Madeleine Bunting, senior writer for The Guardian (UK). Ms Bunting has overseen the newspaper’s sponsorship and coverage of the Jubilee 2000 campaign for eighteen months.
At the industrialized countries (G8) summit held in Cologne in June 1999, an accord on partial debt relief for the world’s poorest countries was reached. Above, a supporter of the Jubilee 2000 movement, which played a big part in achieving this agreement.
|
If you want peace, strive for justice. Pope Paul VI (1897-1978) |
For the first time, the churches found
their belief in solidarity with the world’s poor taking concrete form and direct political expression
Inspired
by the biblical concept of jubilee, a global campaign to cancel Third World debt
has managed to influence the agenda of the world’s richest countries
Jubilee 2000 is cited as as one of the biggest single-issue global campaigns
ever. It is even compared with the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s and has clearly
had a more global outreach than campaigns on nuclear power or nuclear disarmament.
With partner coalitions in 89 countries, the initiative has already exceeded its
target of collecting 22 million signatures by the end of the year 2000.
All over the world, governments, experts and campaigners are watching Jubilee 2000’s
extraordinary success both in mobilizing a global activist movement and achieving
demonstrable success in pushing debt onto the agenda of the G-8 industrial nations
and forcing the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to tackle the
indebtedness of the poorest countries. Jubilee 2000 succeeded in getting tens of
thousands of people onto the streets for the G-8 summits in Birmingham (UK, 1998)
and in Cologne (Germany, 1999). During the latter, finance ministers agreed in principle
to cancel $70 billion of the $130 billion owed by the world’s poorest nations. Rival
campaigners amongst environmentalists, human rights activists and trade unionists
marvel at the way Jubilee 2000 has trounced those who talked pessimistically about
the apathy and fatalism of civil society. Meanwhile, some governments are seeking
advice from think tanks as to how such campaigns can seemingly appear from nowhere,
mobilize such force so quickly and with so few resources.
The secret of Jubilee 2000’s success is simple but unfashionable: it is the Christian
churches. There is a polite disagreement over who first came up with the idea of
linking the Biblical concept of jubilee, expressed in the Old Testament Book of Leviticus,
with the millennium and debt cancellation. Catholics maintain the Pope spoke of it
first, while the UK evangelical aid agency Tearfund claims to have initiated the
campaign’s idea in 1994. What is without doubt is that both Catholics and evangelicals
have found a common purpose in the campaign. Tearfund provided crucial initial funding
for the Jubilee coalition and the Pope has played a vital role in raising the profile
of the campaign in southern Catholic countries.
The concept of Jubilee in the Old Testament is that anniversaries should be marked
by measures of social justice: slaves should be freed, land and wealth redistributed
and debts cancelled. Providing a target, a date and a biblical justification galvanized
the long-running Debt Crisis Network, a British debt cancellation campaign.
The involvement of the churches was crucial for two reasons. Their backing brought
with it millions of churchgoers in the UK and the ready-built structure of churches
and parishes, along with their publications. News could—and did—spread fast, and
Jubilee 2000 found the idea taking off as an integral part of the churches’ celebration
of the millennium. Alongside plans for parish parties and fireworks was debt cancellation.
Jubilee 2000 found itself addressing church meetings up and down the country.
A winning
combination
Secondly, the churches
brought an international structure. As the idea gained ground in the UK, it began
to spread through diocesan links, between bishops’ conferences and via parish twinning
to the southern countries. Missionary societies and orders spread the word. For the
first time, the churches found their belief in solidarity with the world’s poor taking
concrete form and direct political expression. At times, this made the church hierarchies
nervous, admit senior Jubilee 2000 staff, but they found themselves swept along by
the enthusiasm of the rank and file in the pew. This was faith in action, their parishioners
asserted, and it helped them make sense and give meaning to a date in the calendar.
Jubilee 2000’s winning combination was to persuade aid agencies (such as Oxfam and
Christian Aid) and the churches to work together. It was—and still is—a relationship
of creative tension. Left-wing aid activists do not like working with religious institutions
such as the Catholic church in Latin America, of which certain sectors have been
supportive of oppressive regimes. But while the aid agencies offered expertise on
debt and campaigning, the churches provided the footsoldiers to gather signatures,
turn up at demonstrations or swamp the UK treasury or the German embassy with postcards.
It proved a powerful combination. Despite rivalries betwen aid agencies anxious to
maintain their profile and funding, the fact that a coalition of over a hundred groups—including
trade unions and professional bodies—managed to agree on how to tackle the growing
inequality of the global economy added immeasurably to the campaign’s credibility.
One other aspect of the churches’ involvement was specific to the British campaign
but had global consequences. The Labour gouvernment elected in 1997 had been particularly
sympathetic to the churches’ representation in the campaign. This is partly a shrewd
political move from a government anxious to extend its political base from a traditional
left-wing to a centrist position, and it partly stems from conviction. Both Prime
Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown are strongly influenced
by Christian socialism. The latter took on the issue of debt as a personal commitment
and has consistently pushed the issue up on the international agenda, proving a crucial
ally in chivying other finance ministers to consider the issues.
What is interesting is that although many point to Jubilee 2000 as a new form of
global activism now possible because of the Internet, it is again the churches rather
than new technologies which have fuelled its development. The Jubilee 2000 website
gets about 15,000 visitors a week, but much of the information requested has to be
printed out and sent to southern campaigners because their telephone links to the
net are so poor.
Advance
information
Where the net has been
crucial is in connecting about 180 key activists and organizations around the world,
enabling them to share strategies and information to move the global campaign along.
Jubilee 2000 often received information from partner coalitions on debt negotiations
forming in a particular country before the UK Treasury. As a result, when lobbying
ministers, campaigners were often better informed and could outmanoeuvre them. There
has only been one assembly of all the partners; otherwise meetings have been rejected
as expensive and not very productive. The efficiency of the information exchange
enables a huge global campaign to be run with only 15 full-time staff in London supporting
the entire edifice.
Jubilee 2000 is a long way from achieving its target but it has succeeded in getting
a considerably more generous debt relief initiative underway. No one, two years ago,
believed the movement would be able to achieve what it has. In part influenced by
the campaign, the IMF and the World Bank have recognized for the first time that
their legitimacy depends on engaging with civil society and are showing an unexpected
reconsideration for some of the principles which have driven their policies since
the war. Heartened by this, some would claim Jubilee 2000 is a taste of global activism
which might achieve real change in this new century. Others worry that with church
attendance continuing to decline, the moral imagination of churchgoers which has
fuelled this campaign might become a thing of the past and leave a gap in how to
motivate people to express their solidarity. Only time will tell.
A list of national coalitions
as well as additional information can be found on the the Jubilee 2000 website at
http://www.jubilee2000uk.org
