OSLO (dpa) – With astonishing speed, the anti-globalisation movement ATTAC is expanding in the Scandinavian region, with members of the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee becoming the most recent figures, after start-ups in Sweden and Denmark, to endorse the group.
ATTAC, aiming to slow down the globalisation which its members say is advancing at the expense of the world’s poor countries, was launched in 1998 under a campaign by the French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique.“International capital speculation is extremely dangerous,” said Francies Sejersted, a member of Norway’s conservative party Hojre and until 1999 chief juror on the Nobel Peace Prize selection committee. “It has gone too far.”Bishop Gunnar Stalsett, a member of the Nobel committee since 1984, explained his backing for ATTAC by saying that a “global social contract” is his goal.“The gap between rich and poor is getting increasingly wider in Norway, and for that matter, throughout the world,” he said.Like Bishop Stalsett and Sejersted, who is a professor of history, several thousand other Scandinavian citizens are participating in the ATTAC’s initiatives. Two of the chief demands are a worldwide tax on cross-border capital commerce and the write-off of the debts of the world’s poorest countries.When the liberal-leftist Danish newspaper Information issued an invitation for the first meeting in Copenhage with ATTAC’s Paris- based spokesman Bernard Cassen, some 1,200 people showed up.The parley saw a mixture of serious-looking business-suited executives, aging former leftists, and young people urging street action, with everyone expressing their outrage against what to them appears to be an increasingly uninhibited dictatorship of market economics reigning supreme over ethics and social justice.“Being very specific, I want to see that we can force insurance companies to behave ethically when they make their gigantic investment decisions,” one participant from the small Danish city of Roskilde said.The man added that he had never before been politically active, and that it was “somewhat strange” to him that he might for the first time ever follow the calls made by other participants and take to the streets in June. The occasion then would be the European Union summit in the Swedish city of Gothenburg.But it is in no small measure due to the television pictures of the violence by anti-globalisation protesters at world economic parleys in places like Seattle, Prague and Davos that ATTAC has harvested highly sceptical comments in the Scandinavian media and among some parts of the political establishment.On the other hand, those coming forth to express a certain “sympathy” for ATTAC’s goals have been Sweden’s social-democratic premier, Goran Persson, and Norwegian Foreign Minister and head of the social democratic party Thorbjorn Jagland.Joergen Stehen Nielsen, who as editor-in-chief of Information got the ball rolling for the foundation of the Danish section of ATTAC, says it is still an open question as to whether the initial mass turnout proves to be only a temporary stylish trend or will become a stable protest movement.“Totally new structures are evolving with the use of the Internet,” he noted about the anti-globalisation movement. “Nobody knows what will come of it or whether it will be here to stay.”It would appear that after at least ten years of apathy in the leftist camp and what seems like a paralysingly permanent battle against E.U. monetary union, ATTAC now presents the first new form of protest with any potential of success.But critical newspaper editorials are warning that the entire initiative will likely soon be taken over by resurrected old-time Stalinists and fundamentalist E.U. opponents.However, Ralf Pittelkow, a former advisor to Danish Premier Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, sees things differently. He said the enormous show of support for ATTAC is an expression that very many Scandinavians are no longer going to be satisfied with merely endlessly complaining about the lack of morality in politics.
