The Real Gains

Michael Levitin is a freelance journalist living in Berlin. He has written for Newsweek, Slate, and the Los Angeles Times, among others.

Klaus had tromped through forests and across fields, marching 15 miles back here to his ramshackle tent at 3:00 in the morning, so it's understandable that he was too beat to be euphoric. He'd taken whacks from billy clubs and swallowed pepper spray as he and more than 10,000 demonstrators -- who employed a kamikaze-like "five finger" tactic, in which their groups split abruptly and individuals sprinted in all directions -- broke through police lines, blockaded roads and railways, and claimed victory in their bid to disrupt the G8 summit.

Today, as rich-nation leaders wrapped up their Baltic coast vacation -- in which posturing about fighting climate change and poverty in Africa replaced any of the nuts-and-bolts strategies required for doing so -- the image of those celebratory masses of young people parading by the thousands across Germany's rolling farmland, with hundreds of slender white wind-turbine blades spinning symbolically in the background, has somehow overtaken the official debate in its seriousness and importance. In a not-yet-quantifiable way, the anti-globalization movement has been reignited in Rostock. Reinjected with passion. Reinforced with solidarity; with organization, with clear-marked acts of bravery, and with what author and activist Susan George called the public's "invincible" will to bring a more socially just world into being.

George, the former vice president of Attac and current chair of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, encouraged the direction the anti-globalization movement is taking alongside author John Holloway in one of several hundred panel workshops that took place at the Alternative Summit in Rostock. "Everyone knows that capitalism is raping the planet, this is absolutely clear," said the 73-year-old American-turned-French citizen. The public's first task, then, is "to denounce, to challenge, and expose [those in power] through detailed arguments, and to find spectacular, persuasive ways" to put issues like climate change and debt cancellation at the top of the agenda. "This movement is still very young and it has its best days ahead of it," she said.

Using a more blunt -- and in America, it would seem, unthinkable -- language of revolution, Holloway, who has been described as the poetic voice of the anti-globalization movement, spoke about "a moment of rupture," describing a vision of global social struggle filled with hope. We need "to think of revolution -- of the possibility of creating another world -- not in terms of a breakdown, but as a breakthrough," he said. He likened the weeklong events of protest in Rostock, and in Seattle and Genoa before it, as a "crack through which the seeds of a new society are pushing. We [the anti-globalization movement] represent a force that is pushing through and, like cracks in an ice floe, can spread with incredible and unpredictable speed."

A New Movement

Sound like over-the-top anarchic Euro-speak? Well maybe, coming from the intensely capitalist system we in America have embraced since our inception as an all-or-nothing option. But the point is that change is afoot, and that Klaus and his army of merry pranksters who lit up the Rostock region this week -- proving themselves unrelenting in their blockades and peaceful demonstrations despite the violence of tear gas, water cannons, and beatings police waged against them -- are the latest incarnation.

Look also, if you haven't already, at Thursday's jaw-dropping, made-for-Hollywood high-speed boat chase that occurred a few hundred yards offshore from Heiligendamm, providing the biggest drama of the summit. Three rubber speedboats operated by Greenpeace succeeded in breaching the Navy-patrolled security zone. They intended to carry a petition demanding substantial carbon cuts to the heads of state, but instead got engaged in a 15-minute, hair-raising adventure at sea. Dwarfed and out-horsepowered by the armored German military vessels that pursued them, the maverick pilots made risky maneuvers at top speed that could have easily lost them their lives; when the chase was over, in the moments before they were gathered into custody, they hoisted the banner "G8 Act Now" defiantly into the air, facing the helicopter cameras as their tiny boat rocked on the waves. It was bravest act of idealism -- putting the planet over their lives -- that I have ever seen.

As for the ways the G8 leaders did not act -- specifically, the way George Bush once again bucked scientific consensus and global political and public pressure in failing to come on board with specific targets to cut carbon emissions -- it's nothing we haven't heard. Merely agreeing to begin discussions in Bali in December on the road toward creating an international climate framework that can work as a successor to Kyoto was, apparently, enough a concession by the U.S. for embattled Chancellor Merkel to herald the "deal" a success. Depressing stuff.

But wait, there's an upside to the last six and a half years of criminal, irresponsible Bush leadership: the world, in the meantime, has gotten busy. At the Alternative Summit in Rostock, which went under the slogan "Another World Is Possible," I saw numerous examples of movements and initiatives that have sprung up virtually in direct response to American actions -- and may now be leading the rest of us with their progressive vision.

One is the modern peace movement in Europe, which Jan Tamas, chair of the Humanist Party in the Czech Republic, announced at a panel session on the G8 and war is "just being born." The cause: America's aggressive approach to installing anti-missile bases in Eastern Europe, rekindling what many perceive here as old Cold War rhetoric. Tamas helped found the No To The Bases initiative last July; in February, his party ushered the Europe for Peace Declaration into being; and on Tuesday, he demonstrated with some 2,000 people during Bush's visit to Prague to protest the proposed missile defense sites.

"Everything was going fine after the Berlin Wall fell," he said, "and now [they're saying] we should be stuck again in the armament race? The perception of the U.S.," he added, a country that formerly championed his people's right to freedom, "has definitely changed among Czechs in the last five years." (A note: After Bush's tummy-ache at the summit on Friday morning kept him out of meetings with China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa, he flew off to Poland to further his calls for a missile base in that country. But not before hearing out Russian Premier Vladimir Putin's proposal to form a joint U.S./Russian anti-missile platform in Azerbaijan instead, an offer that surprisingly perked up his ears.)

If peace campaigning is on an upswing thanks to aggressive U.S. policies, so is economic planning in countries where U.S. and World Bank strategies have failed, or have been absent altogether. In Latin America, for example, a transnational finance initiative known as the Bank of the South has been worked on by the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, a Belgian NGO, along with the Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez, and could go online as an institution as early as this month. Speaking to an audience of about 40 crammed into a stuffy room on the third floor of Rostock's Nikolai Church, the group's spokesperson, Virginie de Romanet, described the mega-cooperative as a Latin American counter to heavy hitters like the World Bank and IMF. The Bank of the South will give grants for social projects, housing, education, and health care in the poorest countries, she said, with the intention of "paying off the social debt the governments have toward their peoples. We talk about financial debts, but not about the social needs that have been abandoned in Latin America since neo-liberal plans have been imposed there [by the North] in the last 20 years."

And then, of course, there were the workshops on the topic of the day, which the U.S. administration has disregarded, to the world's detriment, more than any other: climate. At a discussion called "Mobilization for Global Climate Action," activists, city council leaders, and students from around Europe brainstormed strategies to raise awareness for an international demonstration for climate to be staged December 8 during the talks in Bali. Given the mushrooming in recent years of so many groups focused on the one game in town -- Climate Alliance, Climate Action Network, Stop Climate Chaos, and Climate Forum, to name a few -- the issue confronting these NGOs now is how to "be concrete" with their message.

"We must be explicit in our goals" as groups and as a movement, said Klaus Milke of the research institute Germanwatch. For example, he said, Europe needs to turn its attention toward its less developed members like Poland and Romania, reaching out with something akin to "climate ambassadors" who will help bring those countries up to speed with carbon reductions and renewable technologies.

The climate movement, without question, has become a global driver bringing people and communities together. But some are worried that too much emphasis is going toward organizing protests for climate awareness and accumulating followers, rather than working on the hard-and-fast science and policy aimed at solving the crisis. "The strategy is to get bigger climate demonstrations every year. 'We'll have a demo, we'll make it bigger than the last one.' But I don't see a plan," says James Lloyd of the U.K. student environmental group People and Planet. "I think there needs to be a debate on what strategies for public awareness have the most impact. It's not a campaign we can fuck up -- and I'd hate to think five years on we're still organizing rallies."

The Herd Is Not Enough

Neither rallies nor blockades nor conferences among the world's elites will be enough to save us from the impending climate disaster. It will take, as Greenpeace said so simply from its boat at sea, Action Now. Already next week, a "Midnight Sun Dialogue" in Riksgransen, Sweden, among environment ministers from 20 countries will pick up in the area where Heiligendamm left off: by beginning to lay the groundwork to launch formal climate negotiations in Bali at the end of the year. Clearly, global leaders have heard the call and are now hustling to put one foot after the next in the glacial process toward writing a sound climate policy for the future.

Americans should learn from this week's large-scale, peaceful, and professionally organized turnout against the G8 in Rostock. They should be emboldened by European activists' efforts and should pick up where the blockaders on the Baltic left off. "We got sprayed, we got hit, but they didn't stop us," Klaus told me as he sat with sunburnt face, rolling a cigarette the morning after the all-night blockades. He was one of 6,000 who'd made Camp Rostock his home for the week, and who walked away feeling that "with this political message, we made protest history in Germany. We said we'd block them and we blocked them. The rest is details."

As Tycho Boender, a Dutch activist and founder of the climate awareness group Inside Collective, told me, a lot about his and his country's future is riding on our world leaders' decisions about cutting carbon levels and developing renewables -- namely, in the kind of legislation they write and how quickly it can be made into law and enforced. Some parts of his country already sit six meters below sea level, he said. "I might need a snorkel to sit in my house soon."