Revolution Without Violence?
Brian Urquhart
Civil Resistance and Power Politics:
The Experience of Non-violent
Action from Gandhi to the Present
edited by Adam Roberts
and Timothy Garton Ash.
Oxford University Press,
407 pp., $50.00
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 resis-
was unable to prevent the horrors of
Hindu–Muslim interreligious violence
that accompanied Indian independence and partition.
Gandhi’s example and teaching were
a basic inspiration for the United
States civil rights movement led by
Martin Luther King Jr. and the SouthFacts Are Subversive:
ern Christian Leadership Conference.
Political Writing from a
From A. Philip Randolph’s threatened
Decade Without a Name
March on Washington in July 1940 to
by Timothy Garton Ash.
protest exclusionary hiring practices in
Yale University Press, 441 pp., $35.00
defense industries to King’s successful
actions of the 1960s, carefully planned
Amid both the gloom of the
and targeted, nonviolent,
season and the recent upriscivil resistance was the esings in the Arab world, it is
sence of the movement’s
bracing to look back at the
operations.
last thirty years or so and
Its strategy included insee how much has actually
ducing opponents to react
gone more or less well. The
brutally, thereby inviting
end of the cold war, the desympathetic support from
mise of communism, and
the press and public and
the emergence of new demthus encouraging the federal
ocratic states of varying
government to intervene on
quality all represent importhe side of law and order.
tant historical change. Most
King and the SCLC were
masters of this technique.
of the radical political and
They selected Birmingeconomic transformations
ham, Alabama, for their
of the last ­quarter-century,
1963 campaign, because
moreover, have been brought
the commissioner of public
about with little or no
safety, “Bull” Connor, was
bloodshed. The “velvet”
a dependably violent racist
revolution, based on civil
hothead who could be reresistance, organization,
lied upon to use dogs, cattle
and negotiation, came into
prods, and water cannons
fashion. Much was owed to
against peaceful demonMikhail Gorbachev.
strators. Connor’s brutaliWhat we now call “civil
ties invited TV coverage
resistance” often takes
that made him a national
the form of mass rallies
villain and sowed the seeds
and demonstrations, as in
Václav Havel leaving an unofficial meeting with Lech Wałe˛sa at the Czech–Polish border, March 17, 1990
for President Lyndon JohnPrague in 1989 and Tehran
son’s 1964 Civil Rights Act.
in 2009. People also engage
In an ironic tribute, President Kentance and other forms of power,” somein strikes, boycotts, fasts, and refusals
movements. Current events in Tunisia
nedy told King apropos of Connor, “in
times including force, violence, or the
to obey the law. All these have been
and Egypt bear this out.
his own way, he has done a good deal
threat thereof. There is no set formula,
evident in the largely leaderless, but
for civil rights legislation this year.”
although the methods used by suc­Internet-coordinated, overthrow of
andhi, who articulated the idea
Doug McAdam writes that with the
cessful civil resistance movements are
the government in Tunis and the mass
of civil resistance as a “conscious oppassage of President Lyndon Johnson’s
carefully studied and sometimes emuprotests in Cairo, whose outcomes
tion” for resisting injustice, had only a
Voting Rights Act in August 1965, “the
lated by succeeding movements. April
probably won’t be clear for some time.
qualified success. In British imperial
electoral underpinnings of the southCarter mentions that Gene Sharp, the
Civil resistance usually cannot surIndia, he had certain initial advantages
ern system were finally removed.” But
author of The Politics of Nonviolent
vive systematic and violent repression
that he exploited brilliantly. The Britcivil resistance does not always lead to
Action, has listed 198 methods of nonor a totalitarian police state, and it is
ish imperial regime was responsible to
all of the desired results. As Johnson
violence. Be that as it may, the essenstill often suppressed by authoritarian
a democratic government at home; its
foresaw, the legislation that was a major
tial elements of successful nonviolent
governments and oligarchies. At least
rule rested on its relations with longgain for civil rights also resulted in Reaction, from Gandhi to Martin Luther
in the Arab world, this seems to be
standing Indian institutions—civic, republican dominance in the formerly
King to Lech Wałe˛sa, have been perchanging.
ligious, military, and economic—that
Democratic South. The vast demonceptive strategy, imaginative and canny
Modern nonviolent civil resistance
were the source of its strength.
strations that successfully called for the
leadership, organization, and popular
has usually been associated with MoGandhi knew how to manipulate
departure of the Shah of Iran brought
support. Coverage of civil resistance by
handas K. Gandhi, who began his
these basic features of the Raj and
in a religious dictatorship that killed
the press, the Internet, and television
experiments with civil resistance to diseventually undermined the Indian coand tortured thousands of Iranians and
has played an increasingly important
crimination against Indians in South
operation upon which British rule was
is now determined to suppress the civil
part in its success.
Africa in 1906 and moved to India to
based. His brilliant use of political theresistance movement that has risen to
The basic rationale of civil resistance
challenge the British administration of
ater with himself as the star secured
oppose it.
is that the power of rulers ultimately
the Raj in 1915. Whatever the success
widespread sympathy in the outside
The civil rights movement undoubtlies in the obedience and cooperation of
or failure of his campaigns, Gandhi is
world and also inspired the Indian
edly profited from the post–World War
their subjects. So far, at any rate, no one
the name most frequently invoked by
National Congress, which grew into a
II emphasis on global human rights, in
has found a reliable way of making civil
nonviolent civil resistance movements,
mass-based party that was capable of
which American leadership had been
resistance work in a totalitarian police
although I have seen little reference to
challenging the Raj and, by the end
vital. Franklin Roosevelt, willing to
state—as distinguished from the satelhim during the recent uprisings in the
of World War II, of forming an indetrade off the issue of black civil rights
lites of such states—although the curMiddle East.
pendent government. Gandhi’s teachin the US for support from Southern
rent revolts in the Arab world may prove
ing and his philosophy of nonviolence
Democrats for the New Deal during
an exception to this rule. The American
and satyagraha (“truth force” or “soul
the 1930s, had also been an outspoken
civil rights movement or the ultimately
force”) added a new element to India’s
champion of decolonization abroad.
effective protests against the war in
The Oxford University project on civil
sense of identity and pride. It was these
The domestic racism of the United
Vietnam could count on publicity and
resistance was established in 2006.
political and spiritual developments
States itself was a glaring repudiation
support in a working democracy. In
Civil Resistance and Power Politics:
rather than civil resistance that finally
of its international aims. It also made
Nazi Germany and the USSR, there
The Experience of Non-violent Action
made British rule impossible. The
the United States an easy target for
were no such successes. Nor did the Tifrom Gandhi to the Present, edited by
tragedy, which also led to Gandhi’s
Soviet cold war propaganda. Such conananmen Square movement for reform
Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton
assassination, was that his movement
siderations stiffened the spine of the
in China in 1989 or the mass protests of
Tomki Němec
Buddhist monks in Burma over increases in the price of food and fuel in
2007 survive forceful suppression. It
was Gorbachev’s 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 1989. Indeed
the willingness of leaders to retreat—
Gorbachev, F.W. de Klerk in South Africa, or, more recently and surprisingly,
Slobodan Milošević in Serbia—is crucial to the success of civil resistance
G
1.
March 10, 2011
37
T
he 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 “Prague Spring,” a well-organized
and widespread nonviolent popular
movement under the leadership of Alexander Dubček 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. Dubček 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
the ensuing struggle against the Communist government was conducted by
Václav 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 Communistruled country to make a peaceful,
negotiated transition to multiparty
democracy. This achievement and
the method used provided a different model. Poland’s so-called “selflimiting 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 Party’s domination of society. It operated with deliberation and,
as Aleksander Smolar puts it, “majestic
self-restraint” under the leadership of
Lech Wałe˛sa. It successfully discouraged 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. Wałe˛sa
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 for roundtable
talks with the government. The Solidarity leaders had always been realistic
38
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, Wałe˛sa 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
Wałe˛sa 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.
Timothy Garton Ash,
New York City, October 2010;
photograph by Dominique Nabokov
to South Africa’s economic troubles. In
January 1986 the government declared
a state of emergency and drove the
UDF off the streets.
The UDF and the ANC in exile began
to consider their final options, a “people’s war” or a negotiated transition to
power. The ANC favored a “people’s
war.” Umkhonto stepped up its guerrilla raids. South Africa’s international
problems multiplied—the withdrawal
of foreign investment, a $21 billion
foreign debt, trouble with its African
neighbors. In 1989, from his prison cell
on Robben Island, Mandela opened
talks with the government. Also in
1989 the fall of the Berlin Wall and
Gorbachev’s new policies laid to rest
a long-standing white South African
obsession, an armed ANC insurgency
supported by the Soviet Union. F.W.
de Klerk succeeded P.W. Botha and
nine days later released Mandela, who
over the next four years negotiated a
constitutional liberal democracy with
the government. The ANC returned
home and showed that it could control its supporters and support the
negotiations.
Both sides recognized the other’s
power and problems. Under Mandela’s
charismatic leadership, care was taken
to avoid humiliating the white minority, which continues to be economically
powerful, and to put aside the bitter
past. For all the problems that South
Africa still has, including widespread
AIDS, unemployment, and crime, the
seemingly miraculous outcome, as
Lodge notes, was brought about by
“an insurrectionary movement, largely
nonviolent but extensively violent
as well,” and, at the end, by unprecedented statesmanship and generosity
of spirit.
Africanist Congress, urged Africans to
surrender themselves en masse outside
police stations without the “passes”
that allowed them to live in many parts
of the country. Police fired into these
crowds, and at Sharpeville killed sixtynine people, evoking outrage around
the world. A month later the government banned both the ANC and the
PAC .
By 1961, increasing government repression seemed to show that nonviolent protest was becoming irrelevant.
Nelson Mandela and other leaders
therefore agreed to sponsor an armed
wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe
(the Spear of the Nation), to carry out
acts of sabotage. By the end of 1963,
most Umkhonto leaders, including
Mandela, were in jail, and the ANC was
in exile, with a formidable bureaucracy
and an army based in Angola.
In 1976 opposition to the government
began to pick up again. Trade unions
were active, and Umkhonto’s sabotage operations reminded Africans
that the ANC in exile was still in business. A new internal organization, the
United Democratic Front, organized
civil disobedience through seven hundred affiliates, and began to provide
civic or community training through
women’s groups and a youth congress.
Civic groups in the townships began to
construct the alternative institutions
of “people’s power.” Lodge writes that
“violent attacks by [UDF] activists on
perceived collaborators were important in prompting an administrative
collapse in African local government.”
He also shows how a wave of industrial
strikes and consumer boycotts added
Timothy Garton Ash is the chronicler,
the bard even, of Eastern Europe’s 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 to the 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 Ash’s first subject is the
changing nature of revolution and the
Serbian people’s removal of Slobodan
Milošević, Georgia’s “Rose Revolution,” and the “Orange Revolution”
in Ukraine. No chapter, however, tells
a story as important and unlikely as
Tom Lodge’s essay “The Interplay of
Nonviolent and Violent Action in the
Movement against Apartheid in South
Africa, 1983–94,” a story that highlights both the limitations and the successes of civil resistance.
The African National Congress had
already embraced the idea of civil disobedience against the policy of apartheid in 1950, but it was not until nearly
forty-five years later that the rebellion
led by the ANC finally achieved the
replacement of the long-entrenched
system of white minority government
within the Republic of South Africa.
In 1960 a breakaway group, the PanDominique Nabokov
federal government in responding to
the civil rights movement.
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 several—notably in China and
Burma—have failed to reach their objectives. The great value of Civil 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.)
Portugal’s “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 Mário Soares to
mobilize a broad movement to introduce, by 1976 and without bloodshed,
a representative, pluralistic system of
government. Soares managed to break
the historical pattern of what the historian Alistair Horne, referring to the
Algerian war, had called the “sad, repeated failure of the moderates, or a
third force to compete against opposing extremes.” For once, in Portugal,
Kerensky overwhelmed Lenin. As
Kenneth Maxwell, the author of this
chapter of Civil Resistance and Power
Politics, writes:
The Portuguese people’s navigation of these turbulent months
made their country into a precocious forerunner of the largely
peaceful transitions from authoritarianism to democracy that followed in southern and eastern
Europe and in Latin America.
It was a remarkable historical
achievement.
Civil Resistance covers, in all their
variety, the Iranian revolution, the
downfall of Ferdinand Marcos in the
Philippines, the ultimate rejection of
Augusto Pinochet in Chile, the liberation of East Germany, the eventual independence of Kosovo, the
3.
The New York Review
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
pressure . . . to 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 733, and
proceeds to a brilliant analysis of the
continent’s 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 wound—and the reaction to it—that 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, but
highly revealing, session (“On most
issues relating to Europe [the President] seemed to have an open, not to
say an empty mind”), Garton Ash recalls 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 of 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
40
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 the combination of long captivity, international fame—including, 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 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 Burma’s appalling problems,
Garton Ash hopes that
something of the tranquil beauty
of an isolated, traditional culture,
almost unique in today’s world,
could survive the necessary and
longed-for tempest of modernity.
But the armies of global capitalism are waiting 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
any. . . People’s 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.
F
inally 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 today’s 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. It’s
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 life—food, shelter, drinkable
water, minimal personal security—and
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
and number 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 needed nearer home. The New York Review