Globalization and Political Change in the
Women’s Movement: The Politics of Scale
and Political Empowerment in the World
March of Women n
Pascale Dufour, Universite´ de Montre´al
Isabelle Giraud, Universite´ de Gene`ve
Objective. The objective of the article is to show that in order to understand the
ongoing transnational mobilizations of the European wing of the World March of
Women (WMW) between 2000 and 2006 we also need to consider the politics of
scale of the transnational social movements’ mobilizations. The WMW is a transnational collective action that integrates women from grassroots organizations, labor
unions, and leftist political parties in over 150 countries (approximately 6,000
groups) into a process of transnationalization of solidarities. Method. The method
is based on the analysis of internal documents of the international and European
wings of the movement, interviews with key actors and militants, and direct observations over the years 1998–2005. Results. The results are twofold: we investigate the shift in the politics of scale of the movement, from using the same scale as
the political authorities with which they interact to the creation of its own scales of
action (first part); we focus on the articulation of different scales of protest, showing
how, by constructing networks and coalitions, actions, and demands under the
WMW umbrella, grassroots women’s groups are becoming empowered and are
regaining political power over the definition, dissemination, and resolution of gender issues (second part). Conclusion. The conclusion is that this specific process of
empowerment helps to explain why feminist activists pursue transnationalization
actions despite all the material, ideological, and relational difficulties that accompany such actions.
In recent years, both in the ‘‘real world of politics’’ and in the literature of
political sociology, a great deal of attention has gone to transnational social
movements that are challenging aspects of the globalization of politics
(Rucht, 2003). One example of such a movement operating across national
n
Direct correspondence to Pascale Dufour, Département de science politique—Université
de Montréal, C.P 6128, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal (Qc), H3C 3J7, Canada hpascale.
[email protected]. I will share any information necessary for others to replicate the
study. We thank Renaud Goyer, research assistant on this project, and anonymous reviewers
whose comments greatly improved the argument. This article would not exist without the
help of Jane Jenson to whom we are deeply grateful. Finally, the research has been sustained
by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, Volume 88, Number 5, December 2007
r 2007 by the Southwestern Social Science Association
Globalization and Political Change in the Women’s Movement
1153
borders is the World March of Women (WMW), which has been active
since 1998. It organizes transnational relations of solidarity among women
around the globe. In this article we use the example of the WMW to raise
theoretical questions as well as to provide an empirical analysis of ongoing
mobilizations by transnational social movements. On the face of it, the
WMW might not seem to be a good example of such a movement. Its name
suggests that it was a one-time event, a global march organized on October
17, 2000. However, our analysis documents in detail that the WMW has
had a continuous life, in multiple locations—from local to global—for
almost a decade.
Much of the available literature focuses on transnational movements as a
succession of events, ignoring the life of the movement between its major
public manifestations. Therefore, to understand the continuous and varied
life of the WMW, we need to make some adjustments to this literature.
Focusing on the European wing of the WMW, we propose to do so by
taking both place and scale clearly into account.
The Literature on Transnational Social Movements—Place and Scale
The number of articles and books analyzing transnational social movements has grown significantly in the last decade. Although this literature
proposes various explanations of why and how transnationalization of collective action occurs, attention to transnational movements has allowed
researchers to move beyond long-standing theoretical and methodological
divisions as well as to produce increasingly comprehensive understandings of
the empirical cases, including creating rich data sets and building bridges
among different theoretical traditions (e.g., Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Bandy
and Smith, 2004; Della Porta and Tarrow, 2005; Tarrow and McAdam,
2005; Della Porta et al., 2006). Donatella Della Porta and her co-authors’
(2006) work is among the most successful in this regard. These authors
propose a detailed analysis of two ‘‘global events,’’ the G8 protest in Genoa
in July 2001 and the first European Social Forum in Florence in 2002. On
the basis of their in-depth analysis of these two events, they conclude that
a global social movement exists. It is a chain of events, rather than a continuous set of practices, which provides the evidence for the existence of a
movement. However, this way of analyzing a movement provides little information about the movement between these two events, in other places
and perhaps at other scales. Therefore, our analysis will focus more on the
life of the WMW between the major public events. To do so we need to take
seriously two elements of the WMW’s life, that is, place and scale.
In Della Porta et al. (2006), place is not treated as pertinent to the
analysis. The fact that these two events occurred in Italy is considered
irrelevant; it is only an element of context. Yet the participation in the events
(more Italians than if held elsewhere) (Della Porta et al., 2006:23–24) and
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Social Science Quarterly
the social and political dynamics of the events (e.g., one activist was killed by
Italian force in Genoa, a result that can be linked to the dynamics of
repression in the Italian political context) (Della Porta et al., 2006:150–95),
all point to the relevance of place for the analysis and, as we claim here, for
any analysis of transnationalization of solidarities.
This literature on transnational social movements presents a second important concept. For several authors, global protest is primarily the result of
‘‘shifting scales’’ of protest, with national or local collective actors redirecting
their strategies toward another or other levels of governance, such as the
European Union or international institutions (Della Porta and Tarrow,
2005:7). By changing the focus of their claims making, movement organizations may open opportunities to build new networks and coalitions. For
example, availability of political opportunities at the international level has
influenced the development of transnational nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) and facilitated the dissemination of ideas and practices from one
country to another (Della Porta and Tarrow, 2005:2), thus contributing,
sometimes, to the convergence of actors from many countries around claims
directed both to international institutions or to their own local governments.
Others, for example, describe the ways the possibility of shifting the focus of
claims making toward international organizations can constitute a new opportunity structure for local or national social movements that are blocked at
the national level (see, e.g., Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Jenson and Papillon,
2000). This process is sometimes termed a ‘‘boomerang effect,’’ in which
transnationalization can become a resource for mobilization, and global
actions thereby can have positive repercussions at the local level (Keck and
Sikkink, 1998).
The notion of ‘‘shifting scale’’ used in this literature is too limited. In
these works, shifting scale only means changing the target of protest, a
process better described as changing the level of protest, from the national
government to an international organization, for example. Just as with the
treatment of place, scale is considered to be a given rather than a social
construction.
Human and political geography have another way of understanding both
place and scale. They assert that actions take place in spaces that are not
simply given but are constructed out of social relations and social practices
(Miller, 2000:7–14). One of the spatial properties of social relations is scale,
another is place. As Masson (2006a:139) notes, ‘‘social relations are not only
deployed ‘in’ space; the different economic and political processes that organize social relations and social life extend and stretch over different (and
variable) expanses of space. The extent of such stretching is their scale.’’ In
this perspective, the scale of a collective action is its scope. It is the complex
result of interactions within social movements and interactions with
their environment, including institutions. An example might help here. The
city of Porto Alegre, Brazil is well known for its participatory budget
(PB) experiments (Gret and Sintomer, 2002). The social movement that
Globalization and Political Change in the Women’s Movement
1155
supports the PB and struggles for its implementation (Fedozzi, 2000:167)
has extended the scope of its actions from the local government to the global
scene via active participation in the process of the World Social Forum, first
held in Porto Alegre in 2001. Such participatory practices have been promoted and taken up by many within the movements for global social justice
(Gaiger, 2003). The scale of actions has been stretched in the process. In this
story, place also matters because these actions were promoted by a local
social movement that arose in and out of the concrete experience of this city
in southern Brazil (Baierle, 1998) and that developed specific links with left
parties after the democratization process (Avritzer, 2005). It is unlikely that
without this specific context the commitment to such practices would have
emerged.
These are the concepts with which we will analyze the WMW. We define
place as the concrete locus of collective action, while scale is the scope of the
action, ranging from the individual to the global. From this perspective, an
action that takes place locally could have a global scope, even if it is the local
government that is the target. And, of course, governments—of whatever
level—are not the only targets of protest; targets may also be nongovernmental institutions. Transnationalization does not occur simply when the
level of protest changes; it is also necessary to consider the ‘‘scalar practices’’
by which movements’ actions produce their scope. Some of this may be the
result of strategic choice while other actions may be unintended consequences of earlier action or the actions of others.1
In this article we analyze the politics of place and scale of the World
March of Women. In the first section, we show that between 1998 and 2005
a shift in the politics of scale of the WMW occurred. It went from a straightforward institutional understanding of ‘‘levels of action’’ to constructing its
own scale, with greater autonomy from institutions and traditional sources
of authority. In the second part, we explore how different scales of protest
are interrelated. We show that by constructing the WMW as an umbrella
for networks and coalitions, as well as for actions and demands, grassroots
women’s groups are being empowered and regaining political power over
the definition of gender issues and their dissemination in social movements
that are not part of the WMW. This process of empowerment helps explain
why feminist activists pursue transnationalization despite meager policy
gains and notwithstanding the material, ideological, and relational difficulties that accompany such collective actions.
We analyze the European wing of the WMW between 2000 and 2005,
focusing on the process of organizing, constructing demands, and deciding
on actions. We have made extensive use of the documents produced by the
WMW, both of the March itself and the national coordinating bodies, many
1
This conceptualization follows the work of, for example, Masson (2006a, 2006b), Conway (2004, 2005), and Smith and Grundy (2005).
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of which were available online.2 We conducted two separate field studies.
One consisted of interviews undertaken during the March on October 14,
2000 in Montreal as well as six interviews with Quebec women working at
the international level. The second field study took place in Europe, where
we interviewed 10 European leaders, mainly in French-speaking countries
(France, Belgium, and Switzerland) between 2000 and 2006. We also attended and observed the proceedings of the Women’s Assembly during the
European Social Forum held in Paris, November 12–16, 2003, and conducted in-the-street interviews during the March held in Marseilles on May
28 and 29, 2005.
Politics of Place and Scale of the World March of Women
In its transnational collective action, the World March of Women involves activists from approximately 6,000 groups, ranging from grassroots
women’s organizations to labor unions and leftist political parties, in over
150 countries. It is a global network that organizes worldwide mobilizations
every five or six years. After two years of preparation, a call for an event
termed the World March of Women was launched simultaneously in more
than 50 countries on March 8, 2000. Throughout that year, demonstrations
then took place in more than 150 countries to protest poverty and violence
against women. This series of mobilizations ended on October 17, 2000 in
front of the U.N. headquarters in New York, where a delegation of 200
marchers representing women from around the world presented the Advocacy Guide to Women’s World Demands. In 2005, another series of mobilizations was organized. It was a process relaying the Women’s Global Charter
for Humanity around the world. This document was produced by the International Secretariat of the March in cooperation with national coordinating bodies and grassroots organizations. The Charter traveled around the
five continents throughout 2005, beginning in Brazil on March 8, International Women’s Day, and arriving on October 17, International Day for
the Eradication of Poverty, at Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Each time the
Charter crossed a border, mobilizations were organized by grassroots women’s groups in that area.
The internal organization of the March is very decentralized; in this article
we focus only on Europe. The formation of a European coordinating body
of the World March of Women took place in October 1998 at the international meeting held in Montreal as part of the preparation of the first
global event. Initially, it included French, Swiss, and Belgian representatives,
from the francophone regions of the latter two countries. A World March
European Platform, developed by these francophone feminists, was soon
2
The data reported in this article are from documents obtained through 2005. The website
is still active, and can be consulted at hhttp://www.worldmarchofwomen.org/en/i.
Globalization and Political Change in the Women’s Movement
1157
endorsed by German and Spanish activists (National Guide, 2001). These
five had the largest delegations at the Europe-wide march held in Brussels on
October 14, 2000, which was also attended by representatives from Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece, and the Basque country. By
2005, the WMW’s European Coordination covered 42 countries representing 1,300 groups hhttp://www.marchemondiale.org/structure/cn-groupes/
europe/fr/i.3 Analysis of the ways mobilizations were built in 2000 and then
2005 reveals a shift from an acceptance of predetermined institutional
scales of mobilization (local, national, European, continental) to the effort to
define alternative scales of actions, ones that better represented the WMW’s
own goals.
An Institutional Understanding of the Politics of Place and Scale
The World March of Women emerged from the relative success of a kind
of collective action used in 1995 by Quebec women when they organized a
March Against Poverty. Over a period of 10 days in June, 800 Quebec
women active in labor unions, women’s groups, and community groups
walked from Montreal to Quebec City to highlight the worsening of women’s poverty under neoliberal politics and to present nine demands (Minguy,
1996). Approximately 20,000 demonstrators welcomed the marchers at
their arrival in Quebec City and the march is credited with convincing the
government of Quebec to act on several of its demands, including pay
equity, minimum wages, social infrastructures, and support for students
hhttp://www.ffq.qc.ca/marchequebec/actions/gains.htmli. However, the
government’s response did not meet all the demands or provide the
hoped-for spending levels (Graefe, 2005). The government at the time—
formed by a nationalist party traditionally allied with feminists—cited constraints imposed by Canadian federalism and global capitalism to rationalize
limits on spending (Bouchard, 1996). Faced with this assertion that women’s poverty was primarily due to the Canadian institutional structures and
the constraints imposed by pan-American and international levels of governance, and therefore was not the responsibility of political authorities in
Quebec, feminist activists began to consider expanding their demands to
other institutional levels (Giraud, 2001; de Sève and Maillé, 2004).
Soon after the Quebec march, the Fourth World Conference on Women,
organized by the United Nations, was held in Beijing in September 1995.
3
These figures were obtained by counting the number of countries and the groups for each
country. Of the 51 countries listed on the WMW website in 2005, nine listed no participating group. Of the 42 countries or regions listing participating groups, 20 countries were
not active during the 2005 mobilizations around the Charter. These included Germany (35
groups), Croatia (14 groups), and Great Britain (26 groups). The number of groups varied
widely. Belgium and France had the most (210 each), followed by the Netherlands (173),
Spain (150), Italy (54), and Galicia (40).
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The NGO Forum, which took place in parallel to the official U.N. Conference, gave Quebec women’s groups an opportunity to share the experience of their march, recount the success of the mobilization, and tell of
the commitments the government had been pushed into making. Their
story greatly appealed to the participants from countries of both the South
and the North, most of whom were facing governments that were losing
interest in their economic demands (Naples and Desai, 2002). The Beijing
World Conference also resulted in major commitments by participating
governments and raised hopes for mainstreaming gender politics and
achieving equality results (Marques-Pereira, 2003).
At and after Beijing, the idea took hold of building a worldwide network
of women that would enable them to make collective representations to
international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
and the World Bank, which were perceived as being responsible for many of
the decisions that directly affected women’s daily life (Newsletter, 1999). In
the first platform of the World March, written in 1998 in Montreal, the
IMF and the World Bank, as well as the United Nations, were identified as
targets of global mobilization (Newsletter, 1999). In the Advocacy Guide to
Women’s World Demands, presented to the United Nations at the end of the
2000, the World Bank and the IMF were again called on to improve their
policies toward women. From these initial practices we observe that women
activists were adopting the politics of scale that characterized the political
discourses of national political authorities and that assigned to international
institutions the responsibility for issues defined as global, such as trade
relationships and their impacts in terms of poverty.
This specific understanding of who was the target and responsible for
ensuring women’s well-being and equality directed the WMW’s actions
toward institutions in which women’s and gender issues played a very minor
role and in which the women’s movement had no direct access to decisionmaking processes.
European women followed this pattern as well. They also presented their
demands directly to European and international institutions. The European
March was launched on March 8, 2000 in Geneva, where a delegation was
invited by the United Nations to celebrate International Women’s Day. The
march of women from almost 20 European countries halted in front of the
office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to demand asylum
rights for women who were victims of rape, violence, and persecution, and
then in front of the headquarters of the World Trade Organization (Newsletter, 2000). On October 14, Anna Diamantopoulou, the European Commissioner in charge of promoting gender equality, received a WMW
delegation during the European March in Brussels.
The marchers also pressed their own governments to address problems,
selecting the level that they thought had responsibility. Sometimes, this was
national governments. In both Switzerland and Belgium, marchers submitted a set of demands to the federal government for measures to ‘‘fight against
Globalization and Political Change in the Women’s Movement
1159
violence and poverty’’ (interview with Maria Casares, Geneva, April 3, 2006
and with Poupette Choque, Brussels, March 2, 2006). Sometimes, marchers
called on regional institutions to act because these institutions had policy
responsibility for preventing violence and poverty. In France, for example, a
delegation of the Amies de la Marche (Friends of the March) in Marseilles
submitted a regional platform to the regional council of Provence-Alpes-Côte
d’Azur (interview with Judith Martin-Razzi, Marseilles, August 30, 2004).
In spite of the enormous amount of work involved, these mobilizations
produced only meager results. Despite demands to do otherwise, the United
Nations continued to give a prominent role to religious organizations opposed to women’s rights in various commissions that concern them (Druelle, 1999). In Europe, the impact of actions directly targeted at political
institutions was disappointing. For example, the response of the European
Union Commissioner to hearing a long list of demands was to mention only
a draft of a European directive against workplace discrimination based on
gender, age, or sexual orientation; other issues, such as poverty and violence,
were ignored (Rojtman, 2000). The limited media coverage of the event and
the limited range of political results were also discouraging.
In 2000, as we have seen, the March’s feminist activists chose to confront
directly each of the representative institutions, replicating political authorities’ definitions of the relevant scale. Although the disappointment generated by the responses of states and international institutions did not
discourage the practice of transnationalization of solidarities, it did lead to
questions about the rules of access to these institutions, their male-dominated composition, and their lack of democratic transparency (participant
observation, European Assembly for the Rights of Women, Workshop on
Women and Power, Bobigny, November 12, 2003; see hhttp://
www.ffq.qc.ca/marche2000/en/TractEnglishi). Ultimately, however, the
fact that the mobilizations of 2000 had led to a huge solidarity movement,
encompassing more than 6,000 groups all over the world, meant that for the
women involved the success of the movement lay much more in the practice
of transnationalization of solidarities itself than in any concrete policy gains
the mobilizations might have generated (Newsletter, 2001). In 2001, international delegates of the WMW decided, therefore, to continue the transnational movement and to strengthen it by reinforcing advocacy work and
by launching new mobilizations for 2005 (Newsletter, 2001).
The WMW Identifies its Own Politics of Place and Scale
The WMW’s shift away from targeting formal international and supranational institutions is clear when we consider the specific articulation of
places (locus of actions) and scales (scopes of actions) pursued by European
activists between 2001 and 2006. After deciding to continue the adventure
of the March in 2001, decisions about strategies and action were increasingly
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taken independently of any reference to a traditional institutional referent.
Instead, the WMW international leaders focused on the symbolic dimensions of their actions, deciding to launch the Global Charter for Humanity to
guide their worldwide actions in 2005 (Newsletter, 2003a). Whereas the
culmination of the 2000 March was presentation of document to the United
Nations in New York, the goal of 2005 action was simply the widespread
circulation of the Charter itself. In addition, since 2001 the WMW has been
a very active participant in the annual World Social Forum (WSF) initiative,
initiated in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The WSF involves activists from
a variety of backgrounds—environmental, humanitarian, unions, peace,
women, and so—and from all over the world, gathering for a few days to
share knowledge and practices and to build networks. The WMW has been
a key actor in the WSF since its inception, and the March has devoted
considerable energy and resources in order to be considered a full partner by
the other social movements involved (Newsletter, 2003b).
In some cases, where political institutions were already engaged in a dialogue with the WMW, the places of mobilization corresponded to those
where political authorities were based and the scale of protest continued to
be tied to a level of government. In Belgium, for example, interactions with
the national authorities happened much more regularly between 2000 and
2005 than they had previously, in part because for the first time in this
federal state, where Walloon and Flemish women’s groups have traditionally
acted separately, the WMW led to the establishment of a joint coordinating
body. In this context, Brussels became the favorite place for mobilizations,
and women created and used the federal scale and the national capital as the
place relevant for gender-related demands. For example, when the WMW
coordinating body convened an International Parliament of Women in
Brussels on March 2, 2002 to debate the issues of violence and poverty, the
meeting was held in Belgium’s federal parliament, the Chambre des
représentants (Monde selon les femmes, 2002). Among other things, the
participants of the International Parliament of Women have been able to
build on existing claims (supported by other women groups as well) and
reiterate the need to secure the incorporation of the principle of gender
equality into the Belgian Constitution (Article 10), a requirement for the
representation of women in all regional legislative bodies (Article 11), legislation on wage parity, and the establishment of the Institut de l’égalité
hommes/femmes (Institute of Men/Women Equality) in 2002. Thus,
building on previous mobilizations of Belgian women, the Belgium WMW
has helped gained a new institution to engage with at the federal level, which
also became, for their further mobilizations, a relevant scale of action.
In many cases, however, the focus on European institutions was no longer
concentrated in the traditional locales, that is, Brussels and Strasbourg. In
May 2004, the WMW European meeting, occurring just before the elections to the European Parliament, took place in Vigo in Galicia. The
WMM’s European Coordination and its Galician branch organized a march
Globalization and Political Change in the Women’s Movement
1161
under the theme ‘‘Europe for All Women—Different, yes! Unequal, no!’’
The choice of Vigo, located at the western extremity of the Iberian Peninsula, meant that the event would be attended mainly by Spanish and
Portuguese women. Despite this, the event attracted 20,000 women and was
considered a success by the women involved in the March, thanks to a considerable communications effort in Spanish and local media (World March
of Women, 2004:19). With the choice of Vigo as the site of a mobilization
meant for all Europe, feminist activists created an autonomous scale of
action, even though Galacia held only a minor position in the hierarchy of
Spanish and European institutions. From our perspective, this meeting and
the demonstration are indicative of the March’s goal to create a politics of
scale different from that preferred by traditional political authorities.
Another example of rescaling occurred during the relay organized for the
Women’s Global Charter as it traveled around the globe as part of the second
series of demonstrations organized worldwide by the WMW. Again, the
Coordination did not choose a European capital to hold its European
meeting. On May 28 and 29, 2005, women from European countries converged in Marseilles. The city was chosen for several reasons: the level of
activism of local women’s groups, especially Les Amies de la Marche; their
position in the local power structure, which meant they could obtain funding from institutions such as the regional and local governments; and their
good relations with other activists in unions, political parties, and the Global
Justice movement (World March of Women, 2004). Symbolically, the activists also chose to emphasize the Mediterranean as the relevant space (scale
and place). Approximately 50 women from Tunisia, Morocco, and, especially, Algeria attended this meeting of Europeans (Leclerc, 2005). Although
the Marseilles meeting was distant from the institutions located in Brussels
and Strasbourg, the demands made at the end of the meeting centered on
the European Constitution, which was the focus of public attention across
the European Union at the time. The European Coordination denounced
the fact that women and gender issues were virtually absent from the proposed Constitutional Treaty and reaffirmed the need to create equal political, social, and economic conditions for all European women (European
Women Assembly, 2005).
Finally, there was a third type of rescaling that created new relationships
between national groups. This occurred, for example, with the organization
of joint activities by the Greek and Turkish coordinating bodies of the
March in Thessalonica, a symbolic city where great battles between Greeks
and Turks had taken place in past centuries. These joint activities made it
possible to develop a Balkan network of the WMW and to make symbolic
gestures toward peace, as explained in the testimony of a Greek coordinator
posted on the WMW website.
We closed the meeting with antinationalistic speeches and speeches on
women’s rights, highlighting the role that the solidarity of women can play
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in building bridges between our two peoples, who have been enemies for so
long in a region traumatized by nationalist wars, population ‘‘exchanges’’
and ethnic cleansing. We also urged our respective countries to adopt a
policy of disarmament. . . . Never before had the voices of Turkish and
Greek women demonstrating together been heard in the streets of this great
city [Salonica]. (Mitralias, 2005, our translation)
To conclude, the WMW politics of scale that emerged between 2001 and
2006 became progressively independent of the scale used by political authorities to designate which institutions and actors were concerned with women
affairs. Women of the WMW chose to occupy places that were not always
recognized as pertinent by these authorities and to construct their own scale,
bridging long-time divides and creating new spaces. This process was not only
the result of the institutional rejection of their demands in 2000, but also a
reflection of their focus on solidarity building as an experience of political
empowerment. In the next section we examine in greater detail the issue of the
relationships among different scales of action and the process of empowerment of grassroots activists that is associated with it.
Transnationalization and the Empowerment of Grassroots Activists
The feelings of solidarity generated by the WMW mobilizations in 2000
were linked to the capacity of the movement to reach consensus on fundamental demands around the globe. Thanks to their experience within the
WMW, grassroots groups that belonged to the March network were involved in a political dynamic of empowerment—in organizational terms
because new networks of solidarity were created; in terms of types of action
because these groups were part of street demonstrations and popular education strategies; and in terms of the discourses produced because the
groups were directly involved in the process of making demands at multiple
scales. This consensus cannot be divorced from issues of place and scale. As
Conway has argued, specific meeting places give host groups the power to
shape the demands and decisions of the movement (Conway, 2005:12). As a
result, the configuration of power among actors at one place will shape the
scope of the movement and influence what will happen at other scales of
action. After identifying how place, power, and scale building were interrelated in the actions of the WMW’s European Coordination between 2000
and 2006, we show how the process of transnationalization of solidarities
was also a source of empowerment for grassroots organizations.
Place, Power Relations, and Scale Building
The daily production of transnationalization of solidarities represents financial and political challenges that begin with the organization of transnational meetings in specific places. In the case of the WMW, two kinds of
Globalization and Political Change in the Women’s Movement
1163
places must be distinguished: places that were selected directly by the international leaders of the WMW and places that provided an opportunity
for meeting, such as the World Social Forum or the European Social Forum.
In the case of meetings of the WMW, the multiplicity of feminist movements around the world and the diversity of their analyses and demands
were a source of potential division. In the cases where opportunities for
meetings outside the March were seized, it was the integration of the WMW
and of women’s and gender perspectives in social forums that were the main
battles. In both cases, the ability to reach a global consensus depended on
having reached consensus during earlier meetings and on the specific balance
of power among actors that prevailed during the meeting.
At the first international meeting of the World March in Montreal in
1998, approximately 200 delegates debated for two days over whether to
build and what to include in the first world platform of demands. During
the negotiation process, delegates from the North conceded two major
points with regard to their own feminist convictions. Abortion did not
appear in the WMW’s international platform and sexual freedom was
treated as optional. In an interview for this study, Susie Rojtman, one of the
French delegates, expressed her disagreement and reported that one of the
leaders of the Quebec women’s movement, Françoise David (who was also
the leader of the WMW at that time), had acknowledged her inability to
negotiate the issue of abortion in the global network (interview with Susie
Rojtman, Paris, July 6, 2000). The balance of power in Montreal did not
favor including abortion rights in the platform, for two main reasons. First,
clear opposition came from one of the main financial supporters of the
Montreal meeting of the WMW, Développement et Paix, a Canadian NGO
very close to the Catholic Church (Giraud, 2001). Second, an important
financial effort had been made to attract delegates from the South, especially
from Africa. Some of these African delegates were not free to include demands for abortion and sexual freedom rights. Because of the political
situation in their home country, they were not able to publicly and formally
claim these rights, considered illegitimate and sometimes illegal. Ideologically, some of them they did not support such rights (Newsletter, 1999).
This outcome of the Montreal meeting, as well as the powerful influence
of opponents of abortion rights, provoked strong reactions among European
activists. Francophone women who were at the forefront of the network in
Europe decided to build a European coalition to organize mobilizations at
the European scale. Because of the relative unity of women’s movements
regarding abortion and sexual freedom rights in the European context, they
were confident that they could go further than the international position of
the WMW (interview with Susie Rojtman, Paris, July 6, 2000). Accordingly, the World March European Platform began with political demands
regarding the European Union and called for full citizenship for women,
the rights to abortion and sexual freedom, and freedom from religious
interference in political decisions (National Guide, 2001:8–9). These initial
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demands had an impact on the potential for enlarging the movement to
British, Nordic, eastern European, and Irish women’s groups. The issue
went beyond the matter of abortion rights. For example, women in Great
Britain were uncomfortable with the demand in the European Platform for
such a strict separation of religion and politics because it interfered with
their attachment to the principle of religious freedom (interview with
Monique Dental, Paris, December 14, 2004). Through 2005, the debate
about the place of religion and religious groups within the March remained
lively and, indeed, moved in different directions. In the European Coordination, for example, the degree of tolerance toward the presence of veiled
Muslim women in the movement remained a point of disagreement (interview with Judith Martin Razzi, Marseilles, August 31, 2005). What we
see, then, is that the initial decision of the WMW as a global network not to
insist on abortion rights as one of its fundamental demands, in order to be as
inclusive as possible, had a direct impact on the emergence of the movement
at the European scale.
Between 2000 and 2005, the European scale of the WMW’s struggles was
mainly sustained through its active participation in the European Social
Forum (ESF) (Marchand, 2004). However, the relationships with other
organizations participating in the ESF depended on where ESF meetings
were held. At the first ESF in Florence, November 6–10, 2002, the Italian
feminist movement, which had always maintained alliances with labor
unions and leftist political formations (Della Porta, 2003; World March of
Women, 2004), was strong enough to take the lead within the European
Coordination in denouncing the difficulties that women encountered in
being considered and heard as ‘‘full’’ partners in the ESF process. In the
name of the European Coordination of the WMW, they demanded gender
parity among speakers at the forum and the right to organize a women’s
conference at the next ESF (Newsletter, 2003b). However, in Paris (November 13–16, 2003), the Collectif national pour les droits des femmes, the
main group of French feminist organizations, was unable to secure a place
specifically dedicated to women in the ESF (interview with Nelly Martin,
Paris, September 10, 2004). Historically, French feminist groups have been
divided ( Jenson, 1990) and these divisions continued to foster isolation
from other social forces during the 2003 ESF. They therefore decided to
organize a separate meeting, the European Social Forum Women’s Assembly. They described this event as a ‘‘critical political space for the women of
the European feminist movement, a place for the creation of an alternative
Europe—feminist, social, mutually supportive, environmentalist and working for another type of globalization’’ (Rome-Chastenet, 2005, our translation). Its main goal was to broaden the movement by attracting women
who were active in the ESF but did not necessarily identify with the WMW.
Even if the Women’s Assembly was not fully part of the ESF event (being
held one day before it) (Newsletter, 2003b), its success helped the WMW’s
European leaders in their demands for a greater integration of women into
Globalization and Political Change in the Women’s Movement
1165
the ESF the following year. At the London ESF in October 2004, after an
internal battle between the leaders of the ESF and the delegates of the
European WMW, the Women’s Assembly—as an event—was finally added
to the agenda of the ESF (Martin, 2004). Despite this, the configuration of
power did not yet favor the feminist movement. As in previous ESFs, feminists continued to be underrepresented, British women’s groups seem to
have been divided on the relevance of the event (Mitralias, 2005), and
British feminists had to struggle with their relative marginalization inside the
British Global Justice Movement. WMW leaders complained that while
there was some progress toward gender parity among the speakers, this was
not accompanied by greater visibility of the feminist discourse (Martin,
2004). In this regard, feminism was more visible as a ‘‘category’’ (women
and the need for their presence) than as a vector for systematic analysis of
structures such patriarchy, sexism, oppression, and so on.
From this history of the WMW’s relationship with the ESF we see clearly
that the configuration of power relations in each place, because discussions
were influenced by local histories of relations between feminism and progressive forces, played a crucial role in the ability of the WMW activists to
mobilize, build networks, and decide on common actions. As we have
shown, choices made at one scale further shaped choices at other scales. But
this mutually constituted scale-creation process was not only restrictive in
itself or an obstacle to collective action; it could also work as a political
empowerment process, as was the case with European grassroots groups
active in the WMW’s 2005 actions surrounding the Women’s Global Charter
for Humanity.
Mutually Constituted Scales and Political Empowerment
In the preparation of the 2005 actions, European leaders of the March
were unable to give clear political support for the Women’s Global Charter for
Humanity (World March of Women, 2004). The content of the Charter was
considered to fall too far below the standards of European feminism (World
March of Women, 2004:19). However, they nonetheless did choose to be
part of the global mobilization. The European leaders of the March continued to support the WMW’s global actions because this was a way to
enhance their own attempts to build a European scale of action.
During the fourth international meeting, which took place in New Delhi in
March 2003, at the initiative of the Quebec Coordination it was decided to
draft a Women’s Global Charter for Humanity in cooperation with all coordinating bodies and grassroots organizations (Newsletter, 2003a). The Charter
was seen as a means of engaging a broader dialogue with other social forces:
‘‘With this Charter, we will also invite other women and our allies in other
social movements to defend our feminist values and to call upon our respective governments to ratify and respect existing international instruments’’
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(Reading Guide, 2004:1, our translation). The Charter was based on five basic
values—equality, freedom, solidarity, justice, and peace—and on the desire to
link the individual and collective dimensions of these values in a systematic
manner (Dufour and Giraud, 2005:11). Power was also given a prominent
role in the quest for a genuine synthesis of all the different points of view.
This Women’s Global Charter for Humanity calls on women and men and
all oppressed peoples and groups of the planet to proclaim, individually and
collectively, their power to transform the world and radically change social
structures with a view to developing relationships based on equality, peace,
freedom, solidarity and justice . . . It is a call to action to change the world.
The need is urgent! (Women’s Global Charter for Humanity, WMW
website, 2004)
Throughout 2004 and as part of the process creating the Charter, grassroots
organizations were invited to submit suggestions and amendments to the first
draft of the Charter prepared by a Montreal-based committee charged with
overseeing the process. The exercise was seen as an educational tool for
women’s groups, NGOs, and labor unions. A second draft of the Charter was
prepared during the summer of 2004, and comments were requested from
national coordinating bodies. The committee combined shared values that
had been accepted by the different WMW actors since 1998 and formulated
in the 2000 global platform and in the ‘‘Declaration of Values’’ issued at the
end of the New Delhi meeting in 2003 with the suggestions made by national
coordinating bodies (Reading Guide, 2004). Beyond this Quebec lead, the
geographical origins of activists present at the international meetings and
taking decisions each time was crucial for the process.
At the 2003 New Delhi meeting, the WMW had adopted a ‘‘Declaration
of Values’’ prepared by delegates who were present. The Declaration included references to ‘‘the defence of sexual and reproductive rights’’ and to
the right to access to ‘‘sure methods of contraception and abortion’’ (Declaration of Values, WMW website, 2003). But this very important move
forward from a feminist point of view was put into question again at discussions of the Women’s Global Charter for Humanity held in Kigali, Rwanda, in 2004, during the fifth international meeting. When delegates from 31
countries, now mostly African, debated the final text of the Charter, for
some African delegates, the discourse on sexual and abortion rights proved
difficult to accept even though it was part of the Declaration of Values and
was supposed to be part of past compromises reached by the March. In the
eyes of European delegates, on the other hand, the words ‘‘abortion’’ and
‘‘lesbian’’ were central to their political battles.
An account of the meeting distributed in France by the delegate from
Marseilles described in detail the negotiations that took place between European and African delegates, stressing for European feminists that the integration of the points of view of all women into a single document was
fraught with difficulties (Martin-Razi, 2004). With regard to the sentence
Globalization and Political Change in the Women’s Movement
1167
declaring that ‘‘women freely decide anything concerning our bodies,’’ European delegates made a major concession by agreeing to the exclusion of the
word ‘‘abortion’’ and grudgingly agreeing (by abstaining) to the inclusion of
the words ‘‘fertility and sexuality’’ (Freedom, Affirmation 4). However, the
limits of this global declaration were to have political consequences elsewhere, especially in Europe.
First, from an organizational point of view, the mobilizations conducted
in Europe in 2005 on the basis of the Charter were very difficult. For
example, delegates from Portugal deplored the fact that they could not use
the Charter to seek legislation on abortion and they felt that, as a result, they
would be unable to muster much enthusiasm for the European relay of the
Charter scheduled to occur in Marseilles (World March of Women, 2004:
25). Despite this, Portuguese and Italian advocates for reproductive rights
went to Marseilles seeking renewed support for their cause from the women
of Europe.
The Charter mobilization held little political interest for European activists because it had too little to offer relative to their demands. For that
reason, they decided to use the Marseilles gathering as a forum for sharing
knowledge and ideas on specific thematic areas (Website WMW, France).
For example, the Women and Power Network, established in 2003, was
responsible for organizing a forum on ‘‘Democracy, Power and Gender
Equality’’ at the meeting. The final document of that event goes much
further than the Global Charter. Where the Charter speaks of ‘‘equal access’’
to the political process for men and women, European feminists called for
‘‘parity’’ and full European citizenship for women. New demands were also
added to previous ones: that European Union laws on gender equality be
applied to all member states; that the rights of women be harmonized in all
European countries in accordance with the highest and most progressive
standards; that freedom be granted in the areas of sexuality, access to
healthcare, abortion, and contraception; and that ‘‘secularism’’ be adopted as
a basic principle of the Union (European Feminist Meeting, 2005). When
comparing these demands to the more general and less precise ones of the
WMW’s 2000 European Platform, one can clearly observe a deepening in
terms of content and a move toward more concrete demands that were
addressed to European institutions. Despite the difficulties of mobilizing
support around the Global Charter, European activists managed to create
new avenues for promoting gender issues and disseminating feminist analyses while still remaining under the WMW’s global umbrella.
Second, the dissemination of the Charter served to empower grassroots
activists. Christine Weckx, leader of the popular education organization Vie
Féminine in Belgium, believes that the WMW made it possible to promote
feminist ideas and to help women worldwide raise awareness on gender issues.
Not all women were feminists, I think. And this was also the positive aspect
of things, because we are not born feminist, it’s a progression, it takes time
1168
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to discover affinities with feminists. So it’s a movement that allows any
woman to join somewhere, to progress, wherever she was engaged, whatever
may be her social conditions. (interview with Christine Weckx, March 3,
2006, our translation)
In practice, events were organized locally, nationally, or regionally to mark
the passage of the Charter in the form of relay marches or demonstrations,
for example. On October 17, 2005, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, where
the Charter ended its journey, delegates came from around the world to
demonstrate, while the coordinating bodies in each country organized ‘‘24
hours of solidarity’’ actions that took place exactly at noon on that day.
Accounts of all these events, along with the proceedings of workshops, were
immediately posted on the WMW website. This communications effort was
accompanied by public descriptions by delegates who had taken part in the
international events, such as an account by Belgian delegates who had traveled to Marseilles (World March of Women, 2005) or by French delegates
who had attended the Burkina Faso gathering (Marche-Paris, 2005), and so
on. These narratives played a role in linking and mobilizing women who did
not have the same degree of political commitment as activists who were
firmly involved. They also allowed different coordinating bodies within the
WMW to establish their own identities. The emphasis placed on originality,
plurality, peace messages, and demonstrations of local dynamism reflected
the desire to give greater visibility to the different components of the
WMW. One of the main results of the 2005 mobilizations was the building
of new bilateral, trilateral, and thematic transnational networks (Mitralias,
2005). Finally, the narratives were themselves an important political component of the actions; they contributed to the scale-building process, ex post,
by giving each place and scale a role in the global space of women’s activism.
This political empowerment of women as a consequence of the WMW’s
politics of scale helps explain the longevity of WMW mobilizations in Europe, despite the difficulties encountered inside and outside the movement.
Conclusion
Our approach using place and scale offers a theoretical basis from which
to understand the ongoing transnationalization practices of grassroots women’s groups in Europe under the WMW umbrella, despite the meager institutional responses to the 2000 mobilizations. Between the beginning of
the movement in 1998 and the 2005 mobilizations surrounding the Charter,
the leaders of the movement altered their politics of scale. Although at first,
in 2000, they had accepted the scalar hierarchy deployed by established
institutions, the disappointing response of states and international institutions caused them to rethink and then to redirect their energy and resources
toward the building of other scales of protest. Therefore, the relative failure
of the 2000 mobilizations in terms of concrete gains did not halt the trans-
Globalization and Political Change in the Women’s Movement
1169
nationalization of solidarities among women activists. On the contrary, it
motivated the work by which the WMW built its own scale of action. This
effect emerges clearly from the analysis of the places chosen by European
leaders of the March for their meetings and from their involvement in
European Social Forums events.
At the same time, the continuity of transnationalization of solidarities in
the WMW cannot be understood without taking into account the fact that
scale building is a mutually constitutive process. Even though the Charter
could not be used to support the demands of European women for reproductive and sexual rights, the European leaders of the March continued to
sustain the process of transnationalization because it was a source of empowerment for their own scale of actions. The transnationalization of solidarities means that there is a concrete need to reach global consensus on
gender analyses, even if profound divergence continues to exist on some of
the content. This political work and these conflicts about the definition of
feminism resulted in a convergence of interests and identities among women
around the world, albeit at a general level, and in the recognition of their
common oppression. This is a crucial step not only in building a global
movement, but also in building alternatives to social, economical, and political inequalities at multiple scales. In the European wing of the WMW,
the transnationalization of solidarities on a global scale had direct impacts on
its ability to build a European women’s movement. In that respect, the
global convergence of women served and reinforced the convergence of
European women’s networks.
The World March of Women provides a model of grassroots transnationalization that distinguishes it in important ways from the more elitist
transnational feminist networks that gravitate within the U.N. orbit. The
transnationalization of social movements has repercussions for the activism of
women, giving rise to a type of empowerment that strengthens their political
commitment, compared with their prior, nonpoliticized involvement in
NGOs and labor unions in the 1980s. It also contributes to the emergence of
a new generation of feminist activists, involved in other networks such as
social justice or the environment. This observation raises the question of
whether this phenomenon will expand further in the future, going beyond
NGO, labor union, and political militants already active within the organizations of civil society to encompass ordinary citizens, and whether the
transnationalization of solidarities, which is already the hallmark of activism
in social movements (Beauzamy, 2005), will also be acknowledged by the
media and institutional actors as a genuine political power alternative.
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Appendix
Websites of Interest
Belgium World March of Women: hhttp://www.marchemondialedesfemmes.
bei.
Fédération des femmes du Québec: hhttp://www.ffq.qc.cai.
MMF-France 2005: hhttp://collectif13.ddf.free.fri.
World March of Women Website: hhttp://www.marchemondiale.orgi.
List of Interviews Conducted
Maria Casares, Switzerland WMW Coordinator, Genova
Poupette Choque, Le Monde selon les femmes, Brussels
Monique Dental, Ruptures, Paris
Nelly Martin, SUD-PTT, France World March of Women Coordinator, Paris
Globalization and Political Change in the Women’s Movement
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Judith Martin-Razi, Collectif 13 Coordinator—Marseilles
Susie Rojtman, Collectif national droits des femmes, French international
delegate WMW, Paris
Christine Weckx, Vie féminine, Brussels
Sites of Participating Observation
European Social Forum Paris-Saint-Denis, November 13–15, 2003
European Women’s Assembly, Paris-Bobigny, November 12, 2003