Analysis: Protest does not always have to be enraged

THE protest movements that have flared up across the West, from Chile to Germany, have remained curiously undefined and under-analyzed.

The Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, for example, has claimed we are experiencing 1968 “in reverse”. “Then students on the streets of Europe,” he says, “declared their desire to live in a world different from the world of their parents. Now students are on the streets to declare their desire to live in the world of their parents.”

How protestors describe themselves – and how analysts describe them – will make an important difference in the direction they might take.

1968 was famously over-theorised. Student leaders, or so most people remember, were constantly producing convoluted manifestos that combined Marxism, psychoanalysis, and theories about Third World liberation.

The German leader, Rudi Dutschke, insisted the movement was driven by “existential disgust” – and anger provoked by the Vietnam War.

Many “theorists” felt the protestors should “practically problematise” inherited radical strategies. Put more simply: they were supposed to make it up as they went along.

In that sense, 1968 and today’s protests are not so different. There is no united ideology, but there are events and books that inspired outrage: Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in the 1960’s and, today, the bestseller Indignez-Vous!, by former French Resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel.

As critics have pointed out, Hessel’s booklet at times reads like a call for an almost arbitrary desire to be agitated by something.

It did not help that Hessel nostalgically invoked Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism and the “great stream of history” – longings reflected on a hand-painted sign at Occupy Wall Street: “Get excited and do something.”

Tellingly, that sign was flanked by posters for left-wing anarchist philosopher Noam Chomsky and right-wing libertarian politician Ron Paul.

Still, “indignation” has become a watchword for movements in France, Spain, and elsewhere.

Language matters here: indignation suggests governments or elites have violated shared moral understandings. This is the literally “reactionary” interpretation of these movements: they are animated by a sense that the social contract has been broken, and that elites ought to return to the status quo that preceded the policies which ultimately led to the financial crisis.

If so, the people on the squares of Madrid, Athens and New York are not so much demonstrating against those in power but rather are telling those in power that they should feel ashamed for having reneged on supposedly shared commitments.

Indignation is different from outrage – a sentiment that is ultimately blind and not necessarily connected to any presumption that one shares commitments with the people against whom it is directed.

The distinction might seem like nitpicking. But the lessons that elites learn will partly depend on how these movements are described, and how they conceive of themselves.

The demonstrators have yet to articulate any wider demands or a sense of what a different society, or “real democracy” should be all about.

If today’s protest movements are based on righteous indignation, the lack of concrete demands should not be a problem: shared norms can still broadly be assumed.

But if they are being driven by rage, then a lack of clear goals might merely produce more anger and frustration, which in turn could eventually lead to physical violence and some kind of political nihilism.

l Jan-Werner Mueller teaches at Princeton. His latest book is Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe.