Background

There have always been opponents of openness and liberalisation. For a very long time they were institutionalised in the governments behind the iron curtain, and in their supporter organisations in the West. After the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, the opponents of open markets and open societies were silent for a while. Some even thought that they were gone forever.

But along with the growing awareness that the world was rapidly changing in a liberal way, the spread of the Internet, and a number of reforms of the global institutions for free trade, came a growing opposition to these changes. A new movement arose which was based on the belief that things were not going in the right direction. It didn't seem to care that people benefited from the changes, that more people prospered, and that the liberalisation of markets went hand in hand with democratic reforms. The movement was just dead against globalisation.

The first time the movement attracted major international media attention was in 1999 in Seattle, where a meeting with the World Trade Organisation became the focus for major demonstrations. Some just wanted to demonstrate peacefully, others tried to stop the meeting, still others used their position as lobby groups to change the outcome of the meeting. But they had all one thing in common they were opposed to open borders for people, goods and ideas.

The amoebic movement from Seattle soon found ways to take other forms. One of the attempts that have attracted most media attention, and whose founding actually pre-dates Seattle, is ATTAC. It was founded in December 1998 in France, its name being a French abbreviation for "International movement for democratic control of financial markets and their institutions". That the name bears a great resemblance to "attack" and thus has appealed to more violent parts of the anti-globalisation movement is of course no coincidence. ATTAC deserves a little extra attention for two reasons. To start with, they have actually adopted a program, which takes away some of the vagueness of the anti-globalisation movement. To read their side of the story, their program can be found at www.attac.org

Secondly, the ATTAC movement and its Swedish branch made an appeal which inspired a number of Swedish believers in globalisation to launch a campaign and make an appeal for an open society, which in its turn has been the major source of inspiration for this webpage.

Click here for an English version of the appeal!