On 16 February 2003, the day after huge rallies took place worldwide, the New York Times headlined that a new superpower was born alongside the United States (US): the ?Global Anti-War Movement?. In this representation, we could catch in the same moment the dramatic importance, complexity, and characteristics of this new era of global mobilisation. As a superpower, the ?Movement of movements? does not have a single partial target, the war, but is operating on general and strategic issues with the strong capacity to finally connect all the social and political justice movements into one unified Movement.

This Movement did not arise from the US-UK (United Kingdom) aggression towards Iraq, but it was born much earlier. We could say it started from Seattle passing through the main protests organised against the antidemocratic World Trade Organization (WTO) or in Genoa against the Group of Eight (G8) Summit. At that time, we began saying that we were against the world as projected by the dominant powers, in which the lack of political and social democracy is a main characteristic; it was also at that moment that we said through popular, social and political organisation in all continents ?a new world is possible?.

After 11 September, we understood very clearly from the US President that the forthcoming war would be one of the major instruments used by the dominant powers to face the ungovernable contradictions of globalisation. We understood at that time that the historical decision held by the biggest countries after the Second World War, and contained in the United Nations (UN) Charter forbidding ?the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state? and requiring the settlement of ?international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered?1 was cancelled to open a new era of ?preventive war?. We understood the real global danger for a future based on the ?jus bellum? ? the right for the most powerful, rich and the most armed to wage wars and kill people against any international law, legitimacy and moral grounding. From that point forward, a new massive consciousness against any type of war, a radical opposition to the concept of the ?just war?, developed within the Movement. It was an historical, anthropological and political turning point towards nonviolence as a means to change reality and to build a world without wars. It was a difficult process marked by hard opposition and brutal repression by dictatorships all over the world. For example, in Europe the Movement faced the Genoa trauma of state violence and killing.

Pacifism and nonviolence together with social justice and democracy became the fundamentals for a new world as a radical alternative to the ?imperial civilisation? based on growing social, economic, political and racist violence. Nonviolence became the way of struggle and protest, the way to live and to participate in the Movement as part of a personal and collective process that promotes mass participation, creativity and strong determination.

The dramatic involvement of religious organisations and churches in the anti-war struggle fostered a strong social cohesion, which united young and old people, workers and unemployed, students and professors, Catholics and communists in a legitimate popular unity.

Moreover, this huge pacifist anti-war movement derives strong civil and moral legitimacy from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Charter blatantly ignored by US aggression towards Iraq. After gaining moral legitimacy, the anti-war movement succeeded in a very convincing way to connect the socio-economic-political causes of the war. The concept or new ideology of the ?preventive war? clarified in the most brutal way, the concrete US imperialist policies and objectives to dominate the world through economic and military imposition.

Millions of people in every continent perceived the aggression against Iraq as a brutal, unjust and strategically dangerous war because it went against all international resolutions and institutions, fought against a population already massacred by 10 years of external embargos and Saddam?s repression and especially because it was perceived not only as a war for oil but as a concrete step in the ?infinite war? for global domination. The war was the opening of a new international relations system based on the imposition of US interests by force all over the world.

The dramatic outcome of this anti-war movement came from its capacity to analyse the war?s real causes as directly connected to social and economic injustice and its ability to denounce the interests and objectives of the global decision-making system of exploitation and power. Only through a fantastic melting of identities, through the meeting of various fertile political and cultural elements, did the Movement succeed in elaborating this common analysis of the world, by connecting the war to the US globalisation process.

The ?new world? utopia politically radicalised and unified a huge variety of movements struggling for social justice, peace, democracy and international solidarity. Green activists working against environmental pollution and for clean energy and sustainable development, the Via Campesina network, native population movements struggling to defend minority rights, youth and leftist organisations, trade unions and workers in industrialised countries, South American populations facing the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) working on water, health, education and poverty issues in deprived countries identified the anti-war mobilisation as the most important struggle.

For these reasons it was relatively easy at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre to launch the exciting proposal for the first global anti-war day on 15 February 2003 to mobilise millions of people against war. These people did not stop the war, but they marked a strong voice of protest in the international arena; they slowed down the huge army machine and politically interfered with the superpowers? operations. When the war started, the Movement did not withdraw and did not collapse.

On the contrary, it multiplied its efforts of mobilisation by organising thousands of civil resistance actions: strikes, sit-ins, die-ins, rallies which blocked ?normal life? in many cities, occupations of trains and seaports to obstruct the transportation of military killing instruments, and civil missions in conflict areas such as Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq itself.

While Mr. Bush is selling the end of the war as ?Iraqi liberation?, we know we must strengthen and enlarge the capacity of the ?Movement of the movements? to exercise political and cultural hegemony in this sea of pacifist people: the ?new world civil society?.

We need it because we know the war will not finish against people who struggle for a new world based on human rights, respect, socio-economic justice, political democracy, popular participation and international solidarity. By committing ourselves to one another and fighting oppression and injustice through popular nonviolent resistance, a new world is possible.