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Chapter 1: Protest against Politics
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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C h a p t e r 1 Protest against Politics “What is going on?” asked radical French philosopher Alan Badiou two years ago. “Of what are we half- fascinated, half- devastated witnesses? The continuation, at all costs, of a weary world? A salutary crisis of that world . . . ? The end of that world? The advent of a different world?”1 The trigger for all these questions has been the massive explosion of protests that has shattered the world since the advent of the Great Recession in 2008. In the last five years, political protests have erupted in more than seventy countries.2 Some of these, like Egypt and Tunisia, were autocracies; others were democracies like Great Britain and India. Some were prosperous like Israel; others, like Bosnia and Moldova, were poor and depressed. In most of them, social inequality is growing, but in others, like Brazil, it is on the decline. Protests engulfed countries savaged by the global economic crisis— Greece and Portugal being the most notable examples— but they were also found in high- growth emerging economies like Turkey and Russia, which were largely unscathed by the crisis. 8 Ivan Krastev To classify is the natural instinct of the social scientist . It is certainly useful to distinguish the prodemocracy protests in places like Tunisia, Egypt, and Russia from the “occupy” movements in the United States, Britain, or Spain. It is useful to distinguish between protests that were organized and directed by opposition parties, like those in Thailand, from protests that were directed against both the government and the opposition, as in Bulgaria and Turkey. It is useful to distinguish between the national revolutions in Ukraine and the antiausterity riots in Greece. All these distinctions are critically important, particularly when we have “big data” about the protests at our fingertips. But we should be also careful not to fall in the trap of too much classifying. It is the protest wave and not any singular protest that provoked Badiou’s questions . The cover story of the June 29– July 5, 2013, issue of the Economist magazine captured the global nature of the protests. It featured four figures, each representing one of four historical protests and where they took place: 1848, Europe; 1968, America and Europe; 1989, the Soviet Empire; and 2013, “Everywhere.”3 The protests have been unexpected, spontaneous, and— it must be underscored— nonviolent. Their nonviolence hardly implies an absence of clashes with the police and blood on the streets. We all have witnessed people beaten and killed in Cairo, Istanbul, and Kiev. It means, rather, that the protesters, unlike their revolutionary predecessors , are not attempting a violent takeover. Unlike German or Italian radicals of the 1970s, the protesters of today do not believe in the transformative power of class violence. To bet on violence today for both governments and protesters most often means courting defeat. [18.206.160.129] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:04 GMT) 9 Democracy Disrupted It was police violence and brutality that to a great extent explains the mass nature of popular protests in places like Turkey and Ukraine. In the case of Ukraine, the majority of people were unhappy that their government turned its back on the European Union, but it was the decision of this same government to break violently the protest of the pro- European students that brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets. If anything, protesters’ strategy of peaceful resistance underscores Erica Chenoveth and Maria J. Srephan’s thesis in “Why Civil Resistance Works,”4 which argues that between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance campaigns were nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts. Of course, the reasons for mobilization were contextually distinct. In Tunisia, the self- immolation of the street vendor Mohammed Bouazzi, long harassed by the local police, brought people onto the streets in droves. In Russia, it was the government’s manipulation of parliamentary elections coupled with the outrage that the corruption ran to the very top that unleashed the explosion. In Madrid, a combination of rage against rising unemployment and the corruption of the banks and politicians brought young Spaniards to the squares. But the protesters did not land from outer space. Burrowing into the recent history of civic activism reveals layers of small and dispersed protests in which activists and strategists of the current wave were introduced to the art of political rioting. In some countries, the antiglobalization protests helped people find their way to the public squares...