arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

Hi, i'd like to know how is it going in bruxelles!
I read that on Thursday the demos were 100.000, and on Fryday 25.000.
Primarly i thought it was not so bad, but now i'm thinking about italian numbers and i'm getting sad...
It's not about Genoa, it's the entire "demostration attitude" of many UE countries... i think it's really bad if people have no attitude of going down the streets to claim their rights.
What i ask you is:
Did Belgium people (but even UK or German people) got this "attitude" once, or not? Did they lose it? Maybe they never had it in the "latin europe way", never in the history...

Someone can answer me?

ps
i do apologize for my bad english!

I think one of the main reasons why there were so many more people in Genoa is because G8 attrackts more hatred than D14.
And most of the demonstrants that were there this thursday were 'lemmings' anyways. They got free for the day from work and a free bus, so they took that opportunity to go to Brussels and drink beer whilst marching through town.

To answer your question: it's going sort of all right in Brussels (you read the site, so you know a lot already).

Indeed, we don't seem to have 200,000 people in the streets... But it is freezing cold here right now: minus 3 to 6 all day, so it's not as nice as demo'ing in Italy...

But let me start with something positive: for the first time in a long, long, long time different kinds of organisations were able to come together with the sole purpose to mobilise together. That's the D14 coordination. The success of D14 in Brussels was a catalysor for the creation of D14 groups all over Belgium and even abroad. All those D14 coordinations included an extremely varied mixture of small left action groups, trade unions, NGOs, citizen's organisations. They all had one reason to exist: the platform text you can find on http://www.d14.be and the will to mobilise for a better Europe. As such it is positive that so many different people and groups were able to agree on the fact that together it is better than alone. Of course, there were internal discussions -- a lot of them. And of course some were there to have their name on flyers. But the overall impression is that all over the country D14 allowed people who traditionally were considering each other at best as competitors and else as ennemies to meet.

Next to the cold, a reason why there weren't as many people in the streets as in Italy, is that the perception of our government in the general population is not as bad as is perception of Berlusconi and co. in Italy. This makes people more confident in politics. That also makes it harder to mobilise for a "political matter"...

Another point is that the trade unions are too linked with politics and the corporations, meaning that the people at the top do not want to loose their nice positions and only mobilise symbolically -- just enough to keep the people at the base happy. But now, there seems to be an increasing number of people at the base who seem to understand that it is time to do more than "stupidly march in a well-organised protest"...

Next, the message from the "anti-globalists" is being recuperated by the traditional political parties, making it harder for us to explain to the general public what we're standing for and how we differ from the established politics.

And a last point is that some NGOs are monopolising the dialog with the authorities. They traditionally have a very strong base, and are very influential: if they start mobilising, they can get a lot of people in the streets. This time, they waited very long before starting to mobilise and organise actions for the EU-summit (most of them seemed to think that nice advertisements were enough... This explains why only a minority of the protestors today were with an NGO). NGOs don't want to loose their perceived position as strong lobby groups (even though they don't seem as strong as they pretend they are... They just reaffirm government positions...

I could go on for hours and hours giving you small but valid reasons why people are less numerous to protest in Belgium, but I guess the discussion that may start here will give you even more valid reasons.

There is still another reason why there were less youth at Brussels than at Genoa: all school going youth has to study for their exams at this moment, while in July they all had holyday.