What's it all about, then?

Sometimes international conferences can be exciting because of what happens in the meeting halls. Sometimes it can be because of what happens outside them: Seattle, for instance, or more definitively the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968.

At the moment, I'm afraid that the forthcoming G20 meeting is going to be neither. There seem to be too broad differences amongst political leaders to imagine anything concrete emerging from the meetings themselves; but I can't bring myself to be particularly interested in the protests outside, which began today with about 35,000 people on the streets of London.

Perhaps it's because I'm not there. Protests are meaningful really as personal experiences which people engage in to assert their loyalties and confirm their beliefs; they're not especially important as political action, and they don't tend to impress people via the TV screen. This, if evidence were needed, was demonstrated pretty graphically by the way in which Blair and Co. encouraged millions of protestors as part of the Gleneagles G8 meeting on global poverty and the world's most powerful swiftly neutralised them with a few bland promises that were subsequently not met. For better or worse, street power hasn't been a factor in politics for a long time, except when it descends into violence and is exploited by anti-reformers.

But it's also because, in truth, I don't really understand what these marchers are protesting about. The BBC website says "Speakers are calling on G20 leaders to pursue a new kind of global justice." Great. And they want "action on poverty, climate change and jobs." Great. But how? Do you want the G20 to agree a global co-ordinated effort to revive free global trade (and by extension capitalism)? Do you want to get rid of it and see a new era of protection? Do you want governments to devote more money to international assistance, perhaps through institutions like the World Bank and IMF - the architecture of the Washington Consensus? Do you want them to do something about Darfur? Do you just want a day out in London to make yourself feel morally superior to the bankers and the politicians? I don't mean to sound dismissive, but what, in the end, is this all about? No-one wants global warming. No-one wants poverty. But where's the shared sense of a policy approach to actually achieve something?

As a political act, marching against the war in Iraq made sense, at least in the sense that - for whatever reasons and motives - the people on the march shared a clear political goal. But, and I could be just being obtuse here, I just don't really get what these marchers are after. Perhaps someone might enlighten me?

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