After massive protests at the WTO summit in Seattle last November-December, and in Washington for the April IMF/World Bank meetings, the movement for global justice and against corporate globalization moves to Europe this fall. Europeans have, in recent years, a richer history of large demonstrations for progressive causes than the U.S. does. Among the many recent mass mobilizations around Europe have been the 70,000 who encircled the 1998 G7 Summit in Birmingham, UK and 40,000 in Cologne in 1999 to demand debt cancellation and the tens of thousands who protested in Berlin at the 1988 fall meeting of the IMF and World Bank.

While the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank are always in Washington, the fall "annual" (as opposed to "semi-annual") meetings are held outside Washington once every three years. This year they will be in Prague, from September 19 to September 28. The fall meetings are designed as the institutions‚ showcase: seminars, expositions, press conferences, and thousands of delegates from all the world‚s finance ministries. While the IMF and World Bank put on their show, the momentum from the April demonstrations will be very visible on the streets and public conference centers as 20,000 people are expected to protest in Prague.

The last time the IMF and World Bank went abroad for the fall meetings, in 1997, they went to Hong Kong, where they held the first major international gathering after the territory‚s transfer back to China. The institutions spent over a year planning a special series of seminars on the "East Asian miracle" ˜ which were preempted by the onset of the major regional crisis in July 1997 with the devaluation of the Thai currency. The collapse of the Indonesian and South Korean economies was imminent even as praise flowed from Hong Kong.

In Prague it is likely that the IMF and World Bank will be eager to declare a victory for their neo-liberal capitalist economic model in the tumultuous transition the former Soviet Union and its satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe have endured since 1991. Each of the countries has submitted, to one degree or another, to IMF discipline and World Bank development programs. The stunning decline in the standard of living in Russia and Ukraine will have to be glossed over somehow, as will the enormous gap between the very small wealthy classes and the rest of the population in all of the countries. It promises to be an interesting study in institutional public relations, and a good opportunity to offer an accurate accounting of the damage done by the orthodox economic model now dominating the world.

Czech environmentalists, anarchists, and activists for economic justice have come together to form coalitions that will coordinate several types of actions and gatherings at the IMF/WB meetings. The first, a "skill-sharing," is primarily designed to educate people from Central and Eastern Europe about the work of the international financial institutions and effective campaign tactics for opposing them. Two public sessions, one a "counter-summit" dealing with the whole range of globalization topics, and the other a public forum dealing more specifically with the IMF and World Bank, will take place between September 22 and September 27. The counter-summit is being organized by the INPEG (Initiative Against Economic Globalization) coalition that has come together specifically for the September actions. INPEG is planning public demonstrations for September 26, the official opening day of the meetings, and has put out a call for people in other countries to make that date an International Day of Action (see article on page 3). The other conferences are being organized by CEE Bankwatch, a coalition of organizations devoted to monitoring the impact of the international financial institutions in Central and Eastern Europe.

There will be several demonstrations in addition to those on September 26, including those sponsored by labor unions and the Jubilee 2000 movement. Both the activists and the authorities in Prague are anticipating at least 20,000, and as many as 50,000, protesters coming to the city. Activists are wary, however, of the strong possibility that Czech authorities will try to exclude some visitors it judges to be potential "trouble-makers" even if they have all the required documents for entry (holders of U.S. passports do not require visas for a short visit). There is also reason to be concerned about the police response to demonstrations: after attending an April meeting in Prague to plan for the September events, I stayed an extra day in Prague to witness the May Day demonstration organized by anarchists, and was appalled at the Czech police‚s behavior. Officers in riot gear barreled into an entirely peaceful crowd listening to a speech on an isolated island, picked out specific individuals, wrestled them to the ground, then carried them away. Such confrontations between police and anarchists in Prague are reported to be common.

The Czech media and Interior Ministry have fueled the flames of panic about the disruptions that could occur in Prague along with the meetings. In recent weeks the Czech government, at least, has begun to try to de-escalate the tension a bit, though reports of police and military training are still emerging. The World Bank has sent a high-ranking official to take up residence in Prague for several weeks in order to try to shift attention from the protests to the issues. This is a task we also faced in April, though for us it was framed as the challenge of getting the media to pay attention to the issues rather than the tactics being used by demonstrators. In this case, the Bank may be fearing that another large protest will more permanently anchor a sense of its flaws, those things that make it "protestable," in the public mind, and that few cities will want to host meetings in the future (the next non-Washington meeting, in 2003, is scheduled for Dubai, a city that does not immediately suggest itself as an easy target for protesters).

As thousands pour into Prague from the UK, Italy, Poland, Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and elsewhere, I will also return to Prague. In the next issue of Economic Justice News: a report from the streets, conference centers, and press conferences of Prague.

For more information on the activities in Prague, visit these websites: INPEG: www.inpeg.ecn.cz CEE Bankwatch: www.bankwatch.org