ILRS AT THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE
OF NORABIDEAK/CRISTIANOS EN EL PSE

In Bilbao on 28 November 2004, ILRS President Pär-Axel Sahlberg addressed the Tenth Anniversary Conference of our Spanish member organisation.

Good morning. First let me say that I am very happy to be here with you to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Christian Socialists in the Basque Country, and also the growth of this important movement in the rest of Spain. I wish you even more success throughout the country for the next ten years. I am here today with my colleague Andrew Hammer, representing the International League of Religious Socialists, which is essentially the Socialist International for religious socialist groups like Cristianos en el PSOE. Founded in 1921, the ILRS represents over 200,000 members in 17 socialist parties throughout the world, organised in groups similar to yours, mostly in Europe, but now expanding to Africa, Latin America, and very soon to Asia through our contacts there. We are officially affiliated with the Socialist International as an associated organisation, which means we work in our own way along side the SI to further the goals of religious socialists in our parties, our institutions of faith, and in society. I shall come to some of those goals in a moment, but let me first offer some words in relation to what I feel are some of the most serious problems facing our world today.

The theme of our next congress, to be held in Norway in the summer of 2006, is 'Social Globalisation'. Of course everyone today is aware of globalisation, and there are different views on exactly how to deal with it. The prevailing social democratic opinion on the matter is that the socialist movement, along with the other democratic forces in society, must catch up with globalisation, so that we may make use of it and shape it in the interests of the people. We already know who is using it today: the market, capitalistic forces and the criminal are using it completely to their advantage, but democratic forces and religious communities are far behind. That is a tragedy, because as socialists, we understand that the people of the world, we the citizens of the world, need to be in charge of our own world.

Globalisation means mainly two things. One is that as the world becomes smaller, we realise more and more that we are each others neighbours. What goes on in one part of the world has an impact on all of us in the rest of the world. The needs of someone else are a challenge to us all. Poverty is not only a problem for the poor; the externalities of poverty create tensions, and those tensions create problems for the rich. Much of the production that creates wealth in the richer nations creates poverty in other nations and so on.

The other result of globalisation we have seen so far is that short-sighted perspectives and cultural dominance seems to be one-sided. To people in developing nations, globalisation looks like colonisation all over again, and it covers the world with views and perspectives from the wealthy western countries (the north). So in many ways this tells us that globalisation is not new - it's as old as humanity itself. But the speed at which these events take place is faster than ever before, and therefore globalisation means something fundamentally new in our time. Globalisation itself is not an evil, it is simply a process. It contains a great deal of possibilities, but also frightening risks. If the democratic forces and grassroots public organisations of ordinary people are not able to challenge the short-sighted views of the capitalists, we are in great trouble. If we cannot build a form of 'social globalisation' which changes the nature of that process in order to use its possibilities for the benefit of all the people, and not just a wealthy few, it is hard to imagine what kind of future we shall have.

At the same time, the actions of terrorists and the unilateral war on terror being waged by the US has resulted in a situation where the worst sides of humanity are winning out over the best. The Islamic fundamentalism of a dangerous few is met with the Christian fundamentalism of a few leaders in the American regime, and by focusing only on the worst tendencies of minorities in our own groups, we are being drawn into a so-called clash of civilisations that not only does not properly reflect the reality of billions of Christians and Muslims, but is increasingly more dangerous for the whole world.

Therefore our goal as socialists must be, as the theme of this conference says, to build bridges. And those bridges must be built not only between the church and the socialist movement, but between Christian socialists, Muslim socialists, Jewish socialists, Buddhists, Hindus and so on. In almost every meeting I have with people of other faiths, I discover how much more we have in common than we have to divide us. We each want a peaceful world, where our children can be safe, can play and learn, and can grow up to have meaningful lives without the worry of poverty or hunger for themselves and their children. We each have our own vision of spirituality, of God in our lives, directing us to do those things which increase kindness and understanding towards the other. What we now have to do is take actions which make those ideas a reality. There is no future for any of us, of any faith, if we do not take steps to oppose the idea of such a clash. To continue as we are now doing will only mean more war, more deaths, and all of us being much further away from our concept of God.

Here is where the purpose, the usefulness of the religious left comes in. It is in the religious left that we find the best impulses of religious believers. We find the freedom to question not only the fundamentalists who would twist our beliefs, but the institutions of faith that sometimes defend tradition over justice. Far from being anti-religious, we represent what we feel is the most valid view of our faiths, and in the context of our current time, most of us in the religious left also have a willingness to learn about and have tolerance for the faiths of others. In a multi-cultural society, which Europe is fast becoming, these aspects are valuable not only in the discussion about fundamentalism and the role of religion in civil society, but they are also valuable to our socialist parties when we are confronted by those who claim to represent the church with right-wing politics.

It is true that in some of our countries, the anti-clericalism of the past as well as the hostility of the institutions of faith towards socialism has made it difficult for our parties to reach religious believers. But as religious socialists, when the right comes to us with accusations that socialism is not compatible with religion, we can ask, what are those on the right doing to offer genuine economic solutions to the problems of the poor, as the holy scriptures of most faiths tell us to do? Perhaps one of our most important goals as religious socialists, if not the most important, is to proclaim loudly that religion does not belong to the right, and then to demonstrate, with both our scriptures and our politics firmly in hand why this is the case.

And then we take it further: spirituality is not only the property of specific institutions of faith or even of those people who have a particular system of faith. As Ramon Jauregui told you yesterday in so many words, spirituality is a public right, not a private industry. Spirituality belongs to all of us, and if we are to do as Jordi Lopez Camps suggested, to recover the sense of socialism itself as a moral project, part of that recovery involves the inclusion of spirituality on those terms, as something that is open to all.

Our hope, as religious socialists, is that we can build a different definition of values. That we can demonstrate that the parties of working people do not ignore the sympathies of the working class. And that spirituality need not be a source of division, but instead can bring people together across their differences, by focusing on those values which we share in common.

Again, I thank you for inviting me to be with you today, and I look forward to working more closely together in future to build bridges, and also to build a better world.



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