Genoa 2001 is the new issue of Internazionale extra. Twenty years after the G8, news, photos and reports from the foreign press of yesterday and today. On newsstands from 7 July.
“Another world is possible!”. From Seattle to Prague, from Nice to Gothenburg to Genoa, the demonstrators repeated this slogan in front of the buildings that housed the most important international summits, where the economic fate of the world was decided at the end of the nineties. They protested against rising inequalities, environmental devastation and the weight of multinationals in the economy and politics. But also against genetically modified organisms and for the cancellation of the debt of poor countries.
Returning to the days of Genoa is also important for those who had not been there at the time or were too young to remember them. This issue of Internazionale Extra collects articles from the foreign press from 1999 to today, with the aim of reconstructing the political climate of the time and recovering the ideas of those who asked for a different globalization. And to tell about an international movement that brought together social centers, NGOs, trade unions, left-wing activists, Catholics, environmentalists, all united in the critique of capitalism and its forms of social, environmental and political exploitation, but divided on the forms of protest. A movement that, among the first, was able to use the potential of the internet to make independent information and as a tool for mobilization and boycott, in a period in which US technology companies were building their dominance on the network, and social networks did not have the current form and diffusion.
Those who in July 2001 were not born or were not old enough to understand what the context was, may not know this part of the story, given that the actions of the black bloc, the indiscriminate repression of the police and the killing of Carlo Giuliani have obscured the rest. And a few months later, with the September 11 attacks in the United States, that other “possible world” seemed to vanish. Priorities have changed and forces have converged in the anti-war movement against George W. Bush’s “war on terror”.
In that summer twenty years ago in Italy a wound opened that has never healed. “That momentary reversal of democratic codes has forever changed the relationship of Italians with political life and social commitment”, explained Lucie Geffroy in Le Monde in 2013. Also for this reason it is essential “to understand how the various conflicting and often incomplete memories of the days of Genoa will go down in history”, as Annalisa Camilli, journalist of Internazionale and author of the podcast on the G8 writes. Lemons.
Today, the increase in inequalities, the worsening of the climate crisis and the explosion of the pandemic confirm that the current system does not work. The negative consequences of unregulated economic globalization are increasingly evident, and those ideas have become even more urgent and necessary.
“The real change compared to then is that popular anger against the power of multinationals is very widespread today”, wrote Naomi Klein, a journalist very close to the movement, in 2019, speaking of the precarious work that in recent years has destroyed any residual trust in companies. But if there is anything that the history of the movements teaches, it is precisely that anger alone is not enough. “We did the mass demonstrations and we proved that we exist,” Klein said in an interview in 2000. “Now we have to identify the central ideas that cross borders and organize ourselves on this basis.” Those who want a different world could start from here.
.