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Madrid Summit gets Web Input

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By: NMK Created on: January 25th, 2005
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International summits aren't noted for inclusiveness or willingness to tune into ground-level voices. But Bill Thompson and openDemocracy are using the net to make a difference at a forthcoming summit on democracy and terrorism...

International summits aren't noted for their inclusiveness or willingness to listen to the voices of ordinary people. But Bill Thompson and openDemocracy are using the net to make a difference at a forthcoming summit on democracy and terrorism.

By Bill Thompson

[Register and post your own comments on this article below...]

On 11 March over a million people are expected march to Atocha railway station in Madrid to commemorate the 191 people who died in the bomb attacks of 2004. And in the three days before the anniversary the city will be hosting a gathering of current and former world leaders, academics, policy wonks, journalists, NGO representatives and others, there to discuss and agree the Madrid Agenda – a set of principles and practices which democracies can adopt in order to counter terrorism.

The event – or rather ‘The International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security’ as it is properly called – is being organised by the Club de Madrid, a group of former world leaders that includes Vaclav Havel, Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev and our own John Major. Oh, and that Bill Clinton who keeps popping up on TV.

As you would expect, most of the organising is taking place in a few closed committees where powerful people make serious decisions, although they are getting ideas and support from a couple of hundred of the world’s best known experts on terrorism – a good idea, but not what most of us would call full public consultation.

Politics in public

Fortunately the organisers are painfully aware that unless they come up with proposals that can command popular support – ideas that the rest of the world sees as making sense – then they might as well not bother. So a separate public discussion site has been set up by openDemocracy, the UK-based online magazine of world politics and culture, and it too will be feeding ideas into the final agenda.

And in a brave attempt to pull people in at an emotional level as well as just getting them involved in the intellectual debate, people from around the world are being asked to hold their own, small, meetings on March 11 where they can sit down with friends and family to think about how democracies can respond to threats of terror. These will be organised online, so anyone who is interested can register their meeting and write up something about what they discussed afterwards.

I’ve organised some high-profile debates before, including a extended discussion of the ‘third way’ for the Prime Minister’s office, run by the now-defunct online think-tank Nexus in 1997. But this one is a serious challenge, partly because we’re trying to run it simultaneously in English, Spanish and French and partly because some very serious people have agreed to take part and they are going to have to be nurtured.

Limits of online power

The chances of getting former Prime Ministers and Presidents to sit down and post directly to your forum are slim, but it’s pretty likely that we will get at least some of them to provide comments, read what other people say and then respond to the points being made. One of the team here will actually do the work of typing in the words, and it will be posted from an account we control, but with senior people it seems to be the best you can manage.

This worked well for Nexus, when we managed to get some senior policy types to come out of the Number Ten woodwork and engage in the sort of argument that normally happens behind very closed doors – even if the rooms are smoke-free these days.

Of course, we should not confuse a successful online debate, or even a large number of meetings on March 11, with genuine global impact. When Howard Dean looked like he was in with a chance of securing the Democrat nomination for the US Presidential race, one of the arguments in his favour was that he had raised a lot of money from a lot of people. Another was that he had managed to organise large numbers of well-attended meetings around the country.

e-campaign gets real

These were generally believed to indicate deep levels of grass roots support. Sadly, when the Dean campaign met the real world in the Iowa primary, the real world proved to be a lot more comfortable with established modes of political discourse than the e-campaigners had hoped. The problem was that Dean had used the net to do things which, while hard in conventional politics, were easy to do online.

Holding a debate, and even getting enough people interested in what you’re doing to hold their own meeting, is a lot easier to do via the net than in the real world, but fortunately everyone involved in the summit recognises this.

Few international political events of this scale seem willing even to attempt to engage online, with all the risks that come from inviting comments and trying to organise events around the world. It’s a brave move – and it might just ensure that the governments around the world take notice of what gets said in Madrid and elsewhere.

[Register and post your own comments on this article below...]

About The Author:
Copyright of Bill Thompson, online journalist and web consultant. Bill is managing the online debate and meeting site for openDemocracy.net, but is writing here in a personal capacity. The debate site is at http://madrid.opendemocracy.net/ and the main summit site is at http://www.safe-democracy.org/. Sign up for your own meeting on 11 March and help make a difference yourself!

Comments

skimmel said:

Appreciation for B Thompson's Work to Open Up the Madrid Summit Process <p>As one of the participants in the on-line Forum Bill Thompson created to try to open up the process of the Madrid Summit, I wanted to indicate how much I have appreciated his work. I also greatly appreciate the way he underlines in his comments above the rather paradoxical limitations of the fairly traditional way most of the work of the Summit has been conducted through relatively closed group discussions. Bill's comments underline what could be the most fundamental contradiction of the Madrid Summit: the distance between its stated objective of creating a more democratic framework for responding to contemporary threats to democracy, and its fairly closed and undemocratic process focused around the work of the same experts and former state leaders who usually determine the policymaking process. I will be interested in what OpenDemocracy has to say in its post-Summit evaluation of what was democratic about the Madrid Summit-- <br/> <br/>Unfortunately, if the only significant element of &quot;openness&quot; in the Madrid Summit process is the on-line Forum that OpenDemocracy has created, The Forum may simply be covering over the degree to which this Summit is reproducing the same old closed and relatively undemocratic policymaking structures and agendas. I hope, of course, the Framework of the final Summit Agenda suggests otherwise. But the Summit process, at least from the perspective of an outside observer, does not so far suggest too much reason for optimism. <br/> <br/>If the Agenda produced by the Summit ends up merely repeating much of the already existing liberal Agenda of experts and state policymakers for responding to terrorism, I hope OpenDemocracy will not hold back its critique of the Agenda and the relatively closed process that created it, simply because it has been instrumental in providing the Forum as a supplement to the working group process. We know, after all, that too often public comment, as in a newspaper's editorial column, is &quot;allowed&quot; to happen so that people will feel they have a place to &quot;voice their opinion&quot; about what goes on beyond their sphere of influence. But democracy is not simply about voicing opinions on the periphery of a policymaking process controlled by others. Substantial democracy is about taking part in the policymaking process--helping to make policy, establish agendas, and the frameworks for implementing them. <br/> <br/>If OpenDemocracy wants to make sure its involvement with the Madrid Summit does not serve merely to cover over the serious democratic shortfalls within the micropolitics of the Summit, and the potential contradictions existing between the stated objectives of the Summit and its own political process, I hope OpenDemocracy will devote considerable attention to critical discussion of the Madrid Agenda, the micropolitical process that produced it, and the extent to which the creation of the on-line Forum did or did not &quot;make any difference&quot; to what went on within the working groups, or to how the Madrid Agenda was framed and written. Did the presence of the on-line Forum exert any influence on the Madrid Process, or was it merely window-dressing, a space for those not materially involved in the process to voice opinions from the sidelines? <br/> <br/>Whatever the results of the Madrid Summit, Bill Thompson and OpenDemocracy have provided a valuable example of the way such on-line forums can work to challenge future international summits to be more open to real democratic interchange. But in order to build on this experiment, I hope the members of OpenDemocracy involved in the Summit will take up the democratic challenge of being anthropological participant observers of the micropolitics of the process. What can we learn from what did and did not happen at this Summit to make future international policymaking Summits more truly democratic in their process as well as their results? <br/> <br/>And we can learn much simply by examining the limits of the discussion that developed on the Madrid Forum site. If analyzed, the Archive of the Forum discussion will yield insights for what can be done better next time to open up the policymaking process that occurs at this kind of Summit. Briefly stated, this Forum space seemed to be structured more to offer space for those who were clearly outside the activity of the working groups, to &quot;voice&quot; their opinions. Insofar as the Forum space was added onto the Summit process as a kind of secondary appendage, rather than incorporated into the fundamental process of the Summit working groups, the Forum may have worked to enforce, rather than break down, the division betwen those on the outside of the working group process (civil society), and those on the inside (the experts and the state policymakers). Thus, ironically, even in trying to open up the Summit to more democratic voices, the structuring of the Forum site as primarily a space for voicing opinions rather than interacting directly with members of the working groups, may have enforced the traditional divisions between the people &quot;voicing&quot; their opinions about issues from the periphery of the policymaking space, while the actual work of policymaking went on as usual beyond the reach and active involvement of the people within the working groups. <br/> <br/>The rather perfunctory reports posted in mid-February on the Forum by some of the working groups, only further underlined the ways in which the working groups seemed to be carrying on their discussions just as they would have without the existence of the Forum. For all these reasons, I would be especially interested in the post-mortem reflections of Bill Thompson and other members of OpenDemocracy who participated in the Summit, on what they thought worked well and not so well in both the Forum and the interactions between the Forum space and the space of the working groups. <br/> <br/>Whatever the limitations of the process and results of this particular Summit, OpenDemocracy's work to create this Forum has opened up a wonderful space for democratic experimentation that can lead to the creation of more truly democratic policymaking Summits of the future. And for the work of Bill Thompson in opening up this space of democratic experimentation--a space open to the future of democracy--I for one am grateful. <br/></p>

mariagonzalez said:

Meet on March 11 - Make a Difference <p>On March 11 2004 ten bombs exploded on four commuter trains in Madrid, killing nearly two hundred people and injuring thousands more. In the days that followed the world was inspired by the people of Spain as millions took to the streets, refusing to be silenced by terror.&lt;br&gt; <br/>A year on this spirit of resistance is still alive. <br/>From the Ivory Coast to Ireland, India to Iran, people will be Meeting on March 11 to remember victims of terrorism from around the world, and think about ways in which things can be different in future. <br/>Join them! <br/>Take time out on March 11. Sit down with friends, colleagues, or family. <br/>Eat lunch or supper, and while you do: <br/>Remember the many victims of terrorism around the world <br/>Reflect on how we can deal with this threat to our way of life <br/>Respond to the Madrid Agenda, a set of guidelines drawn up by respected international scholars and senior politicians, aimed at shaping democratic responses to terrorism. <br/>After your meeting, make your thoughts count by taking a few minutes to share your ideas and conclusions with us and the rest of the world. <br/>That way we can let the political leaders know what the people think. <br/>Find out more and register your meeting at: &lt;http://meetings.safe-democracy.org/meet/&gt; <br/>And help us get the message out by sending this email on to your friends and colleagues. <br/>Thank you <br/>The Meetings on March 11 are being organised by openDemocracy.net, the online magazine of global politics and culture, in support of the Madrid Agenda and the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security. The Summit is organised by the Club de Madrid and will take place in Madrid, March 8-10 2005. See &lt;http://www.safe-democracy.org/&gt; for details. <br/></p>

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