International Cooperative Alliance Global Conference
Antalya, Antalya, Turkey (2015)
Relative to past statements, the Youth Statement on Cooperative Leadership took on a much more issue-specific angle in its content. The statement writing process was organized, and the issue topic of “Cooperative Leadership” was selected by the USA Cooperative Youth Council (USACYC), which submitted the process as a workshop proposal to the International Cooperative Alliance conference. While the workshop was known to and approved by the International Cooperative Alliance, the presentation of the statement publicly was not discussed or guaranteed ahead of time. Once the statement was authored, it was delivered at a general conference session by Sebastien Chaillou, who would soon become the first elected president of the Youth Committee (formerly Global Youth Network).
The Cooperative Leadership workshop utilized a Peoples’ Movement Assembly (PMA) format, which evolved out of the United States’ Social Forum (USSF), which self-identifies as "a movement building process. It is not a conference; instead, it is a “space” or opportunity to advance peoples’ solutions to economic and ecological crises. The USSF is the next most important step in our struggling yet determined effort to build a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, intergenerational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history" (from the 2010 USSF website). As part of the PMA process, the coopyouth group, first, took time to educate themselves about the general meaning of leadership and, second, discussed the current status of leadership within the Cooperative Movement. Specifically, the group explored how neoliberal and capitalist values had aggressively and harmfully shaped the mainstream understandings of leadership, success, and democracy to the extent that had infiltrated the Cooperative Movement and corrupted the movement’s sense of cooperative leadership. Specifically, they identified that the Cooperative Movement largely fails to lift up the marginalized - youth, included - into leadership.
The final statement resulting from the above process committed its authors and the broader coopyouth contingent to building a truly Cooperative Movement via:
- Participatory Democracy - large group consensus building processes (e.g. PMAs), year-round online discussions within the International Cooperative Alliance membership, the use of consensus decision-making models at all levels of International Cooperative Alliance decision-making, moving away from a “false model of overly representational democracy;”
- Leadership Succession & Shared Leadership - term limits, gender quotas, shared management structures among staff and executives, statutory seats and full voting rights on all International Cooperative Alliance boards and committees, youth staff development policies within the International Cooperative Alliance; and
- Autonomous Youth Organizations - all youth organizations and boards must be autonomous at all levels (global, regional, national) – specifically, they decide who their members are and how to spend any money to which they have access.
These commitments were closed out with the following: “We are building this now for ourselves. We are building this for future youth. We call on the broader Cooperative Movement and – specifically – the International Cooperative Alliance Board of Directors to join us in this important work by implementing these changes to foster a brave, loving, just, and intergenerational Cooperative Movement.”
Following the presentation of the statement in the general conference session, Sebastien Chaillou added a few sentiments from his perspective as a student unionist and activist in France. He shared that “my generation and the next don’t believe in traditional politics anymore – we have stopped participating in elections […] no political party can solve this.” He went on to say “To me, cooperatives can be the social movement of this new century, a movement that empowers people, a movement with values, a movement with creative solutions, a movement where we share, a movement which extends citizenship into economics, a movement that protects the environment, peoples’ rights and wellbeing. We, the Cooperative Movement, can be this movement...can’t we?”
The overall tone of the statement and Sebastien’s subsequent remarks captured the sentiments from the 2014 statement while also identifying additional actions to be taken and more deeply adopting the language of social movements and social justice. Coopyouth spaces and voices during this time period resoundingly engaged with movement and social justice language. It had become clear that youth see cooperatives not as a “better form of business” and more as local, autonomous units of a social movement working to bring about broad-scale societal transformation. In accordance with this worldview, it is notable that many of the youth who co-authored the youth statement also participated in an intergenerational direct action during the conference.
Turkey’s recently elected President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was invited to address attendees, as is the practice for all leaders of International Cooperative Alliance conference host countries. The meeting was during 2015, very early in Erdogan’s rule, before the expansiveness of his violence and repression was fully known. Though, the history of the oppression of the Kurdish people by the Turkish nation-state had been long well-known. Erdogan did not attend the conference, but sent the Minister of Economy as his representative.
“During the minister’s address, a dozen conference attendees participated in an intergenerational and youth-led walkout demonstration while holding signs with messages such as ‘Cooperation with the Kurds’ and ‘Cooperation Not Coercion.’ A statement on the walkout has since been issued elaborating on the reasoning behind the action and levying a challenge to the International Cooperative Alliance and Cooperative Movement to consider the political implications of partnering with certain nation-states.”
This direct action in solidarity with the Kurdish people, many of whom use the cooperative model to structure every aspect of their communities ranging from sustenance to self-defense, was an explicit assertion by coopyouth that cooperation exists within a social justice movement framework. It is worth noting that the G8 was being held at a resort next to the location of the International Cooperative Alliance events. Secret police investigated those who participated in the action by asking resort guests and conference attendees if they knew the names of anyone in a photo of the action.
Youth were not alone in making this call – elders also participated in the action and signed the statement. The International Organisation of Industrial and Service Cooperatives (or, CICOPA, which is essentially the worker cooperative branch of the ICA) issued their own statement calling for greater transparency around country selection by the International Cooperative Alliance for its events and making “a commitment to be a political voice on substantial issues related to economic and social justice.” The sincerity and strength of the statements from the event, as well as the potentially unprecedented instance of direct action at an International Cooperative Alliance event, signaled a turning point for the Cooperative Movement. This call to consider the Cooperative Movement as a global voice accountable to the struggles of all oppressed people was not new, but it was perhaps the loudest and most direct assertion of this call to the movement in collective memory.