Hallo Marco,

I am not sure, if I agree with your analysis of the effects of summit-hoping and the consequence that you have drawn ( to stop summit-hoping). I don´t know where you are living. I live in Germany and here I recognize for the first time, that the official media put further attention to the movement and publish more detailed about it than only repeating that riots are destroying cities. Until now this has been nearly the only commentary that the movement got from the media.

Now the style of the commentaries is changing. The media here report about mainly peacefull protestors, and even mention that they have reasonable arguments concerning their globalisation-critics, though they still don´t describe them as too much serious people. The media here mostly describe the "homo anti-globalisation" as somebody, who has a right to critic the globalisation capitalism, but who does not know the real context and therefore can´t be taken as a serious discussion-partner in politics. The media stress out, that there are lots of different groups in the protests who have completely different difus arguments and don´t even agree with each other.

Nevertheless they start to put more attention towards this movement for the first time, with the result of a discussion in civil society. So I want to underline that all the exhausting efforts of summit-hopping now seems to bear this positiv effect of a discussion in civil society. so far I can´t jugde if this will be a longer and serious discussion, or if it will end a few weeks after Genua, but it maintains a chance of people becoming more aware of the circumsctances of globalisation.

I don´t know, if it wouldn´t be better to continue this summit-hopping, as you call it, once we got the attention for the discussion, because I think we got it, due to the mass protest on the summits.

Me personally, I don´t accept the word summit-hopping, because it sounds like polit-tourisme and doen´t express the political seriuosness of those who take the effort to protest. The word also reflects the opinion of the mass media, that the protestors have diffus arguments for protest but they are far not as politically educated to be able to jugde the situation and they only protest because they dicovered a new hobby : summit hopping.

I agree that there should be other strategies to fight globalisation, but at the moment I think "summit-hopping" strengthens the international protest networks in an indespensable way. It´s one thing if you read that there are a lot of people who don´t agree, but it is far more important to experience that a lot of people are strongly opposed against our economic systems, it is important to expireince that, to have real contact with the people, to have the possibility to talk with people from other countries directly, we shouldn´t underestimate the importance of this experience - no internet can replace that.

Regina