Smell of revolution is in the air: from Kiev to Cairo, protesters...

Posted on February 15, 2014

http://utopiathecollapse.com/2014/02/15/smell-of-revolution-is-i...

February 2014 CIVILIZATION It seems as if the world has broken out in mass, government-threatening protests: Caracas, Ankara, Bangkok and Kiev are among the capitals that have erupted in flames and clouds of tear gas in recent weeks. But these arent the democracy protests weve known during the past 2 1/2 decades. Two things distinguish them: First, they are mass uprisings not against dictatorships but against governments that came to power through reasonably fair elections in existing (if young) democracies, but then turned against the principles of democracy by suppressing media and opposition forces, by rewriting laws and by altering constitutions to partisan advantage. These people are protesting against the rotten fruits of democracy. Second, these protesters are generally not interested in using democratic politics as their instrument of change. New political parties and candidates arent emerging from these movements, whose members often see representative democracy as a sideshow. Theyre not anti-democratic, but theyve come to believe that the protests themselves are more democratic than elections. Ive witnessed this in all the protests Ive attended recently. In Kiev, during the lull between outbreaks of mad violence in the citys haphazard Independence Square protest camp, I spent time asking dozens of protesters who they wanted to run Ukraine. Assuming their mission to force the resignation of President Viktor Yanukovych was a success, who were they backing as a successor? Most had to spend some time thinking about it. A few named Yulia Tymoshenko, the imprisoned onetime opposition leader, famous for her blond plaits. Some had no thought on this at all. Most others named one of the three opposition-party leaders, liberal or right-wing nationalist, who have appeared onstage regularly during the protests. But almost all of that group seemed surprised by the question: This wasnt why they were here, or what they were thinking about. I heard similar responses in Istanbuls Gezi Park protests last summer: While the young people denouncing President Recep Tayyip Erdogans excesses were politically sophisticated, they werent enthusiastic about the main secular opposition party and generally hadnt put much thought to an alternative: This was about ending injustices, not about finding new leaders. Cairo in 2011 was the first time I saw this effect so dramatically: The broadly liberal, secular protesters who led the uprising against dictator Hosni Mubarak failed dramatically to produce a viable candidate or even a strongly identifiable party; the most admired figures from those protests all chose not to enter elected politics and I spoke to many protesters who seemed not to be terribly bothered by this. Ive seen this same disengagement from the electoral system in many recent protests in New York, I didnt meet many Occupy Wall Street protesters who cared about Congress or the presidency. This disengagement may be understandable, but its results can be tragic. In Egypt, it meant that the Muslim Brotherhood rushed in to fill the political vacuum: When elections came in 2012, Islamist president Mohammed Morsi won with just 51.7 per cent of the vote. A stronger interest in running for office would almost certainly have produced a secular president. And then, in 2013, secular Egyptians held mass protests against Mr. Morsi who had, like Mr. Yanukovych, done menacing things to the democratic system and his opponents. Once again, the protesters did not seek to put someone in office. They settled, with surprising placidity, for a military coup. This all might sound like a paradox: Here are people in countries that have only recently fought for democracy using the word revolution to describe protests against the governments produced by that very democracy. This is exactly the paradox that puzzled Robert Dahl, the great political scientist who died last week at 98. The paradox vanishes, he wrote in his classic After the Revolution, if we realize that because democracy has never been fully achieved, it has always been and is now potentially a revolutionary doctrine. For every system purporting to be democratic is vulnerable to the charge that it is not democratic enough, or not really or fully democratic. In other words, sometimes the excesses of fairly elected leaders require extra-democratic responses. This has been a pattern in many countries: Protest for democracy, then protest against the results of that democracy. Fair enough, as there have always been more Robespierres than George Washingtons. But at some point, you need to find someone fresh to step up to the plate or someone far worse will fill the vacuum. Globe and Mail

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