Protests are revealing deep,
foundational issues of contemporary democratic policies. In a variety of
different ways, they raise the question that people are dissatisfied with the
exercise of their sovereignty. What is interesting is that these expressions of
dissatisfaction are becoming more intense and more regular than they used to
be. Post-war politics in Europe has been rather tranquil if the turbulent
period of the 1960s is excluded. After that, political mobilization went mainly
through the standard channels of party representation. In Eastern Europe,
1989-1990 was a period of regional
massive participation through rallies in politics: since then there have been
outbursts in specific countries but nothing as the rather epidemic spread of
protests we are experiencing at present. The very quantity and geographical
coverage of the phenomenon comes to show that there are deep processes in the
very foundations of democratic government, which are affected.
The first policy-relevant conclusion that we draw
is that people see elections as important, but less and less meaningful and
efficient instrument for the change of public policy. Protesting empowers and
voting frustrates because today voting for the government is simply no longer a
guarantee that things will change.
Elections are losing their central role in democratic politics firstly,
because citizens do not believe any more that it is governments that govern and
because they do not know whom to blame for their misfortunes. The more
transparent our societies become, the more difficult it is for citizens to
decide where to direct their anger. We live in a society of “innocent
criminals,” where governments prefer to trumpet their impotence rather than
their power.
Protests indicate that people will assert their sovereignty as the power to refuse.
People will step into the limelight very
often only to reject certain policies or debunk particular politicians. The new
democracy, that is emerging is a democracy of rejection. And indeed, in most of
our cases studies protesters do not have developed sets of alternative ideas,
they do not stay behind specific developed ideologies. This is often used by
governments in the handling of the protests – they accuse the protesters of
having no positive alternative. Although this is often a fact, it does not diminish
the corrective role of public protest – it indicates that the representative
structures of democracy have deviated rather drastically either from
foundational political and constitutional rules, or that they have not defended
adequately what is seen as the public interest.
The reasons for protests are not only economical. These reasons are the fears of the middle part of society (the “squeezed middle class” included)
While anti-austerity sentiments were at the
fore front in Spain, Greece and other countries, there were countries in which
economic considerations were not dominant. In Russia, Turkey and Bulgaria
protests emerged because of problems of authoritarian tendencies, endemic
corruption, electoral fraud. These problems emerged against the background of
strong economic performance as in the case of Turkey, or rising oil prices as
in the case of Russia. Generally, it will be a mistake to hypothesize that
recent protests have been organized and carried out by the socially most
vulnerable groups of society. Very often these protests are actually driven by
the anxieties of the middle classes or at least the median voters in society.
This was definitely the case of Bulgaria’s protests (especially those in the
summer of 2013), the Russian protests in Moscow, but also the Turkish and
Ukrainian protests. In Ukraine it was specifically clear that the middle of
society is strongly pro-European in most of the regions (something which was
confirmed at the elections after the fall of Yanukovich). Probably it will not
be too speculative to hypothesize that the vulnerable middle sections of
European societies are now much more often voting their fears and frustrations.
In the cases we have studied these fears have been connected with the austerity
in the Southern periphery, corruption in South-Eastern Europe, authoritarian
tendencies and rights abuse in Turkey and Russia. But there are other fears of
the squeezed middle of society – like immigrants, for instance – which can also
mobilize large masses of people.
Protests are interlinked with populist parties in a variety of ways
As already indicated above, protests and
populist parties are by-products of the desire of large sections of
contemporary democratic societies to regain their sovereignty, to increase
their control over their representatives. So, populists and protests could be
competitors, could be fiends, but they could be also enemies. Turkey is an
interesting case where protests have vented the frustration of masses of people
with a strong, populist Islamist leader – Erdogan. In Hungary, recent politics
has been marked by the attempts of the urban middle classes to displaced a
populist leader engaged in self-entrenchment in power – Viktor Orban of Fidesz.
In a similar fashion could be read the Russian situation, although there both
the slippage into authoritarianism and the curtailing of the rights of the
protesters are much more advanced. From our case studies Spain provides an
example of a protest which has led to the setting up of a leftist party, which
could be called populist – Podemos. (Similar is the situation in Greece). And
Bulgaria indicates that populist party politics and protests are separate
tracks – they have not made an obvious impact on each other: neither populist
parties need protests for their operation or survival, nor protests need to be
supported by populist players. This complex relationship needs to be taken into
account seriously: protests can neither be treated as a remedy for populism,
nor as a populist tool per se. The
two pehnomena are linked through the issue of sovereignty, which the people try
to reclaim through them, but this link does not mean that these two are
identical.
Mass protests are not an NGO revolution.
In some respects, commentators are right when they define the NGOs – the civil society sector – as the driver and beneficiary of the protest waves. Many of the protest activists were socialized in the NGO community, and their stress on transparency and control comes straight from the NGO playbook. Yet the age of protest also may mark the twilight of the NGOs, which may become the period’s big losers. The anti-institutional message of the protests drives the younger generation toward Internet-centered activism and distracts them from thinking organizationally. Moreover, since many governments doubt the spontaneous nature of the protests and are constantly seeking out their alleged masterminds, NGOs are an easy culprit. Not surprisingly, in numerous cases the protests have inspired governments to introduce harsh new restrictions on NGOs. Furthermore, the protests have forced NGOs to define themselves in a more open political way, which undermines in the eyes of the public their claim to independence. And in general, NGOs are very poor substitutes for representative structures such as political parties. Forced by the events to position themselves in an openly political way they are easily exposed as non-representative, essentially expertise-based entities, as they are by definition. So, NGOs can turn to be the biggest losers of the “protest mania”.
Protests do not claim power but they do represent an effective strategy of citizen empowerment in the age of globalization.
Protests succeed in influencing politics beyond
national borders and in subverting any sense of security among the elites. Protests unlike elections were able to
represent effectively the intensity of public sentiment, and it was the
intensity of anti-elite sentiment that is at the very heart of protest
politics. They demonstrate that things could change. The protests also create
community. People who take an active part customarily make them a part of their
political identity. One notable consequence of the current protest wave is that
it has made the practice popular. Ultimately, protests create a new public
culture in which the citizens does not participate in politics primarily and
mainly through elections. His or her involvement is more permanent, the individual
is hooked to a number of networks which are on a “stand by” mode, and could be
easily mobilize to veto a specific policy or censure a specific government. It
is questionable to what extent this public energy will have a really permanent
character – there have been examples of deep frustration and disappointment
with the protests themselves in some countries. But the falling costs of
participation and coordination through the social networks are a major
incentive for quick mobilization.
Protests are not a tool of routine, everyday
governance. If they are used for trivial and inconsequential matters people get
tired and become irresponsive. In all of the countries that we have studied
massive protests have erupted around issues, which the public sees as crucial
for the society. This could be the geopolitical orientation of the country, endemic
corruption, wrong economic policies leading to massive social problems,
electoral fraud, etc. Again, the variety of issues which trigger protests
indicates that these are not limited to truly existential issues of life and
death: still, however, the politics of protests begins where a government
commits a serious, out of the ordinary mistake.
While the protests in their pronouncement are a passionate rejection of a politics without possibility, they may be also a form of temporary acceptance of this new reality.
None of the major protest movements emerged with a
credible platform for changing the world—or even the economy. Syriza in Greece
and Podemos in Spain come close to this mark, but still there is a lot of
justified skepticism about what they are actually going to achieve. Even these
two parties – emerging on the basis of protests – are far from the drivers of
an anti-capitalist revolution. In fact, they might be seen as capitalism’s
safety valve. The protests do not mark the return of
revolution. Like elections, protests serve to keep revolution, with its message
of a radically different future, at an unbridgeable distance. The protests
succeeded to disrupt the political status quo but they also helped the elites
to re-legitimize their power. For this purpose it is rather instrumental that
protests are being “normalized” – that there is the understanding that they are
a permanent feature of democracy, an instrument which the sovereign resorts to
only in cases of substantial frustration and dissatisfactions. In essence,
protests become an opportunity for second order elections. It is of key
importance that the classical infrastructure of representative democracy is
preserved in this process, however. From the studied countries, Spain and
Bulgaria have been the positive examples of an unproblematic relation between
electoral politics and protest politics. There haven’t been in these two
countries serious violence, constitutional violations, restriction of rights,
attempts to exclude protestors from the public sphere. To an extent in Turkey,
but especially in Russia and Ukraine – the link between protests and electoral
politics has been damaged and even severed. They resulted in considerable
violence and abuse of rights, they damaged constitutionalism and the rule of
law. In order to prevent this from happening the enormous burden is on the side
of the governments in power. In Ukraine much of the violence and the legal and
constitutional violations were a result of the attempts of the government to suppress
protest and to punish the protesters: people were killed and kidnapped from
hospitals by governmental forces. Similar cases of excessive violence and tough
suppression of protests we found in Turkey and Russia. When treated in this
way, protests easily become subversive – people themselves respond with
violence. Or, protests become an easy excuse for entrenchment of authoritarian
leaders in power. Therefore, it has to be accepted from the very start that
peaceful protests – even when people challenge entire governments are a normal
instrument of contemporary democracy. Yes, this instrument needs to be used
responsibly and carefully, but even if it may seem whimsical, pointless or
unfounded the right to protest should be robustly protected.
The politics of protest signals the twilight of both the classical idea of revolution and the notion of political reformism.
Revolution assumes political ideology and a
struggle for taking the government. Protests were rebellion without ideology or
demands. Political reformism was the grand strategy of the progressives and
liberals in the 20th century. It accepts that the world is imperfect
but it also believes that the world is improvable. It assumed work within the
institutions and not against them; policy of small steps and gradual changes,
acting on insights and constant mechanism of self-correction are at the heart
of political reformism. In its classical manifestation it combines reforms from
inside and political pressure from outside. It succeeded to utilize elections
as an instrument for political change. The reformism was the strategy behind
the success of Western societies in the last century. Democracy of protests
turn its back on both revolution and reformism and brings at the center of
public life political dynamics centered on the successions of disruptions and
restoration of public order. By
rejecting revolution protests may be treated as some legitimation for the
status quo, but it needs to be stressed that this is temporal and provisional
legitimation. People continue to be angry and frustrated, they continue to look
for better forms of exercise of their sovereignty. They are ready to
experiment.
From this perspective, the politics of protest is
similar to other types of politics in a democratic state and the main policy
recommendation is that it should be subject to the same high and demanding
standards of observation of rights and the rule of law. Protest is not an
excuse for violence, it is not an extraordinary situation in the sense of
Schmitt, which calls for suspension of separation of powers and dictatorship.
Yes, there will be strong temptations on both sides – governments and
protestors – to cross certain lines. But “the normalization”of protests means
that societies have to learn to live with them, to create a political culture
which reads them correctly and treats them according to normal democratic
rules.
Conflict – and protests are a form of conflict - is
not necessarily dangerous for democracy. On the contrary, sometimes it is
necessary for the invigoration of
democracy, for the revision of representative structures, and for the
restoration of the trust of the people in these representative structures. In
this sense, some of the aspects of populist types of politics might be actually
beneficial for democracy in the longer run, if they lead to the replacement of
inappropriate institutions and practices with better ones. Yet, an excessive
instrumentalization by populist or authoritarian leaders might actually
destabilise democracy and endanger the liberal protection of rights.
This is the real trouble with the sovereigntist
reading of the protest, as a right of the people. Sometimes such a reading will
be necessary for the replacement of outdated, inefficient or oppressive
governmental and representative structures. Indeed, the transition in Eastern
Europe started with popular pressure through mass demonstrations in the
streets, which led to the liberalization of the oppressive communist regimes in
the region. Since liberalisation has by no means been accomplished in large
parts of the region, there are numerous examples in which the assembled people
are struggling against oppressive regimes: the Russian and Ukrainian case
studies could be interpreted in this fashion.
Direct popular intervention in the political process
has sometimes produced questionable results – it has gave an opportunity for
non-democratic, authoritarian, nationalistic leaders to make it to power, or to
entrench themselves in power. The huge pro-governmental rallies in Turkey and
Russia and other places have been a case in point. The so-called “orange
revolution” gave hopes to the advocates of the assembled people in 2004.
However, the second revised edition of the Ukrainian revolution (2006-2007)
demonstrated that popular mass assemblies could be manipulated by political
actors pursuing opaque ends in battles for power. The Hungarian “revolt of the
decent” against a “political lie” of a Socialist PM (in 2006-2008) also
demonstrated that mass protests might be manipulated in the clash between
different versions of populism: nationalist v. welfarist. Ultimately, they led
to the coming of Victor Orban to power, who has put significant strain on
Hungarian democracy.
A most striking recent example came from Turkey the
secularist urban middle classes and Islamist versions of populism entered into
direct competition in their demonstrations of the will of the people. The
protests discussed in this paper were an expression of this confrontation. This
show of numbers is apparently meant to represent a direct intervention of the
people in the political process: for the time-being, it has had mixed results
and has not stopped the advent of Mr. Erdogan to power.
Thus far we have shown that the sovereigntist
perspective might be put to good use for
the dismantling and liberalisation of oppressive regimes, and for the
reinvigoration of stagnant representative structures. Also, (and more commonly)
the sovereigntist perspective could be put to more questionable uses in the
struggle of populist actors for political power, struggle in which they try to
monopolise the mobilisation of the people, and to present their opponents as
traitors of national ideals or morally corrupt in some other way. Here, the
degrees of danger are nuanced. They start from the direct collapse of democracy
into some sort of dictatorship (Belarus) or manipulated, directed, managed
democracy (Russia). At the other end of the same negative spectrum are more
benign cases in which populist movements and leaders shake or disrupt the
representative structures of government, like in the case of Ukraine. The
following table presents a brief taxonomy of the uses of the sovereigntist
perspective to protest by the people, and illustrates the different categories
with examples from Europe:
|
Dismantling and liberalising
oppressive regimes
|
Re-invigorating stagnant or
corrupt systems of representation
|
Contributing to the rise of
populists and serving in their power struggles
|
Marginalising and oppressing
minorities/opposition
|
Undermining democracy
|
|
Mass
demonstrations across Eastern Europe in 1989-1990 demanding liberalisation;
Student
demonstrations against Milosevic in Serbia late 1990s;
Kasparov’s
Other Russia’s activities
(unsuccessful);
Russia’s
protest from 2011 (unsuccessful)
Ukraine
2013-2014 (?)
|
Greek
Protests since 2008;
Spanish
protests 2011-;
Bulgarian
protests 2013;
Georgian
“rose” revolution;
Orange
revolution in Ukraine (2004)
|
Power
struggle between president and parliament in Ukraine (2006-2007)
Power
struggles between president and parliament in Romania (2007)
Greek
protests 2008 onwards;
Hungarian mass
protests in 2006
Mass
rallies in Turkey in 2006-2007 in the struggle between secularists and
Islamists
|
The rise
of an anti-Roma parties organizing rallies: Yobbik in Hungary, for instance,
or Ataka party in Bulgaria;
Anti-Islamic
rallies in Western Europe and Germany in particular;
Denying
the right to assembly of Macedonians from OMO Ilinden in Bulgaria;
|
The
institutionalisation of plebiscitarian dictatorships, as in the case of
Belarus, and in some of the countries of Central Asia after mass protests in
support of populist leaders;
The
institutionalisation of a directed, managed democracy in Russia in which the
political opponents of the president are systematically denied basic rights,
including the right to assembly, while the government organizes massive
rallies of its supporters;
|
The suggested taxonomy does not pretend to be
exhaustive or analytically very precise. Its point is to demonstrate that there
is a spectrum of uses of the sovereigntist interpretationof protest, starting
from the clearly beneficial, going through the benign, and ending with the
clearly dangerous and malicious forms of the intervention of the assembled
people in politics, which actually result in the subversion of democracy. While
there could be much less substantive disagreement concerning the cases in the
first and the fifth columns of the table, the rest of the three columns seem
more fluid. In any event, the categorisation of a particular situation in one
of the categories could hardly be fully objective: assessment to the danger of
democracy is liable to depend on the views of the persons passing the
judgement. This irreducible political element makes it difficult for the issue
of the danger of particular developments to be treated in a judicial context:
courts are liable to be involved in political arguments, as the Ukrainian
example shows.[1]
The taxonomy also demonstrates, however, that the
people’s direct intervention in the political process is much less dangerous
when: a) it is meant to create competitive representative political structures
– parties and parliaments; or b) when it happens in circumstances where viable
competitive political structures already exist; c) when both government and
protesters work under the clear assumption that they are operating within
democracy and the rule of law. On the contrary, in circumstances of absence of
robust competitive structures of representation, the “assembled people” could
be easily manipulated by skilful demagogues, who might do away with democracy
altogether. It is probably not a surprise that super-presidential systems with
weak parliaments have produced more dangerous forms of intervention of the
people in the political process.
Further, the taxonomy actually shows that when a
non-democratic regime has been put in place, it is no longer interested in the real presence of the assembled people,
but rather in their virtual presence
behind the authoritarian leader. Mass assemblies become either fully directed
and managed, or are being replaced by media impressions of such demonstrations.
This comes to show that there is some deeper link between the right to assembly
and democracy than a deflationary account of the concept of the right to
protest would suggest: protest is important where democracy still exists.
[1] For the impact of the rise of
populism on the rule of law see: D. Smilov, Populism, Courts, and the Rule of
Law: A Policy Brief, Foundation for Law, Justice and Society in collaboration
with the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford (2007) http://www.fljs.org/images/Smilov_Policy_Brief.pdf
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