Peter McPhee* says we are living in a world of upheaval, so why aren’t today’s protests leading to revolutions?
Photo: Oscar Chan
We live in a world of violent challenges to the status quo, from Chile and Iraq to Hong Kong, Catalonia and the Extinction Rebellion.
These protests are usually presented in the media simply as expressions of rage at ‘the system’ and are eminently suitable for TV news coverage, where they flash across our screens in 15-second splashes of colour, smoke and sometimes blood.
These are huge rebellions.
In Chile, for example, an estimated one million people demonstrated last month.
By the next day, 19 people had died, nearly 2,500 had been injured and more than 2,800 arrested.
How might we make sense of these upheavals?
Are they revolutionary or just a series of spectacular eruptions of anger?
And are they doomed to fail?
Key characteristics of a revolution
As a historian of the French Revolution of 1789-99, I often ponder the similarities between the five great revolutions of the modern world – the English Revolution (1649), American Revolution (1776), French Revolution (1789), Russian Revolution (1917) and Chinese Revolution (1949).
A key question today is whether the rebellions we are currently witnessing are also revolutionary.
A model of revolution drawn from the five great revolutions can tell us much about why they occur and take particular trajectories.
The key characteristics are:
- Long-term causes and the popularity of a sociopolitical ideology at odds with the regime in power.
- Short-term triggers of widespread protest.
- Moments of violent confrontation the powerholders are unable to contain as sections of the armed forces defect to rebels.
- The consolidation of a broad and victorious alliance against the existing regime.
- A subsequent fracturing of the revolutionary alliance as competing factions vie for power.
- The re-establishment of a new order when a revolutionary leader succeeds in consolidating power.
Why today’s protests are not revolutionary
This model indicates the upheavals in our contemporary world are not revolutionary – or not yet.
The most likely to become revolutionary is in Iraq, where the regime has shown a willingness to kill its own citizens (more than 300 in October alone).
We do not know how the extraordinary rebellion in Hong Kong will end, but it may be very telling there does not seem to have been significant defection from the police or army.
People grow angry far more often than they rebel.
And rebellions rarely become revolutions.
So, we need to distinguish between major revolutions that transform social and political structures, coups by armed elites and common forms of protest over particular issues.
An example of this is the massive, violent and ultimately successful protests in Ecuador last month that forced the Government to cancel an austerity package.
The protests in Hong Kong and Catalonia fall into yet another category: they have limited aims for political sovereignty rather than more general objectives.
All successful revolutions are characterised by broad alliances at the outset as the deep-seated grievances of a range of social groups coalesce around opposition to the existing regime.
They begin with mass support.
Mass protests fail when they are unable to create unity around core objectives.
The Arab Spring, for instance, held so much promise after blossoming in 2010, but with the possible exception of Tunisia, failed to lead to meaningful change.
Revolutionary alliances collapsed rapidly into civil war (as in Libya) or failed to neutralise the armed forces (as in Egypt and Syria).
Why is there so much anger?
Fundamental to an understanding of the rage so evident today is the ‘democratic deficit’.
This refers to public anger at the way global democratic reform has had such uneven social outcomes.
One expression of this anger has been the rise of fearful xenophobia expertly captured by populist politicians, most famously, for example, in the case of US President, Donald Trump or President, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.
Elsewhere, the anger is popular rather than populist.
In upheavals from Lebanon and Iraq to Zimbabwe and Chile, resentment is particularly focused on the evidence of widespread corruption as elites flout the basic norms of transparency and equity.
The broader context of today’s upheavals also includes the uneven withdrawal of the US from international engagement, providing new opportunities for two authoritarian superpowers (Russia and China).
The United Nations, meanwhile, is floundering in its attempt to provide alternative leadership through a rules-based international system.
The state of the world economy also plays a role.
In places where economic growth is stagnant, minor price increases are more than just irritants.
They explode into rebellions.
Rebellions with new characteristics
Of course, we do not know how these protest movements will end.
While it is unlikely any of the rebellions will result in revolutionary change, we are witnessing distinctly twenty-first-century upheavals with new characteristics.
One of the most influential approaches to understanding the nature of protest and insurrection has come from the American sociologist Charles Tilly, who has identified two key characteristics.
First, forms of protest change across time as a function of wider changes in economic and political structures.
The food riots of pre-industrial society, for instance, gave way to the strikes and political demonstrations of the modern world.
And today, the transnational reach of Extinction Rebellion is symptomatic of a new global age.
Second, collective protest, both peaceful and violent, is endemic rather than confined to years of spectacular revolutionary upheaval.
It is a continuing expression of conflict between “contenders” for power, including the state.
It is part of the historical fabric of all societies.
Even in a stable and prosperous country like Australia in 2019, there is deep cynicism around a commitment to the common good.
All this suggests that any politician who thinks they can dictate the nature of and even reduce protest in contemporary Australia is not only whistling in the wind, but also ignorant of history.
* Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee teaches and writes about the history of modern France at the University of Melbourne.
This article first appeared at theconversation.com
