Revolution Without Violence

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Revolution without violence?March 10, 2011

Brian Urquhart (The New York Review of Books)

Amid both the gloom of the season and the recent uprisings in the Arab world, it is bracing to look back

at the last thirty years or so and see how much has actually gone more or less well. The end of the coldwar, the demise of communism, and the emergence of new democratic states of varying quality all

represent important historical change. Most of the radical political and economic transformations of the

last quarter-century, moreover, have been brought about with little or no bloodshed. The velvet

revolution, based on civil resistance, organization, and negotiation, came into fashion. Much was owed to

Mikhail Gorbachev.

What we now call civil resistance often takes the form of mass rallies and demonstrations, as in Prague

in 1989 and Tehran in 2009. People also engage in strikes, boycotts, fasts, and refusals to obey the law.

All these have been evident in the largely leaderless, but Internet-coordinated, overthrow of the

government in Tunis and the mass protests in Cairo, whose outcomes probably wont be clear for some

time. Civil resistance usually cannot survive systematic and violent repression or a totalitarian policestate, and it is still often suppressed by authoritarian governments and oligarchies. At least in the Arab

world, this seems to be changing.

Modern nonviolent civil resistance has usually been associated with Mohandas K. Gandhi, who began his

experiments with civil resistance to discrimination against Indians in South Africa in 1906 and moved to

India to challenge the British administration of the Raj in 1915. Whatever the success or failure of his

campaigns, Gandhi is the name most frequently invoked by nonviolent civil resistance movements,

although I have seen little reference to him during the recent uprisings in the Middle East.

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The Oxford University project on civil resistance was established in 2006. Civil Resistance and PowerPolitics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, edited by Adam Roberts and

Timothy Garton Ash, contains reports on different cases by nineteen members of this project. It is a

highly informative compilation of differing quests for political, economic, and social change over the past

half-century, most of them nonviolent. Successful or not, these efforts have contributed to a growing body

of common wisdom about how civil resistance can work.

Civil resistance is seldom, if ever, a force that acts entirely on its own. As Adam Roberts explains, there is

a rich web of connections between civil resistance and other forms of power, sometimes including

force, violence, or the threat thereof. There is no set formula, although the methods used by successful

civil resistance movements are carefully studied and sometimes emulated by succeeding movements.

April Carter mentions that Gene Sharp, the author of The Politics of Nonviolent Action, has listed 198methods of nonviolence. Be that as it may, the essential elements of successful nonviolent action, from

Gandhi to Martin Luther King to Lech Waesa, have been perceptive strategy, imaginative and canny

leadership, organization, and popular support. Coverage of civil resistance by the press, the Internet, and

television has played an increasingly important part in its success.

The basic rationale of civil resistance is that the power of rulers ultimately lies in the obedience and

cooperation of their subjects. So far, at any rate, no one has found a reliable way of making civil

resistance work in a totalitarian police stateas distinguished from the satellites of such statesalthough

the current revolts in the Arab world may prove an exception to this rule. The American civil rights

movement or the ultimately effective protests against the war in Vietnam could count on publicity and

support in a working democracy. In Nazi Germany and the USSR, there were no such successes. Nor didthe Tiananmen Square movement for reform in China in 1989 or the mass protests of Buddhist monks in

Burma over increases in the price of food and fuel in 2007 survive forceful suppression. It was

Gorbachevs understanding of the need for change and reform and his refusal to use Soviet military force

against demonstrations in the Eastern European satellites that made possible the spectacular changes of
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1989. Indeed the willingness of leaders to retreatGorbachev, F.W. de Klerk in South Africa, or, more

recently and surprisingly, Slobodan Miloevic in Serbiais crucial to the success of civil resistance

movements. Current events in Tunisia and Egypt bear this out.

Gandhi, who articulated the idea of civil resistance as a conscious option for resisting injustice, had

only a qualified success. In British imperial India, he had certain initial advantages that he exploited

brilliantly. The British imperial regime was responsible to a democratic government at home; its rule

rested on its relations with long-standing Indian institutionscivic, religious, military, and economicthat were the source of its strength.

Gandhi knew how to manipulate these basic features of the Raj and eventually undermined the Indian

cooperation upon which British rule was based. His brilliant use of political theater with himself as the

star secured widespread sympathy in the outside world and also inspired the Indian National Congress,

which grew into a mass-based party that was capable of challenging the Raj and, by the end of World

War II, of forming an independent government. Gandhis teaching and his philosophy of nonviolence and

satyagraha(truth force or soul force) added a new element to Indias sense of identity and pride. It

was these political and spiritual developments rather than civil resistance that finally made British rule

impossible. The tragedy, which also led to Gandhis assassination, was that his movement was unable to

prevent the horrors of HinduMuslim interreligious violence that accompanied Indian independence andpartition.

Gandhis example and teaching were a basic inspiration for the United States civil rights movement led

by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. From A. Philip Randolphs

threatened March on Washington in July 1940 to protest exclusionary hiring practices in defense

industries to Kings successful actions of the 1960s, carefully planned and targeted, nonviolent, civil

resistance was the essence of the movements operations.

Its strategy included inducing opponents to react brutally, thereby inviting sympathetic support from the

press and public and thus encouraging the federal government to intervene on the side of law and order.

King and the SCLC were masters of this technique. They selected Birmingham, Alabama, for their 1963campaign, because the commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor, was a dependably violent racist

hothead who could be relied upon to use dogs, cattle prods, and water cannons against peaceful

demonstrators. Connors brutalities invited TV coverage that made him a national villain and sowed the

seeds for President Lyndon Johnsons 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In an ironic tribute, President Kennedy told King apropos of Connor, in his own way, he has done a

good deal for civil rights legislation this year. Doug McAdam writes that with the passage of President

Lyndon Johnsons Voting Rights Act in August 1965, the electoral underpinnings of the southern system

were finally removed. But civil resistance does not always lead to all of the desired results. As Johnson

foresaw, the legislation that was a major gain for civil rights also resulted in Republican dominance in the

formerly Democratic South. The vast demonstrations that successfully called for the departure of the Shahof Iran brought in a religious dictatorship that killed and tortured thousands of Iranians and is now

determined to suppress the civil resistance movement that has risen to oppose it.

The civil rights movement undoubtedly profited from the postWorld War II emphasis on global human

rights, in which American leadership had been vital. Franklin Roosevelt, willing to trade off the issue of

black civil rights in the US for support from Southern Democrats for the New Deal during the 1930s, had

also been an outspoken champion of decolonization abroad. The domestic racism of the United States

itself was a glaring repudiation of its international aims. It also made the United States an easy target for

Soviet cold war propaganda. Such considerations stiffened the spine of the federal government in

responding to the civil rights movement.

The US civil rights movement was studied by organizers of civil resistance movements in search of

historic change elsewhere, especially in Eastern Europe. Events in Czechoslovakia and Poland, which in

their turn became models for later struggles, offered new ideas on the method of civil resistance. In both

cases earlier attempts had ended in failure, if not tragedy. In the 1968 drama that came to be known as the


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Prague Spring, a well-organized and widespread nonviolent popular movement under the leadership of

Alexander Dubcek demanded change and actually began the process of reform. The USSR refused to

negotiate and on August 20, 1968, it invaded the country with four other Warsaw Pact allies. Dubcek and

his fellow reformers were arrested and taken to Moscow for negotiations.

Kieran Williams calls the Prague Spring logistically so beautiful, but shows how it was a political

failure, resulting in an even more repressive government. In November 1989, the 1968 mass movement

again coalesced. This time, with Gorbachev in power, there was no Soviet armed intervention, and theensuing struggle against the Communist government was conducted by Vclav Havel with style and great

imagination from his theater headquarters and in rallies of steadily increasing size until the government

resigned.

Poland was the first Communist-ruled country to make a peaceful, negotiated transition to multiparty

democracy. This achievement and the method used provided a different model. Poland s so-called self-

limiting revolution took shape in the 1970s as a new strategy of peaceful opposition centering on the

Solidarity movement, a strictly nonviolent alliance of workers, the intelligentsia, and the Roman Catholic

Church, numbering some ten million members. Its initial aim was to expand civil liberties and human

rights and to limit the Communist Partys domination of society. It operated with deliberation and, as

Aleksander Smolar puts it, majestic self-restraint under the leadership of Lech Waesa. It successfullydiscouraged all ideas of a popular uprising as being almost certain to spawn another tyranny. Still, by

1980 the movement was seen by both the Polish authorities and Moscow to be a clear threat to the

Communist system, and in December 1981, under strong Soviet pressure, the Polish prime minister,

General Wojciech Jaruzelski, imposed martial law and suppressed Solidarity. Waesa was interned and

ten thousand opposition members imprisoned.

In 1985 Gorbachev came into power with radically new ideas about the desirability of change, a

possibility encouraged by the 1975 Helsinki agreements that committed all its signatory governments, at

least in theory, to respect human rights. The charismatic Polish pope, John Paul II, provided, in his own

unique way, very public support for freedom and human rights. Solidarity was biding its time. In 1988 a

rash of strikes was a final warning, and in 1989 amnesty for the Solidarity prisoners opened the way forroundtable talks with the government. The Solidarity leaders had always been realistic about the necessity

for compromise.

Jaruzelski, for his part, apparently believed that the opposition was weak. He therefore agreed to

negotiations and semifree elections. In the absence of a threat of Soviet intervention, Solidarity then

proceeded to negotiate the government out of office, ending with its stunning victory in the June 1989

elections. Now that success was at hand, Waesa was accused in some opposition quarters of being too

soft on the Communists, but he held to his course of compromise and nonviolence. Although the new

prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, became the first non-Communist prime minister in the Communist

world, Jaruzelski was elected president. Only one year later Waesa succeeded him.

The leaders of the old regime not only remained unpunished but retained their personal, economic, and

social positions. As Aleksander Smolar writes, the fact that a safe place was reserved for members of the

old regime has since been a major source of resentment in Polish politics. But the manner of the Polish

liberation was a major contribution to the peaceful end of communism in Europe.

2.

During the last forty years at least a dozen revolutionary events, powered by nonviolent civil resistance,

have taken place around the world, of which severalnotably in China and Burmahave failed to reach

their objectives. The great value ofCivil Resistance and Power Politics is to provide relatively succinct

accounts of these diverse events in such a way as to underline both their differences and their similarities.

(The cases reviewed do not include the unfinished business of Palestine.)

Portugals Revolution of the Carnations in the mid-1970s was a reaction to half a century of right-wing

dictatorship and, only slightly less, to the authoritarian, Communist left. It was the achievement of Mrio

Soares to mobilize a broad movement to introduce, by 1976 and without bloodshed, a representative,


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insurrectionary movement, largely nonviolent but extensively violent as well, and, at the end, by

unprecedented statesmanship and generosity of spirit.

3.

Timothy Garton Ash is the chronicler, the bard even, of Eastern Europes liberation, and of much other

contemporary history as well. He is the unusual combination of an Oxford don and a world-class

journalist (the mongrel craft that I have practised for thirty years), and nothing of interest seems to be

beyond his range. About the title Facts Are Subversive, a collection of his writings from the year 2000 tothe first year of the Obama presidency, he explains that facts are subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of

all those easy speeches that comfort cruel men. In our time, he writes, sources of fact -fixing are

mainly to be found at the frontier between politics and the media. Politicians have developed increasingly

sophisticated methods to impose a dominant narrative through the media. That is, among other things, an

excellent description of American politics in the last two years.

Garton Ash declares that the first job of both historians and journalists is to find facts. His powers of

observation and analysis and his sense of history in the making, combined with a generous humor and a

knack for epigrams and zingers, make his essays both a pleasure and a revelation to read. Taken together

they are a magisterial comment on a decade of rising non-Western powers, global warming, the crisis of

capitalism, apparent US decline, and the somnambulism of Europe.

Garton Ashs first subject is the changing nature of revolution and the vast crowds that accompanied it. I

spent many hours of my life standing in those crowds in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague; their

behavior was both inspiring and mysterious. Garton Ash calls 1989 one of the best [years] in European

history; it fascinated the world with a series of so-called velvet revolutions,

non-violent, anti-utopian, based not on a single idea but on broad social coalitions and characterized by

the application of mass social pressureto bring the current power holders to negotiate.

In Islam in Europe, Garton Ash recalls that Charles Martel threw back the Muslim advance into Europe

at the Battle of Poitiers in AD 732, and proceeds to a brilliant analysis of the continents biggest current

problem. To return from the US to Europe, he writes,

is to travel from a country that thinks it is on the front line of the struggle against jihadist terrorism, but is

not, to a continent which is on the front line but still has not woken up to the fact.

Writing thus in 2006, Garton Ash seems to underestimate the terrible and unhealed woundand the

reaction to itthat September 11 inflicted on the American collective psyche.

In the summer of 2001 Garton Ash, in Oxford, was asked by the White House to come to Washington

(coach class) next Thursday to prepare [President George W. Bush] for his first official trip to

Europe. At the end of this not altogether satisfactory, buthighly revealing, session (On most issues

relating to Europe [the President] seemed to have an open, not to say an empty mind), Garton Ashrecalls that Bush remarked, It takes a little time to grow into this job. But would he? Somewhere

deep down, he obviously had some doubts whether he would. So did I.

Garton Ash admits that in his tortured liberal ambivalence he was wrong about the 2003 invasion of

Iraq and should have written against it before it started. As it turned out, Never in the field o f human

conflict was so little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. Claiming to move Iraq

forward towards Lockean liberty, we hurled it back to a Hobbesian state of nature.

Away from Europe, Garton Ash writes of Burma that I have rarely seen a more beautiful country, or a

more ugly regime. After a long talk with Aung San Suu Kyi, who was recently released from house

arrest for reasons not yet apparent, he refers to the Mandela -like mystique that comes from thecombination of long captivity, international fameincluding, in her case, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize

and daily vituperation by the regime. The SLORC, the military regime, has turned Burma into a client

state of China. What hope is there of a silken revolution to restore Aung San Suu Kyi to the legitimate


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position she has earned through elections and the affection of the people? Writing in 2000, Garton Ash

thought that an explosion was more likely, and indeed there was an explosion in 2007 with the

demonstrations by the monks, but it was easily extinguished by the generals.

For all Burmas appalling problems, Garton Ash hopes that

something of the tranquil beauty of an isolated, traditional culture, almost unique in todays world, could

survive the necessary and longed-for tempest of modernity. But the armies of global capitalism arewaiting at the frontier, engines revving up, with their container-loads of tawdry goods, their ready-made

life-style packages, sex shops, reversed baseball caps, and state-of-the-art software for the unceasing

manufacture of new consumer desires. These armies are more irresistible than anyPeoples Army,

because they are truly welcomed as liberators.

Of his time in Iran Garton Ash writes, The Islamic revolution, like the French and Russian revolutions

before it, has been busy devouring its own children. One day, its grandchildren will devour the

revolution. Of Egypt, Trying to strangle Islamism, it feeds its growth.

The 110 miles of Stasi files that became available in 1990 contained a 325-page file on Garton Ash, based

on his years studying in East Germany. He interviewed all but one of the acquaintances who had talked

about him to the Stasi and all the Stasi officers on his case, and wrote a book about it, The File (1997),

that is at the same time coolly descriptive and quietly angry at a system that demanded personal betrayal.

Finally Garton Ash turns to the elephant in all our rooms, the global triumph of capitalism. Although

there now seems to be no practical alternative to it, recent developments are not encouraging. Capitalism,

Garton Ash wrote in 2007, is clearly not an automatically self-correcting system. That has since proved to

be devastatingly true. Inequality of wealth has also reached grotesque levels. Garton Ash comments:

If a lot of middle-class people begin to feel they are personally losing out to the same process of

globalization that is making those few fund managers stinking rich, while at the same time outsourcing

their own middle-class jobs to India, then you may have a backlash.

The Tea Party has proved that to be an understatement. Worst of all, in the long term,

this planet cannot sustain six and a half billion people living like todays middle -class consumers in its

rich North. Sustainability may be a grey and boring word, but it is the biggest single challenge to global

capitalism today. The genius of contemporary capitalism is not simply that it gives consumers what

they want but it makes them want what it has to give. Its that core logic of ever-expanding desires that is

unsustainable on a global scale.

As Garton Ash puts it, remove the elementary staples of organized, civilized lifefood, shelter,

drinkable water, minimal personal securityand we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature,

a war of all against all. There are now ominous global problems, of which the increasing severity andnumber of natural disasters probably linked to climate change may before very long have such an effect.

The resulting mass migrations alone would test the veneer of civilization as never before. Is humankind

irreversibly stuck in a downward spiral? Or can it find the common sense and solidarity to fight its way

back? Garton Ash is skeptical.

Facts Are Subversive makes a lively companion for Civil Resistance and Power Politics. Garton Ash also

reminds us that while serious progress has been made in the art and method of radical political change, we

cannot count on the automatic survival and growth of democracy, nor indeed on the self-correcting

capacity of a predominantly capitalist system. We also face urgent global problems to which we have

scarcely started to look for solutions. The popular political involvement that was the lifeblood of civil

resistance movements, as well as determined and courageous leadership, is now desperately needednearer home.

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