experiences in Scandinavia,
but also through discussions amongst the European movements. We need
to find a model of democracy and a structure that everyone can work
within, and which is accessible also to outsiders and newcomers, not
just to the people who go to the EPAs.

About the ESF itself, we want to create a participatory forum, with
much interaction between speakers and participants. We want to follow
in the tradition of Athens, with less big events with large panels of
speakers and more focus on seminars and workshops and create a forum
where people who come feel included in the discussions even if they
are not listed as speakers.

Regarding the programme, we want to see it being made in an open,
participatory and transparent way, we want a self-merging process to
take place as much as possible, and we are opposed to a forced merging
process in the end where only the persons coming to the EPA have an
influence over the mergings of the seminars and workshops. We also
want to see the programme ready well in time for the forum, for
mobilisation reasons as well as for Babels, who have been asking for
this at every ESF so far... We also want the themes of the ESF to be
decided in an open process, either by extracting them from the
proposed workshops ans seminars or trough an open process of making
proposals. We do not want to decide the sub-themes from above in the
EPA.

We are also looking for as broad mobilisation as possible of different
organisations and movements organising events during the ESF, as well
as general participation, especially targeting youth and immigrants.

We would like to see a large proportion of Eastern Europeans and
delegates from the South at the ESF, and our ambition is to at least
reach the same number of Eastern European participants as in Athens.

/The Nordic Organising Committee

2. Proposal from the Scandinavian Organising Committee on submitting
themes for the ESF:

Since the programme proposals can start to come in early December, we
propose that during the time from now to then, we have an open process
of suggesting themes until the next EPA.

This process should be in the spirit of a Europe we think that we all
want to see; a Europe that takes  positive action towards social,
economic and political rights for all its people, for a sustainable
handling of our common resources and a peaceful development in the
world.

This process should be seen as an opportunity for mobilisation and
enlargement of the ESF.
All the participants of the EPA now have the responsibility to ensure
that there are also proposals from Central and Eastern European
organisations and indivduals, and the OC takes upon itself the
responsibility to coordinate this work by sending out reminders and
collecting the incoming theme proposals. These propsals will then be
summarized and confirmed at the next EPA.

Therefore, all the theme proposals should be submitted through the
website www.esf2008.org. We will inform you as soon as this is
possible.
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