Un’ altra Europa è possibile was the banner under which half-a-million people occupied the piazzas of Florence last month. The march capped a five day conference of intellectuals, trade-unionists and activists assembled as the European Social Forum. Events sparkled with gaiety and giddy energy, contrasting sharply with fresh memories of the 2001 Genoa G8 summit street-battle that resulted in hundreds of hospitalizations and one demonstrator shot dead by the Italian military police. The Forum marked the arrival of a new European left.

Such a conclusion is hard to reach from media coverage of the Forum. U.S. coverage was unfriendly, but the New York Times on Nov. 10 managed to capture an important nugget of truth overlooked by a more sympathetic European press. The Times led with discussion of pre-emptive border controls and precautionary measures to defend Michelangelo’s David but faltered over the anti-climactic facts of the day. There were no arrests; there was no “serious violence.” Pairing anti-climax with sarcasm, the Times reports: “[a female protestor] used eyeliner to paint Y-like shapes on the brows of friends. They worried aloud that the result looked more like Mercedes symbols than peace signs.” Other images are similarly choice: naive peaceniks partying in Florence.

So where is the nugget of truth? Whereas Europe breathed a sigh of relief and smiled approvingly at its peaceful marchers, a frustrated Times vacillates schizophrenically between two stories—impending violence and summer of love—never quite integrating the narratives. The fact of Florence is that its eye-liner wielding peaceniks were wielding cobble-stones and petrol-bombs in Genoa. Since Genoa, they have shaken Italy’s government with two general strikes and the continuing occupation of factories by some 70,000 “redundant” Fiat workers. Yet in Florence they took to the streets with bands and banners, dancing along the four-mile march, singing that another world is possible.

In Florence, there was a giddy hopefulness that may well have been missing since 1968, but there were no paisley peaceniks. The weekend’s theme was “Another Europe is Possible,” and likely for the first time in years, a majority of the participants actually believed it. The issue-based activism of the 1980s and 1990s and the recognition of a common foe in the world financial structures had been stitched together by the shared experience of police repression. Participants in the Genoa protests recounted how seven different columns of protestors marched on the G8 summit because of disagreements in tactics or ideology. Following the first battles and the shooting of demonstrator Carlo Giuliani, subsequent actions happened in unison.

Likewise, Florence was populated by progressives of every conceivable stripe. There were splits and negotiations: the anti-hierarchical groups created their own space on the outskirts of the Forum, which mirrored a tension between the “old guard” who were doing much of the speaking and the overwhelming youthfulness of the conference. Tensions occasionally came to a head: during the forum on gender, the panel of distinguished women began a traditional litany of demands only to find themselves heckled by younger women who exclaimed “How progressive is subsidized childcare if it means that I hire some poor immigrant woman and pay her less than I earn at my job?” or “Equal representation in Parliament is rubbish; any woman sitting as MP will sell us out anyway; look at Thatcher!” But though heated, the arguments lacked rancor, and all the nationalities and ideologies seemed strangely united by the vibrancy and possibility of the moment.

The BBC attributed the peacefulness of Florence to a new commitment from European police forces and Forum organizers to cooperatively weed-out the infamous “Black Bloc” and “ensure that troublemakers did not infiltrate the march for peace.” There is a sense that Europe is over the Genoa bump. But the violence in Genoa was not solely the work of a few agent provocateurs. There is a nastier calculus at work when half-a-million civilians try to stop a meeting defended by 10,000 military police.

The Times declined to explain the peacefulness of Florence and, with this lack of creativity, actually grasped the truth which eluded some European news sources: Florence was of a different cloth than Genoa. Florence was a strategy and networking session for a new European left. Fifty-five thousand people from 88 countries gathered for five days of multi-lingual debate attempting to articulate their new-found unity. They continued a conversation sparked by Genoa and formalized at this spring’s World Social Forum in Brazil. The expectation of violence lay in the mischaracterization of the gathering as a “no-global” action. The people were the same. So were the slogans. But the purpose at hand was new: craft a positive vision. Un’ altra Europa è possibile, but what does it look like, and how do we get there? Florence was the logical culmination of the battles in Seattle and Genoa, but it demonstrated a different sort of political willpower. The new European left showed itself capable of sustaining political energy in the absence of an immediate crisis and of presenting positive alternatives to a neo-liberal regime.

Samuel Houshower ’03 is a social studies concentrator in Dudley House. He is conducting research in Northern Ireland.