Legitimacy, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity

Abstract

Over more than four decades Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) has changed greatly from the loose cooperation between the four founding members — Friends of the Earth (FoE) USA, France, Great Britain and Sweden — that characterized it at its outset in 1971. We saw in Chapter 4 that FoEI had already begun to change by the late 1990s, recognizing how the increased freedom of transnational corporations (TNCs) under neoliberal international regimes was affecting FoE’s campaigns, particularly in the global South. The influx of Southern members during the 1990s meant that the leadership of Northern members was no longer taken for granted and at its annual meetings FoEI grappled with the question of North-South differences. New strategies were necessary, therefore, if the federation was to develop an effective response to what seemed to be a new kind of global politics. However, the pull of national commitments remained strong and FoEI tended to bypass rather than confront internal tensions, and fell back rhetorically on celebrating its diversity as a strength. The costs of this became clear following the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg in 2002 and the ructions over how FoEI had conducted itself there. There followed several years of intense internal deliberation, which resulted in a strategic plan that aimed to deepen the degree of engagement of national FoE organizations with the international federation.