World politics: Essay: A new age of protest

We are witnessing an upsurge of protest in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia—with North America (Occupy aside) and Sub-Saharan Africa being the odd men out. The mainsprings of the protests may be different—some are responses to economic distress, others are revolts against dictatorship, still others express the aspirations of new middle classes in fast-growing emerging markets—but all have common underlying features. The economic, social and political fallout from the 2008–09 global economic and financial crisis helps only partially to explain the upsurge of protest, but what appears to be decisive is the erosion of trust in governments, institutions, parties and politicians—what is generally termed “the crisis of democracy”. The striking features of the protests are their diffuse, inchoate character, their disavowal of politics and ideology, and their self-conscious rejection of organisation and leadership. It is therefore a misnomer to talk about a “new age of revolution”: today’s protest movements bear little resemblance to their 20th–century predecessors.

Within the generalised wave of protest, it is possible to distinguish between several broad types of protest movement.

a) Those pertaining to the “Arab Spring”, the wave of anti-regime and pro-democracy protests and conflicts that began in December 2010 in Tunisia and spread to Algeria, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen and other countries, sometimes also referred to as the “Islamist Winter” as a result of the success of Islamist parties in ensuing elections.

b) There has been an increasing incidence of more traditional types of social unrest, such as strikes and anti-austerity demonstrations, in response to the continuing negative fallout from the global economic crisis of 2008–09, which has led to rising unemployment, poverty and inequality in many countries.

c) There is also a more amorphous category of protest that could be termed “new social movements” (NSMs), as exemplified by the Turkish protesters, the Indignados in Spain, the Occupy movements in New York and London, and the Pirates in Germany and other north European countries. Their causes are diverse, their participants are mainly young and middle-class and their demands are inchoate, but their targets are generally political elites who are regarded as distant, self-serving and corrupt.

The catalysts for these various types of protest movement are diverse (the decades-long dictatorships in the Middle East, austerity policies in Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, the building of megaprojects in Turkey, Brazil and Macedonia etc), but all of them share some common features that set them apart from the sorts of protests that were common in the 20th century.

The drivers of unrest

The sheer number of protests spanning different time zones has caught the attention of commentators everywhere. In fact, protests have been building a head of steam for several years, certainly in Europe, where there have been recurrent episodes of unrest and many governments have fallen. Why are protests erupting now and what are their causes—is it simply a coincidence that unrest is sweeping across several continents at the same time?

The backdrop to the recent wave of protest is the 2008–09 crisis and its aftermath. The negative economic and social fallout from the crisis is important, although it cannot alone explain the upsurge of unrest. A recent study by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), World of Work Report 2013: Repairing the Social Fabric, noted that social unrest has increased in 2011–12 relative to the pre–crisis period in 46 of the 71 countries covered. The ILO’s index uses five weighted variables: confidence in government; living standard; local job market; freedom in your life; and access to Internet. The ILO carried out an empirical assessment to establish the link between its social unrest index and actual economic indicators measured by its social unrest index. It concluded that economic growth and unemployment are the two most important determinants of social unrest.

Like the EIU’s own social unrest index, the ILO found that Europe is the region most susceptible to social unrest as a result of the economic repercussions (recession, rising unemployment, growing income inequality) of the crisis and the post-crisis policy responses (austerity policies and regressive democratic trends). The countries that experienced the sharpest increases in the risk of social unrest in 2010–12 are Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain. The risk of social unrest also increased markedly in central and south-east European countries, among members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and in countries in South Asia. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) the risk of social unrest peaked in 2008 and remained high afterwards. The risk of social unrest declined in Sub-Saharan Africa, which performed well economically in this period (2011–12), and in East Asia, South-east Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, reflecting a relatively swift recovery from the economic crisis.

Ironically, given the conclusions of its own research, the ILO criticises the EIU’s social unrest index for weighting very heavily the institutional and political weaknesses of developing countries (we probably weight these factors more highly than others for developed countries too). However, our emphasis on the importance of this factor appears to be vindicated by recent developments, given that much of the recent unrest in both developed and less developed countries appears to be motivated by a deep sense of popular dissatisfaction with political elites and institutions.

The trust deficit

As we argued in our 2009 report, Manning the Barricades, economic distress is almost a necessary condition for serious instability, but by itself it is not sufficient. Declines in incomes are not always followed by unrest. It is only when economic distress is accompanied by other structural features of vulnerability that there is a high risk of instability. The underlying vulnerability to unrest depends on a host of factors, including the degree of income inequality, the state of governance, levels of social provision, ethnic tensions, public trust in institutions and a history of unrest.

On this basis, we suggested that Europe would be the worst-affected region, and we singled out Greece and the UK as the countries in western Europe most likely to suffer social unrest. And even during the economic boom of the mid–2000s we argued that eastern Europe was particularly vulnerable to external shocks because of the deep-seated popular dissatisfaction with political systems and democracy. The crisis has reinforced a pre-existing mood of disappointment with the experience and results of the 20–year transition. There has been a marked further decline in life satisfaction, support for markets and democracy and trust in institutions—to a degree which, a few years ago, seemed to set the eastern half of the continent apart from the western half. However, in recent years southern Europe has rapidly caught up with the east in this regard, and western Europe is now not far behind.

Only by giving due consideration to the political dimension can we understand the mainsprings of the new age of protest and see the common denominators of seemingly diverse protests. It is the growth of popular distrust in governments, institutions, parties and politicians that is driving many of today’s protest movements, whether in austerity-hit Europe or fast-growing Latin America. There has been a long-term secular trend of declining trust throughout the Western world since the 1970s; this accelerated and spread after the collapse of communism in 1989 and has sped up again since the 2008–09 crisis, as has been well documented in regular surveys by Gallup, Pew, Eurobarometer and others.

A Bulgarian political scientist, Ivan Krastev, has investigated the trust deficit in relation to recent events in Europe and other regions and discusses how the behaviour of political elites in managing the crisis has led to an erosion of trust and disappointment in democracy (the EIU’s Democracy Index 2012 discusses these issues too). Krastev says that the new populism is best understood as “the frustration of the empowered”: the spread of democracy worldwide is coinciding with a growing sense of disappointment with democracy.

This decline of public trust in democratic institutions helps to explain what the impoverished inhabitants of Sofia, Bulgaria have in common with the middle-class demonstrators in Taksim Square, Turkey. The protesters in Turkey are not motivated by economic hardship or dissatisfaction with the Erdogan government’s handling of the economy—its economic record was the main reason the Justice and Development Party (AKP) was re–elected in 2007. The unifying issue is dissatisfaction with Erdogan’s style of government, its lack of consultation and its heavy-handed response to the protests. In Bulgaria, what started off as protests against higher electricity bills a few months ago quickly metamorphosed into generalised anti-government demonstrations complaining of corruption and lack of transparency, resulting in the fall of the centre-right government of Boiko Borisov. Within weeks of its election the new centre-left left government found itself on the receiving end of popular protests against cronyism and corruption, and it is unlikely to serve a full term.

A modern malady

So who are these new-age protesters, and what do they really want? In the main (though not exclusively) they are led by young, educated, middle-class individuals who resent their political leaders. They do not generally belong to political parties or trade unions and prefer the anonymity of Twitter and other social networks to the traditional political soap box—at least until they are carried aloft into the TV studios, when their social network mobilisations unexpectedly turn into mass protests. This happened with the five founders of the “tamarrod” (rebellion) movement in Egypt, all in their 20s, who started out organising a petition to oust President Mohamed Morsi and ended up being guests on prime-time TV talk shows.

The historian Francis Fukuyama argues that new protest movements are the result of the rise of a new global middle class, who feel alienated from the ruling political elite and who have a sense of entitlement that is not being fulfilled. The demanding new middle classes are not just a problem for authoritarian regimes or new democracies, according to Fukuyama, but for established democracies too. However, he notes that historically such movements have rarely succeeded in bringing about long-term political change, because they are minorities in their societies and have proved incapable of linking up and uniting with other social forces. All this is true as far as it goes, but there is a more fundamental reason why today’s protest movements are unlikely to challenge the status quo or bring about substantive political changes.

“All gods dead”

There is a hole at the heart of the new protest movements, as other observers have noted, pointing to the absence of a clearly defined political purpose. We have the paradox of protests without politics in the classic sense of a contest of ideas. Twentieth-century-style politics—a clash of ideas and a commitment to fight for them—no longer exists in the second decade of the 21st century. If we look at the demands of the protest movements around the world, this becomes self-evident. Most of these movements centre on demands for dignity, inclusiveness, recognition, respect.

From Istanbul to Rio, London to New York and Madrid to Athens, protesters have self-consciously refused to engage in a process of political clarification—in favour of just making an emotional statement (indignation, victimhood, leave me alone, not in my name etc). Many protesters refuse to clarify what it is they are protesting against or fighting for, and even make a virtue of having nothing to say. The ” silent man” in Taksim Square, Turkey, who stood without moving or speaking for eight hours, is a fitting symbol of the new-age protests.

Behind this silence is a sense of impotence. Krastev cites a study of protest movements carried out by the London School of Economics (LSE), which noted that many were not protesting against specific government policies as much as expressing a general belief that powerful interests have captured democratic institutions and ordinary citizens are powerless to bring about change. This sense of powerlessness, of being on the receiving end of changes wrought by forces beyond the control of ordinary people, runs through many of the protest movements.

Even when protesters do put forward formal political demands, they tend to be accepting of the status quo. So Bulgaria’s protesters have demanded a reform of the electoral system and the country’s institutions, an end to corruption and greater transparency. These demands suggest an inability in this age of anti-politics to conceive of a better alternative, no matter how disappointing the democratic fare on offer. The protest movements do not have any sense of being agencies of social change; in fact, they are often anti-change and express regressive ideas about growth and development.

The problem for the world’s protesters is that they have been unable to come up with new ideas to fill the ideological vacuum. Most of the new protest movements deliberately eschew ideology, even making a virtue of their lack of political ideas. Most protesters might be able to identify what they are against, but not many can articulate clearly what they are for, or have a plan of how they are going to achieve their goals.

Or does it explode?

The exception to the apolitical trend of modern-day protests appeared to be the Arab Spring movements, which brought masses of people out on to the streets in a collective challenge to the anciens régimes of the region. Once people began to have a sense of their power to change things, as in Egypt a year or so ago, they became more determined to fight for what they wanted. However, what started as a potentially transformative movement for democratic change has ended up endorsing the removal of the first democratically elected president by a military coup.

Having failed to clarify their political objectives and organise themselves effectively, the original pro-democracy protesters in Egypt found their aspirations for democracy blocked by the military. They went out on the streets again to insist on an end to military rule and to fight for free elections, but they failed to rally the more conservative elements in Egyptian society behind their vision of a more secular democratic future. When the first democratic elections brought the better organised Islamists to power, the crowds came out on the streets again to demand their removal. That a military coup to remove the elected president and his party from power can be celebrated by protesters as a success—even as it entrenches nationwide divisions and threatens to precipitate civil war—suggests that Egypt’s protest movement suffers from the same flaws as others.