Street Democracy

Massive street demonstrations have recently proved very effective in another round of attempts to pressure elected governments to listen to popular opinion. While the mass protests of the past month may seem like another wave of popular movements comparable to the Arab Spring, they have spread to new countries, new regions, and new strategic goals.

In Turkey street protests that began in June with a focus on a proposed building project in an Istanbul park eventually led to the deaths of 4 and the wounding of over 7,000 others in confrontations with the police.  For some this series of street actions and eventually conflicts with authorities may seem comparable to the Arab Spring protests in ways beyond regional proximity. The most important similarity with popular movements in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond was the popular rejection of a political process that had come to seem authoritarian to many despite some form of electoral legitimacy. Like the Egyptian protests in Tahrir Square near Mubarak’s party headquarters, the Turkish movement also centered on gatherings in Taksim Square near the park which early protesters wanted to protect. The recent ruling by a Turkish administrative court to block the Gezi park project belies media reports that the street protests of June were ineffective.  Yet the more general criticisms that Prime Minister Erdogan is deploying authoritarian tactics and moving the nation in the direction of an Islamist republic remain unresolved.

Brazil also saw major protests across many cities that initially opposed bus fare hikes and eventually encompassed popular opposition to official corruption and the poor quality of public services. These protests caught the leftist government unprepared for widespread opposition, even though it declared sympathy with the protesters early on. Ultimately the street protests were successful in both a narrow and a wide sense. First, they resulted in a mid-June decision by major city officials to rescind their bus and subway fare increases, and then early this month President Dilma Rouseff proposed a referendum on major political changes in response to the public outcry.

These developments in Latin America differ from the Arab Spring movements in at least three ways beyond geography. First, the Brazilian government is often seen as a leftist and even populist government associated with unions and the poor, unlike many governments that fell during the Arab Spring. And this may have shaped the differences in their response: a presidential proposal for a public vote on political and policy changes that responds to the protest demands.  If the Turkish or Egyptian premier had proposed similar response to mass movement demands, no doubt their countries would have taken a different path.

A third difference is found in the economic orientation of Brazil as contrasted with the policies of many of the Arab Spring countries.  With the possible exceptions of Lybia and Syria, many of the Arab Spring countries were deeply enmeshed in the neoliberal economic policies of the so-called Washington consensus, despite their political differences with the United States. In contrast, Brazil is a founding member of the BRICS alliance of trade partners, including Russia, India, China, and South Africa, that have begun developing limited ways to diverge from Washington-led global economic practices and policies.

As a central nation in the Arab Spring, Egypt has also seen major developments in the past month, upending the assumption that new elections and a new constitution had solidified the 2011 victories of the Arab Spring.  In just two months a paper-based petition campaign dubbed “Tamarod” or “Rebellion” has shrewdly avoided the pitfalls of post-2011 Egyptian political organizing both to gather millions of signatures opposed to the new president and to generate the largest street protests in Egyptian history. These protests have now succeeded in removing President Morsi from office.

What is the goal of the new phase of the Arab Spring movements in Egypt? A spokesperson for the Tamarod campaign has announced that 30 June 2013 is the completion of the work left undone on 11 February 2011, the day Mubarak was forced out of office.  As Reem Abou-El-Fadl of Jadaliyya has argued, “A deeply religious people, they have recoiled from religious rule, because it did not deliver the revolutionary demands of ‘bread, freedom, human dignity.’” So more equitable economic distribution must somehow be combined with freedom to work and to exercise those political rights through which people claim dignity. Human rights organizations have also called for a return to the rule of law that the Morsi Administration was eroding through the 12 months of its administration.

Yet in this second phase of the Egyptian revolution what might hold the Egyptian military, a major social force with clear economic interests at stake, accountable to a popular street-based movement? The traditional constitutional mechanism for controlling the military is based on civilian oversight of the armed forces. In the interim period that Egypt now faces, there is little in place to secure allegiance to popular movements or democratic street organizers.

The assumption that only the military and Islamists carry political weight in Egypt overlooks what Khaled Shaalan, a Jadaliyya commentator, has termed “people’s agency,” the democracy of the streets.  In this conception organizers mobilize mass movements to participate in public demonstrations to pressure autocratic and elected leaders to give attention to particular issues or practices. Rather than overlook the sovereignty of the people, to whom democracies claim to be accountable, an emphasis on “people’s agency” reminds political experts and journalists that a nation’s mobilized people must be included on every short list of influential political actors.

In the Egyptian case the people have joined a risky alliance with the military. Yet this decision was not done without preparation and strategic consideration. Efforts have been underway over the last two years to sharpen the awareness among Egyptians of the abuses carried out by the SCAP military. Adel Iskandar has documented the best known of these projects is a 2011 campaign known as Askar Kazeboon (Military are Liars). Askar Kazeboon was developed to bridge dissonance between cyberactivists who were well aware of abuses by SCAP during their months of leading the government and the public at large who were not aware of the abuses. The approach adopted by Kazeboon was to screen collated video content demonstrating the military's brutal attacks and violations against human rights in public areas across the country. By crowd sourcing projectors and distributing these videos online, the community of anti-SCAP activists organised their own screenings in cities and towns to increase awareness of SCAP abusive practices.  Similar campaigns may be needed in Egypt over the coming months.

Significant questions remain as to the role that the military will play in the upcoming months in Egypt. Certainly they will be expected to work to protect their privileged status in the newly endorsed constitution. This status, established through the Muslim Brotherhood’s dominance of the constitutional process, protects not only their budget and economic empire (between 25-40% of the Egyptian economy) from legislative change but also the controversial power of trying civilians in military courts. Answers to these questions must now be renegotiated between the SCAP and the Egyptian people through the months to come in ways that may produce new alignments and new privileges for particular interest groups. Whether those interest groups include the poor, the unemployed, women, and youth remains to be seen.

The January, 2011 and June, 2013 successes of Egyptian street democracy may be compared to the events of 2001-2 in Argentina, when street protests forced the resignations of several presidents before a leader who would listen to popular views was finally put into office. These events suggest that democracy requires more than elections, competing political parties, and an informed public.  Vital democratic societies also require a public willing to object to abuses of authority, to the erosion of the rule of law, and to the tendency of political oligarchs to ignore the will of the majority. That public has only one arena outside the ballot box, and that is the street, where they must gather from time to time to remind the oligarchs that the political and economic elites are accountable to all, not to the few.

Street democracy enacts a long-established and frequently neglected notion of democratic sovereignty as belonging to the people, not to those who govern. As Giorgio Agamben argued just before the Arab Spring began, the people possess the general will and the right to legislate, which is to be distinguished from the government’s administration and execution of legislation.  So street democracy reminds those who see themselves as possessing political power, such as elected and appointed officials, that their power derives from the sovereignty of the people.  In this practice elections are only one way for the people to exercise their general will; street mobilizations are another way for the people to demonstrate their will not only to the elected officials but also to other citizens who may have forgotten this vision of democratic governance. Egyptian party and street activists are well aware of the important counterbalance to party politics and the national bureaucracy that street democracy provides.

In the terms developed by Jacques Rancière, street democracy is one way to see “the power of those who have no special entitlement to exercise power,” meaning that those without elected office or appointed duties are the ones who make politics possible. The egalitarianism of those who have no special entitlement is precisely what makes them powerful, since the actions of those who are equal may interrupt the efforts of those who govern to exclude them from governance. In this sense street democracy is the "the wrench of equality jammed ... into the gears of domination, it's what keeps politics from simply turning into law enforcement" so that the people retain their agency.

As one of the most potent weapons in the Arab Spring revolutions, attempts to practice street democracy have proven difficult to carry out effectively in anti-austerity campaigns in EU countries and in the U.S. Occupy movement. The mass protests in Turkey, Brazil, and Egypt this past month remind a global audience that not only does it hold the potential to change specific policies, as in Brazil, but also to further a democratic revolution that has lost momentum, as in Egypt.  Only time will tell whether sovereign publics in other countries, including France or the U.S. and other major democracies, will try street democracy to revitalize their own democratic practices.