NEARLY a thousand delegates all over Europe met in Berlin this weekend to build an "international of hope" in support of the Zapatista rebels in south east Mexico.
"Over the ruins of the old exhausted system," said rebel spokesman Subcomandante Marcos in a written message "let us construct the world anew with humanity at the centre of decision making."
The officially titled European Encounter Against Neoliberalism - and for Humanity brought together Serbian metalworkers, Andalusian farmers, lesbian activists from St Petersburg, Basques, Kurds and many more. They spent an intense 48 hours at 48 workshops spread out over a dozen locations.
Mr Jose Perez, a French union leader, called for a general strike across Europe to draw attention to the "alarming rise in poverty", the erosion of workers' rights and increasing police powers.
Mr Perez noted that more people had been killed crossing European borders in the past five years than in the previous 40 of Iron Curtain border restrictions, with 30 deaths recorded on the Polish German border alone during the past two years.
"We want to create new spaces for dialogue and new relationships between people," said Gunther, a former Red Army faction member, still adjusting to freedom after 15 years in prison.
Environmentalists, social democrats, anarchists, lawyers, gays and lesbians discussed autonomy and democracy, analysing the effects of "so called" free trade on health services, education, emigration, unions and human relations.
At midnight on Saturday - under a full moon - a spontaneous heated discussion took place in a park in East Berlin in which 200 people debated the legacy of the Spanish Civil War after the screening of Ken Loach's recent film on the subject, Land and Freedom.
Veterans of the Spanish Civil War brigades spoke of the inspiration of the Mexican rebels, who launched their rebellion at a historic moment in which "the powerful tried to convince us that resistance was pointless."
Paul Laverty, Loach's scriptwriter, focused on the "unelected, unaccountable investment brokers" whose decisions affect millions of lives.
"It's not enough to talk endlessly about victims. We must focus on the big fish and find new terms to counter Orwell speak and ensure the triumph of memory over forgetting," Mr Laverty said, stealing a phrase from the Czech writer Milan Kundera.
The Mexican delegation asked its supporters worldwide to be a Zapatista wherever you are. Activists agreed that the only way to ensure the survival of the rebel project was to build a parallel European movement challenging economic centres of power from home.
The buzz words were consensus, tolerance and resistance, a spirit that proved vital in organising complex discussions in a dozen languages over such a short period of time.