1848, 1968, 2011: the long term effect of the bottom-up revolution

Excerpted from an editorial by Paul Rosenberg, in Al Jazeera’s online opinion pages:

“In mid-February, the week after Hosni Mubarak was driven from office by the Egyptian Revolution, unprecedented demonstrations erupted in the state of Wisconsin opposing the efforts of the newly elected Republican governor to destroy the organising power of public employee unions. Although the specific causes were significantly different, the underlying logic of the people rising up against powerful anti-democratic elites made for more than just a superficial resemblance between Tahrir Square in Cairo, and the capitol building and its environs in Madison, Wisconsin.

They were unique, yet related events, like the differing national expressions of waves of protest and revolution that swept Europe in 1848, or that wrapped around the world in 1968. These recurrent world-historical waves represent a prolonged struggle to realise a more just, egalitarian world – a yearning that crosses all manner of cultural boundaries, though it finds unique expression wherever it arises.

The pattern of these past waves was similar. Initially, an invigorating sense of unity in striving against the dead hand of the past brought together many different groups accustomed to seeing themselves as distinct. But within a few weeks or months, conservative forces counter-mobilised and found ways to play different groups off against one another, as the initial sense of unity faded in the face of difficult nuts-and-bolts questions of how to build something new.

Yet, despite the apparent defeat of these waves of revolution, they had profound effects, altering the very sense of the possible – even if it wasn’t immediately obvious how to make the possible into the real. For example, demonstrations on both sides of the Iron Curtain in 1968 foreshadowed the decades-long development of movements that helped bring the Cold War to a peaceful end. The Western European peace movement and the Eastern European civil society movement gave significant support to one another, starting simply with their very existence and shared inspiration. Movements for the environment, gender equality and human rights also came to span the globe in the decades following 1968, eventually even gaining conservative support for some version of their aspirations.

The story of 1848 was similar. When Otto von Bismarck – one of Europe’s leading conservatives of the 19th century – became the architect of Germany’s welfare state in the 1880s, he did it in part to co-opt support for the socialist-oriented Social Democratic Party. Yet, that very act of co-option was itself an acknowledgment of how 1848 had profoundly changed the world.

The current wave of revolutionary protest, intensely focused in the Arab world, but which echoes from Iran to Spain to the US, shows signs of similar dynamics, though they play out very differently in different situations. One crucial difference from 1848 and 1968 is the role of social media, which gives bottom-up egalitarians a better footing for sustained organising. It remains to be seen how effective this will prove to be, but at the very least there is a vastly increased potential to sustain a broadly-shared sense of what a very different world could look like.”

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