[governance] Fwd: The ‘Viral’ Revolutions Spread Across Europe

Thu Jun 2 12:07:48 EDT 2011

Dear Parminder,

Thanks for sharing the article.

Two points on your remarks:
- fully agree on "new institutional possibilities of participatory
democracy" not fully explored yet; probably new tools can be invented;
- I know your reticences - often voiced on the list - regarding the current
modalities of "multi-stakeholderism" and some of them do deserve attention
(such as the risks of capture, the weight of some actors, the north-south
unbalances and the representation of the unrepresented); however, what I am
missing in your very critical comment ("*it is very much the wrong direction
*") is the proposed alternative; imperfect as they are, aren't the
experiences currently under way presenting more potential for broad
participation, openness and "deeper democracy" (to use your formulation)
than using only intergovernmental interaction in the UN or the G8 ?

In a nutshell, what would you like to see that would be so different from
what is being attempted in the IGF, for instance, that it would justify
thrashing it instead of perfecting it ?

Best

Bertrand

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 2:43 PM, parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> wrote:

>  Hi All
>
> The article below from India gives a southern view of the current political
> impacts of the internet and the deeper politics behind it.
>
> Important to notice how the key issue here was economic but it turned into
> a demand for political change and new practices of 'real democracy'. We dont
> necessarily have an alternative model here, but it is such new institutional
> possibilities of participatory democracy  that may have become available
> today that are exciting and must be explored. Regret to say, the simplistic
> notions (involving co-option) of  multistakeholderism that we hear so much
> about as the next political system is not at all the right direction. In
> fact, in the form it mostly gets spoken of and practised in IG arena, it is
> very much the wrong direction. Parminder
>
> http://kafila.org/2011/05/30/the-viral-revolutions-spread-across-europe/
>
> The ‘Viral’ Revolutions Spread Across Europe
> May 30, 2011
>  tags: austerity measures<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/austerity-measures/>,
> democracy <http://en.wordpress.com/tag/democracy/>, Greece protests<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/greece-protests/>,
> Indignants <http://en.wordpress.com/tag/indignants/>, Spain<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/spain/>
> by Aditya Nigam
>
> *The New Democratic Upsurges*
>
> The mainstream Western media that celebrated the democracy movements in the
> Arab world not very long back, is relatively silent now. For, then it was
> the Arab youth’s striving for the ‘western values’ of democracy that it was
> celebrating. Now that the cry of ‘democracy’ is arising from its very midst,
> it does not seem to quite know what to do. From May 15 on, for almost two
> weeks Madrid and other Spanish cities have been witnessing some of the
> largest demonstrations in recent memory. Protesters have thronged the Puerta
> del Sol, virtually camping there. As government forces started cracking
> down, demonstrations began to grow in an ever expanding scale spreading to
> many other Spanish cities. When the government moved to ban demonstrations
> on May 20, in the run up to the regional and municipal elections, the
> protests acquired an even more militant form. A ‘snapshot’ of the rallies in
> defiance of the ban:
>
> The initial protests against the planned multibillion euro bailout plan for
> banks, austerity measures and against high unemployment almost 45 percent
> among the youth), according to reports, were not very large but when the
> government responded by arresting several activists and demonstrators,
> things started going out of hand. That was the ‘spark that lit the prairie
> fire’. As Ryan Gallagher’s report<http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/05/puerto-square-spanish-work> in
> the *New Statesman*put it:
>
> A demonstration against the arrests was organised in the city’s main
> square, Puerta del Sol, and numbers soon snowballed when word got out over
> the internet. What began as a group of fewer than a hundred activists
> reached an estimated 50,000 within less than six days.
>
> The protesters whose arrests had sparked the initial demonstration were
> released and immediately returned to the square. By the time they arrived,
> the demonstration was no longer just about their treatment at the hands of
> the police. It was about government corruption, lack of media freedom, bank
> bailouts, unemployment, austerity measures and privatisation.
>
> Here is another video of a fierce battle being fought on the streets of
> Madrid:
>
> According to a report in Der Speigel<http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,763836,00.html>
> ,
>
> The protesters have occupied the square for days now, with some comparing
> the gatherings to those that took place on Cairo’s Tahrir Square earlier
> this year, and demonstrations also continued for the fifth day in a row on
> Thursday in Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao and Santiago de Compostela.
> Spaniards living abroad have also set up protest camps outside the country’s
> embassies in Berlin, Paris, London and Amsterdam. Most of the events have
> been organized online. After organizing demonstrations in around 50 cities
> last Sunday, the Real Democracy Now (the name of the movement that
> coordinates the Spanish struggle – AN) movement became a household name
> virtually overnight.
>
> By the end of May, the movement had now spread to Greece where, for the
> fifth consecutive day yesterday, an estimated 100, 000 people were
> demonstrating at the Syntagma square in Athens. Below the parliament
> building they stood, chanting ‘thieves’, ‘thieves’ and carrying placards
> that said ‘Poverty is the greatest abuse’.  Initially calling themselves the
> ‘indignants’, the protesters in both Spain and Greece gradually coalesced
> into this loose federation with a website and a Facebook page by the name of
> Real Democracy Now (see their Manifesto in English translation here<http://www.democraciarealya.es/?page_id=814>)
> that rapidly had over three and a half lakh members signing up. And
> virtually in tandem with the Spanish movement’s call for ‘real democracy’,
> the Greek movement too has transformed the struggle against austerity and
> bailout measures into *a struggle for a changing the political system
> itself, into a struggle for radicalizing democracy*.
> [image: Athens demonstrations]
>
> Athens Syntagma square, image courtesy Greek Reporter
>
> *The Question of ‘Politics’*
>
> This mutation of the essentially ‘economic’ struggle against the bailout
> plans and austerity measures into a political struggle for the
> transformation of the very terrain of democracy tells us something serious
> about the relationship of traditional forms and institutions of politics and
> their growing conflict with popular aspirations.  The call for ‘real
> democracy’ comes in a context where the political parties and the formal
> political domain is being seen as highly corrupt and deeply implicated in
> the politics of predatory corporations and banks. By and large, not only
> political parties but often, even the unions have been bypassed by the mass
> mobilizations – an index of the relative redundancy of these structures of
> formal democratic politics. A report in the l’Humanité<http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article1782> put
> it:
>
> *No trade union, let alone a political party. The workings of traditional
> dispute are outmoded, and even deliberately excluded.* Internet, through
> the exchange in real time via social networks and chats, has allowed the
> emergence of a spontaneous free and radical protest movement by a generation
> that’s had enough…
>
> The Internet has become a structural element of the movement. *What is
> expressed is anger, a desire for radical change and a rejection of all
> traditional forms of politics. Which explains the refusal to be co-opted by
> any political party or trade union and calls to spoil ballot cards or vote
> blank.* Confidence in the Spanish democratic system is broken; the
> indignants have the impression that their voices are never heard. The
> descent into the street came naturally, as an extension. The street is also
> where they want to be heard.
>
> Many observers see the protests in Spain as a continuation of the May Day
> demonstration earlier this year. Interestingly, the May Day demonstration
> itself, according to Gemma Galdon Clavell<http://browsertunnel.info/page/000000A/687474703a2f2f626c6f67732e65756f627365727665722e636f6d2f67616c646f6e2f> of
> the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, was organized independently of the
> mainstream political parties and trade unions and was ignored by the media.
> The point is itself worth some serious thought for it clearly indicates that
> even those formally bearing the legacy of the Left and the workers’
> movement, were clearly quite out of sync with large sections of the youth
> who also aligned themselves to the legacy of the Left  through the May Day
> demonstration.  That is why the entire atmosphere in these protests was said
> to be permeated by an anti-politics sentiment and with a contempt for all
> political parties. Once the movement acquired the form of a huge mass
> movement, obviously things must have changed further. No longer would the
> movement have consisted only of left-wing supporters of the workers’
> struggles. People with different political/ ideological inclinations, people
> with no particular political preferences, all started joining into this mass
> of ‘the indignant’.  The manifesto of Real Democracy Now emphasized this
> apparently nonpolitical character of the movement when it underlined
> something to the effect that ‘we are believers and nonbelievers, we have
> different political convictions but the thing that unites us is that we are
> angry at economic the state of affairs’.
>
> *The Arab Virus*
>
> What we see playing out here in Spain and Greece is not simply an
> aberration. The resonances of the struggles in the Arab world are very
> obvious and widely acknowledged. Activist-organizer Beatriz Pérez, 29,
> underlines: ‘Egypt and Tunisia was a very important catalyst for the
> movement in Spain’, which constituted an inspiration and a trigger, apart
> from inspiration of the recent student demonstrations in the UK. A report
> in Hurriyat Daily News<http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=a-bird8217s-eye-view---the-revolution-spreads-north-2011-05-27>,
> recently recalled its own speculations sometime ago, about the possibility
> of the North African and Middle Eastern revolution engulfing Europe – a
> possibility that it now saw becoming a reality. The resonances however, are
> not simply limited to the fact that the Internet and Facebook etc became the
> major vehicles of organizing the protests. These similarities are in fact
> linked to some other quite significant issues – those that pertain to the
> ‘implosion of the political’. Throughout  the Arab world, this was in a very
> different context, precisely the situation of the formal domain of politics.
> Political parties lay at the feet of the establishment or had reduced
> themselves to complete inefficacy. In country after country across North
> Africa and West Asia, we have seen people in their hundreds of thousands
> march at the head and parties follow. The vanguards – Leninist and
> non-Leninist – all reduced to the ultimate pathos of ineffective, closed
> sects in some cases; or to political instruments in service of bankers and
> corporations. In earlier times, there was no way of communicating without
> the mediation of these organizations and their leaders. Things have changed
> now and direct communication and discussion has become possible through the
> Internet. A lot of discussion now happens there. But the Arab revolutions
> also have a ‘spiritual’ effect over these movements insofar as they are
> equally invested in the values of democracy.
>
> Thus Dick Nichols of the Green Left Weekly<http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/47731>,
> reports from Barcelona:
>
> The central plazas of dozens of cities and towns across Spain bear an
> uncanny resemblance to Tahrir Square in Cairo. They have been taken over by
> thousands of demonstrators demanding a “new system”. As of May 29, dozens of
> other central plazas in Spanish cities and towns look the same — taken over
> by thousands of ordinary people demanding “a new system.
>
> As speculations mount about Greece defaulting on its loan repayment from
> the IMF, the pressure has been building up on the government from
> international financial and corporate circles. In earlier times, such
> pressure would have worked and all political parties, seduced by the logic
> of neo-liberalism would have fallen in line. Not any more. It is clear here,
> to ordinary people as well, that if austerity measures a put in place after
> the debt is repaid, that will lead to further cuts in salaries and pension
> and result in further increase in unemployment and homelessness. That is no
> longer acceptable. And as the Hurriyat report underlines, if Greece
> defaults, that will not be the end of the story; it will most certainly be
> followed by Portugal, Ireland and Spain – with Italy not very far behind.
>
> Here too, the link with the Arab revolts is quite obvious – though the
> issues may not be quite the same. But whatever the differences between the
> European and the Arab situation, one thing is quite clear: the question of
> livelihoods is central here and the fact that increasingly decisions about
> peoples’ lives are being taken away from their hands and manipulated in the
> name of some abstract notions of well-being which ultimately amount to the
> enrichment of some at the cost of vast majorities of populations.
>
> *Democracy in Practice*
>
> There is no doubt that none of the great movements sweeping the world in
> this part of the twenty-first century has any attachment to or any fixation
> with a programme. On the contrary, it cares two hoots about those who have.
> For those who have made programmes behind closed doors and do not want them
> to be discussed democratically, there is nothing but contempt in these
> movements. Yes, they do want to transform things but the critical question
> here is, rather than capture power and start mimicking the erstwhile
> powerful, one of creating new ground rules. The critical thing is to
> enunciate a different political practice so that whoever comes to power –
> the bourgeois or his Leninist mimic – will all have to be governed by those
> new ground rules. Not revolutionary? So be it. That is the fantasy of
> revolutionaries, not of the masses. It never was. Meanwhile, Puerta del Sol
> has been converted into a huge popular assembly where policies are being
> debated. Different commissions are drawing out policy proposals that are
> then discussed in the assembly, which has itself become a huge training
> camp, in between fighting street battles with government forces. Here is a
> glimpse from the *New Statesman* report:
>
> The protesters at Puerta del Sol are interested only in action, not
> rhetoric. In the square, they built a makeshift campsite, including
> everything from a children’s nursery and a library to a kitchen offering
> free food donated by local businesses.
>
> In the space of a few days they had created separate working commissions to
> form proposals for change to current government policy. A social and
> migration commission would look at immigration policy, the health commission
> would focus on how to deprivatise health-care services. Other commissions
> were formed to handle politics, education, the economy and the environment.
>
> Among the camp’s immediate demands were calls for electoral reform, the
> dissolution of the Spanish parliament’s second chamber, and an end to a
> much-despised policy of “salaries for life” for politicians.
>
> The movement itself has no single leader or figurehead; all decisions are
> made by consensus at general assemblies, held twice daily. Hundreds,
> sometimes thousands, attend the meetings, and no decision is taken until
> every single person is in agreement.
>
> The meetings are long and laborious – occasionally lasting more than four
> hours at a time – but seem so far to have been successful.
>
> Do you get a whiff of anti-Leninist, anti-vanguardist, anarchism? How can
> the people ever discuss and decide! They can and they do. Maybe that is
> where the twenty-first century will reverse the perversions of the
> twentieth.
>
>
>
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-- 
____________________
Bertrand de La Chapelle
Tel : +33 (0)6 11 88 33 32

"Le plus beau métier des hommes, c'est d'unir les hommes" Antoine de Saint
Exupéry
("there is no greater mission for humans than uniting humans")
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