The Utopian

 By Sheri Berman.

“Particularly in the West, what seems striking about the current period is the widespread sense of the need for change combined with the lack of any coherent plans for it.” 

On discontent and its failure to effect transformation.

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We seem to be living in an age of uncertainty. Wherever one looks, there are protests and uprisings. A democratization wave is sweeping the Middle East. The United States has witnessed the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, while right-wing populist parties are overturning Europe’s traditional party systems. Almost all corners of the globe seem to be in the midst of upheaval.

Because discontent has appeared in so many places at approximately the same time, it is perhaps natural to view these events as connected and to conclude that their appearance is foreshadowing a period of fundamental transformation. We can see these tendencies clearly, for example, in recent discussions of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has been referred to as America’s “Arab Spring.” Indeed, both participants and commentators frequently draw attention to the similarities between the two movements’ forms (“youth driven, hyper-networked, grass roots”) and revolutionary goals (overthrowing a regime “based on the greed and corruption of the 1%”). Are such comparisons appropriate? Do these movements collectively herald the dawning of a new era? Is ours a passing moment of discontent, or the beginning of a lasting transformation?

To start answering these questions, we must first distinguish between two things that are so often conflated in contemporary discussion, namely discontent and transformation. The most popular approach to explaining why seemingly stable societies suddenly transform focuses on social and psychological factors: the accumulation of societal grievances; the development of pervasive discontent, frustration, and (relative) deprivation; a growing discrepancy between the values of an existing regime and its citizens. These factors are linked to the formation of broadly based popular movements which then seek to overthrow an existing order. From this perspective, in other words, understanding instances of revolutionary change requires focusing, as one important scholar of revolutions noted, on “why, when, and how large numbers of individual men and women become discontented”[1]; fundamental transformations, in other words, are the products of revolutionary movements animated and powered by widespread social discontent.

Despite its familiarity and superficial plausibility, however, this view is fundamentally flawed –  most obviously because it does not fit the historical record very well. Discontent as well as the revolts and uprisings it generates are fairly commonplace; periods of revolutionary transformation are, however, exceedingly rare. As one of history’s great revolutionaries once noted, “the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause a [revolution]; if it were, the masses would always be in revolt.”[2] Why then do some periods of discontent lead to lasting transformation while others do not? What lessons does the historical record provide to those interested in trying to figure our whether or not today’s discontent is likely to produce revolutionary change or simply peter out?

One important historical lesson that seems particularly relevant to our contemporary moment is that it is much easier to be negative than positive. Or, to be more precise, it is much easier to mobilize against an old order than to generate consensus for a new one. There are many historical examples of widespread, even cross-national movements held together by opposition to an existing regime. But such movements are often unable to agree on what they want to replace it. And without some sense of what sort of new order should be created, oppositional movements tend to lose steam over time: all too often, they fall prey to internal squabbles or are eventually overwhelmed by resurgent forces of the ancien régime (or both).

A good example of this dynamic, in fact, can be found in the set of revolutions which the contemporary period is often said to evoke: 1848. (The very term “Arab spring” consciously or unconsciously invokes this time, which was known as “the springtime of the peoples.”) In 1848, oppositional movements to existing dictatorial regimes broke out in almost every corner of Europe and even in some other parts of the globe. As the great historian Eric Hobsbawm observed, few revolutions in history have “spread more rapidly and widely, running like a bushfire across frontiers, countries and even oceans.”[3] Indeed, within a matter of months dictatorial leaders and regimes that had seemed completely secure crumbled under the onslaught of popular movements and mobilizations unlike anything the world had seen before. The height of this revolutionary ferment was reached with the downfall of the long-standing chancellor of the Austrian Empire, Klemens von Metternich, who – perhaps like Hosni Mubarak in the Arab world today – was the ultimate symbol of the sclerotic and reactionary order that had reigned in Europe for decades. And yet, all the regimes that had been overthrown were restored within eighteen months of the original uprisings. How could such a dramatic turn-around occur? How, in the face of massive, cross-national discontent was the old order able to stage a come-back?

Basically what happened in 1848 is that the opposition lost the game before the old order could come back and win it. In the years preceding 1848 discontent had been rising in many sectors of European society. Authoritarian monarchies excluded the vast majority of citizens from political power and, especially in Europe’s east, ignored or repressed the growing demands of national and linguistic minorities. By 1848, in other words, many different groups were united in having significant grievances against the existing order. But once this order collapsed, divisions among the discontented came to fore. Members of the middle class wanted economic liberalization while some workers demanded more radical economic and social change; liberals favored opening up the political system even as they remained opposed to universal suffrage while democrats would settle for nothing less than full democratization; finally, various communal groups each wanted to control their own fates (and often territories) but were often unwilling to recognize the right of other groups to do the same. Once the old order collapsed, in other words, the glue that had been holding oppositional movements together dissolved, bringing their lack of a common vision or set of goals for the “new world order” to the fore. This was the opening the forces of the old order needed: within about a year and a half of the initial democratic “wave” in 1848, all these oppositional movements had collapsed into infighting, fallen apart or been crushed. Some form of dictatorship returned to every place from which it had disappeared.

The failure of 1848, though it is perhaps a particularly dramatic example of the inability of protestors to translate their discontent into real transformations, is closer to being the rule than the exception: there are many more examples of massive discontent with an existing order than there are of successful attempts to create a new one. Our time period may one day be counted as yet another one in this long series of failures to translate widespread discontent into true political transformation.

Today, we are certainly living through a period of massive discontent. Sclerotic and unresponsive political regimes, economic downturns, and financial crises have created grievances and dissatisfaction in many corners of the globe. But much of this opposition remains focused more on what it opposes than on what it wants, better able to articulate why it wants to do away with the existing order than able to convey viable alternatives to it. This is truer in Europe and the U.S. than it is in the Arab world, where problems were both greater and the basic alternatives clearer (i.e. democracy vs. dictatorship). But even in the Arab world, divisions within oppositional movements emerged rapidly in many cases, particularly between those who favored more “liberal” democratic regimes and those who favored more “Islamic” ones. In Europe and the U.S., meanwhile, surveys continually show widespread agreement that existing political economies are “out of whack” – unfair, unjust, too unequal, etc. And yet, a coherent alternative capable of attracting widespread support is lacking on both sides of the Atlantic. As a result, in Europe protests have been disproportionately filtered through right wing populist parties that direct their growing discontent at immigrants and European bureaucrats, while in the U.S. movements on both the right (the tea party) and left (Occupy Wall Street) proclaim to represent “the people,” but have little in the way of positive, attractive plans to offer those who do not already support them.

Prognostication is always a difficult and dangerous business. Perhaps we are still in the early stages of our “age of uncertainty.” Powerful and attractive plans for changing the status quo might soon emerge. But if history is any guide, the chances of that happening are slim. Particularly in the West, what seems striking about the current period is the widespread sense of the need for change combined with the lack of any coherent plans for it. When we think back on history’s great revolutions in particular, or the periods of lasting transformation more generally, we can (at least in retrospect) see both what people were fighting for and against. Take, for example, the last two periods of fundamental change in the West’s modern history — 1945 and 1968. In 1945, the struggle was to bring to an end the horrors of fascism and National Socialism, and finally to put (Western) Europe on the path to stable capitalist democracy. In 1968, the struggle was to transform Western societies, to bring social change in line with the political and economic changes that had been wrought after 1945. Maybe the early 21^st century’s John Maynard Keynes, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, or Danny the Red is out there and will soon emerge to help lead us out of our season of discontent. We are all waiting with baited breath. But, for now, this unlikely figure of hope is nowhere to be found.

Sheri Berman is a professor of political science at Barnard College. Her latest book is The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century.

[1] Charles Tilly, “Does Modernization Breed Revolution?” in Jack A. Goldstone, ed. Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Studies. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1986), p. 49.

[2] Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (NY: Monad Press, 1961), quoted in Skocpol, “Revolutions in the Third World,” in Skocpol, ed., Social Revolutions in the Modern World (N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 260.

[3] Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, p. 4.