Finnish White Overalls in Genoa

From 20th to 22th of July, there will be a G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy. The summit is a meeting between the leaders of the seven most industrialised states (USA, Japan, Germany, France, UK, Italy and Canada), the Russian president Vladimir Putin and EU's representative Romano Prodi.

G8 Summits are held for outlining strategic framework for global development, and also for showing out the presence of Power with a massive (and expensive) spectacle.

Some argue, that the "democratically elected leaders" have the right to meet and discuss freely without any "external disturbances". For our part we want to stress that these leaders are elected for tasks, which the civil society can control with established instruments. This is one of the cornerstones of democracy.

As these leaders' field of work becomes global and their decisions affect possibly even more outside than within the national arena, there's a need to ask, whether there are any proper mechanisms of control anymore. This far the only effective method has been to gather tens of thousands of people during the summits to point out, that the leaders, who have been elected to decide on national issues, are not legitimited to act on the global level, if the citizens do not have new instruments of democratic control.

The main point of the protests is that a forum, which existence has not been legitimated by citizens, is making decisions about the fate of our world. It affects the lives (and deaths) of billions of people, who don't have a say in it.

In the era of globalisation, the pyramid of power has been verticalized so strongly, that in the reality, there exists no representative democracy anymore. This is not only a matter of formalities, but it's also about the contents of the decisions. The civil society, millions of people, are concerned about the fate of migrants, the inhabitants of poor countries, the excluded people of the rich North and the environment, as the neoliberal policies are deepening. These concerns cannot be answered only by saying that "the market will do their job".

The people who are concerned about the current model of development, have built a network called Genoa Social Forum, which is willing to bring to focus all those positive things that the civil society is doing for the benefit of the nature, the poor and the excluded people.