Movement Building and ‘Summit Hopping’ {nato protests}

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http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13052/movement_building_and_summit_hopping

While world leaders prepare the agenda for the NATO summit in Chicago this May, organizers are busy mobilizing a war-weary but politically re-energized U.S. public to greet them. Expectations are high for a show of popular strength against the military alliance.

But will the new politics inspired by the Occupy movement be dragged back into old routines by a familiar showdown between police and protesters? In These Times convened three peace and economic justice organizers for a discussion of the promise and pitfalls of targeting the summit: Patricia Hunt, an organizer with the Chicago-based Coalition Against NATO/G8; Judith LeBlanc, field director for Peace Action and co-coordinator of the Network for a NATO-Free Future counter-summit; and Staughton Lynd, peace activist, historian and member of Occupy Youngstown.

One criticism of mass demonstrations is that they fail to connect with, or even harm, local organizing efforts. Is this a danger of the upcoming protests in Chicago?

Staughton: In the interval between the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and 9/11, many activists went into a pattern that might unkindly be described as summit-hopping. I had already experienced this pattern in the activity at the Democratic Party Conventions of 1964 and 1968, each of which was framed by the movement as a kind of apocalyptic final conflict with the powers of evil. And activists found it difficult afterwards to go back to the day-to-day patient, often frustrating organizing.

Pat: In Chicago, we see this as an opportunity to build a movement that doesn’t go from event to event to event. One of the things we want to do with our demonstration is to pull in the neighborhoods and the grassroots. The end of the summit is just the beginning – because we will have come to common ground locally as well as nationally and internationally.