Is "Another" Public Sphere Actually Possible? 1 The Case of "Women Without" in the European Social Forum Process as a Critical Test for Deliberative Democracy

Abstract This paper presents results of a cross-national comparative research project on the case of democracy in the European Social Forums (ESFs) process over the period from 2003 to 2005. The various progressive social movements engaged in the European Social Forums process try to construct "another world" and "another public sphere" internally within their own practices of participatory and deliberative democracy in public forums. This includes fighting discriminations against women in general and women from nonwestern European parts of the world in particular. I take as my point of departure the case of "women without," that is women activists who lack financial resources and/or have problems participating in transnational meetings because of border or visa restrictions. In the context of the European, preparatory meetings to the ESF, these women are for the most part either migrants living in the European Union or women coming from Eastern, South or Central Europe. To what extent do the effective processes of decision-making in the ESF preparatory process include the perspective and claims of materially less privileged participants, in particular these distinct groups of "women without"? Based on a feminist critique of the Habermasian model of deliberative democracy, I discuss the quality of democratic deliberation in the ESF's assemblies from the perspective of the networks of "women without". Then, as a second step, I show how the strategies of these materially less privileged activists break discursive mechanisms of exclusion inside the ESF process and build their own transnational networks subverting the ruling discourse structure of the ESF. Keywords: public sphere, feminist, deliberative democracy ********** The social forums emerging in different places all over the world can be seen as an experiment to realise in practice the global justice movement's claim to create "another" public sphere across national, cultural and social boundaries. In Europe, it is precisely the enormous ideological diversity of the different individuals and groups involved in the large European Social Forum (ESF) that gives the process of deliberative and consensual decision-making importance as a common procedural source of legitimation (see della Porta et al. 2003, della Porta 2005). The activists within the European Social Forum process collectively organise the ESF summit through a series of transnational preparatory assemblies. (3) The experiment of deliberative decision-making in these multilingual and European-wide preparatory assemblies is an interesting empirical case for discussing different theories of deliberative democracy. I will test the Habermasian model of "deliberative democracy" by confronting it with the alternative model of "communicative democracy" developed by Iris Young. My research question thereby is to ask to what extent the specific practice of deliberative decision-making in different (national and European) meetings of the European Social Forum preparatory process is capable of including less privileged activists or activists who lack basic resources, whom I study in the example of "women without. " (4) The concept of gender is defined here as a "variable" that influences social contexts and performs in power relations through the systems of language and knowledge. I propose thus to follow Judith Butler in understanding gender "as a doing" (1999: 33). Moreover, I assume that socially constructed gender differences, in close interrelation with material inequalities, will have an impact on dialogue and decision-making in public spaces, conditioning and limiting the culturally specific and historically bound "dialogic possibilities" (ibid: 20). My hypothesis is that gender discrimination in the ESF process does not perform simply between the dichotomous subjects of "women" and "men," but as a result of the combination of the condition of material inequalities and a culturally biased style of discussion that "tends to silence or devaluate some people or groups" while elevating others (see Young 1996: 120). …