сряда, 18 февруари 2015 г.

Protests: character and significance


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.

 
Protest signals the declining importance of elections in democratic politics

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 risky instrument of citizens’ control be cannot be confident that people will again be ready to mass on the streets if the public interest is violated?

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.

 
Protests and the People: Tentative Conclusions
 
The analysis thus far has shown that if protest is understood as a demonstration of the desire of “the people” to have a direct impact on politics, to reclaim their sovereignty, the value of the right to assembly becomes very high. Because of this high value, political players will always dispute who is actually represented by the people in the street; do these people really represent the people as a whole.

 
In this contestation, on the one hand there will be populists of various sorts, who would like to show that they are capable of mobilising the people, on the other hand there will be vulnerable groups, who have been categorised as “national traitors” or at least as not proper members of “the people”, who also need to demonstrate physical presence. In general, there is a possibility for a number of types of conflicts: i) between different types of populists, and ii) between populists and vulnerable excluded groups; iii) between populists and traditional parties; iv) between the people and the party system as a whole (anti-party protests).

 

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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