Abstract
This chapter explores the commonalities between the struggles of the last years around the Mediterranean, and tries to find the constitutive elements of this season of protests and activism against repression and a growing systemic crisis. Portrays of characters, places and critical moments of the uprisings are pictured, and social initiatives created to offer alternative opportunities of re-socialisation and meeting basic needs of people are described. Language and mobilization tools of social movements are reviewed as well, by comparing grassroots manuals and guides.
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Notes
- 1.
A protest camp set up by Saharaouis in the occupied Western Sahara between October and November 2010, violently dismantled by Moroccan security forces. The camp was erected to protest against ongoing discrimination, poverty and human rights abuses against local citizens. According to many analysts, the events of Gdeim Izik were the real beginning of the “Arab Spring”.
- 2.
Joseph Massad, “The ‘Arab Spring’ and other American seasons”, Al Jazeera English, 29 August 2012 (Massad 2012). On the terminology, Maytha Alhassen strongly advocates for removing the wording “Arab Spring” from our analyses (“Please Reconsider the Term ‘Arab Spring’”, The World Post, 2 October 2012).
- 3.
- 4.
This is the Egyptian version of a broadly widespread slogan. In Tunisia, it goes: “Shughl, Hurriya, Karāma Wataniya!”, “Labour, Freedom, Citizenship and Dignity”.
- 5.
On the transnational dimension of the protest, see also the research work of sociologist Donatella della Porta (with A. Mattoni, Spreading Protest: Social Movements in Times of Crisis, ECPR Press, Colchester 2014 [Mattoni 2014]), and of the journal on social movements Interface (Magid Shihade, Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Laurence Cox [eds.], The Season of Revolution: The Arab Spring and European Mobilizations, Vol. 4, May 2012 [Shihade et al. 2012]). See as well C.F. Fominaya’s chapter on Arab Spring, Indignados and Occupy, in her book Social Movements and Globalization, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2014 (Fominaya 2014).
- 6.
- 7.
Ibidem, p. 21–22 (Nunes 2014).
- 8.
Larbi Sadiki, “Egypt and Tunisia: Regime Failure and the Gymnasiums of Civic Empowerment”, in Barak Barfi, Anouar Boukhars, Erica Chenoweth, Larbi Sadiki, Stephen Zunes (eds.), Revolution and Political Transformation: Government Action and Response Vol. II, Middle East Institute, Washington, 2011, pp. 19–22 (Sadiki 2011).
- 9.
- 10.
With the 2016 Spring mobilization against the flexibilization of the labour market, French protesters occupied urban squares such as Paris’ place de la République or Marseille’s cours Julien, coining a new form of temporal nomadism consisting in stretching mobilization and debate throughout the night time (Nuit Debout) and the year calendar. As with the French Revolution, in fact, the movement rewrote it: all dates following the first 31st of March protest were renamed as a continuation of the month of March. Sociologist Geoffroy Pleyers qualified it as a slow movement, a movement in need of time, where what counts is what happens right now, not what it would become (“La Nuit debout, ʻun mouvement qui a besoin de tempsʼ” [Up All Night, a time needing movement], L’Humanité, 12 April 2016).
- 11.
Two provinces of the north of Syria, Ar-Raqqa and Deir Ez-Zor enjoyed a strong civic movement for a while; however, it was soon stopped after the control of ISIS. These organizations are now operating clandestinely. See: Citizens for Syria, Mapping the Syrian Civil Society Actors. Phase One, Berlin, September 2015. The mapping has in the meantime reached a second stage and recorded at least 200 more entities.
- 12.
Including national and local trading systems of goods and services, time banks, swap bazaars, fair-trade groups, collective enterprises, eco-communities, urban and experimental agriculture centres, seeds banks, natural architecture groups, training centres for self-organization and management, collective groups for participated sustainable development, community kitchens, free education centres, folk art centres and eco-festivals (interview held in June 2013). Greek documentary Another World, produced in 2013 by Iliosporoi, a youth network of social ecology and politics, interviews the protagonists of many of these initiatives. I attended its screening in June 2013, in the park, which housed Plato’s Academy. “The transition is first of all in us”, “We flee the market economy” and “Do not expect any more from the State” were some of the movie’s statements.
- 13.
See omikronproject.gr. From alternative economies and local exchange trading systems to collective kitchens, from groups providing free lessons and knowledge exchange, stimulating entrepreneurship, or hosting game festivals or book-swapping initiatives to collectives experimenting with new lifestyle models (carpooling, cohabitation, cycling and reviving abandoned spaces), from citizen journalism and independent outlets to neighbourhood assemblies and projects advancing economic, ecological and political democracy.
- 14.
Lanfranco Caminiti, “La sinistra e Grillo: Perché questa ostilità?” [The Left and Grillo: Why Such an Obstility?], Gli altri—La Sinistra quotidiana, 22 February 2013 (Caminiti 2013). Caminiti resumes the specificities of the M5S: civic sense of commitment, intersubjectivity, thoroughness in applying the rules. “This is not anti-politics, I would say this is hyper-politics, arch-politics” he states.
- 15.
It stands for 15th of May 2011, the day of occupation of Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Square and the squares of many other Spanish towns.
- 16.
Podemos inherited this communication’s straightness: their June 2016 Spanish elections programme has been printed in the form of an Ikea catalogue.
- 17.
See interview with Ibrahim el-Houdaiby in G. Solera, Riscatto mediterraneo [A Mediterranean Awakening], Nuovadimensione, Venice, 2015, II ed., pp. 178–181. (Solera 2015). El-Houdaiby recalls three factors making activists realize that formal representative systems were insufficient to achieve the revolutions’ demands: the unbalanced and biased conditions of political organization and campaigning between the forces on the field, during the first post-revolution elections; the alignment of first post-revolution governments’ economic measures with mainstream neoliberal economic doctrine; and the fact that different faces were proposing old social, economic or environmental policies, and governance was responding to a hierarchical school of politics.
- 18.
With the exception of Kosovo (103rd). Source: Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2015, 2015.
- 19.
Such as what I experienced at the Egyptian driver and vehicle licensing system, in order to process a registration request or a change of vehicle ownership.
- 20.
The World Bank, New World Bank Study Details Manipulation of Regulations by Former Tunisian Regime Officials, Washington, 27 March 2014.
- 21.
Bankia has been kept alive up by the Conservative government with injections of public money after it was listed in the stock exchange market in 2011, relying on fraudulent accounts and budgets. In 2009–2012, the bank received more than 142 billion € in official aid between measures of capitalization (15.73 %) and funding measures (84.27 %). This represented a quarter of the public funds destined to the Spanish banking sector (source: Plataforma por la nazionalización de las cajas de ahorro, 2013).
- 22.
Interview held in Zagreb in May 2013.
- 23.
Interview held in Tel Aviv in November 2012.
- 24.
Among the OECD countries, Israel is ranked only on the 30th place for equality in incomes, in front only to the United States, Turkey, Mexico and Chile. This variable is measured by the so-called Gini coefficient. See OECD, “Income inequality”, OECD Factbook 2015–2016, Paris, April 2016.
- 25.
The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation, interview by Paul Jay to Shir Hever, in TheRealNews.com, 6 July 2012 (Jay 2012). The value of wealth owned by these families is equivalent to 77 % of the national budget of Israel (see Ora Coren and Lilach Weissman, “18 wealthiest families earn 32 % of Israel’s revenues”, Haaretz.com, 13 February 2006) (Coren and Weissman 2006).
- 26.
Source: Institut National des Statistiques, Note sur l’enquête nationale de l’emploi [Note on the national employment survey], Tunis, 1st Trimester 2016.
- 27.
See: AlmaLaurea, XVII Indagine sulla condizione occupazionale dei laureati [17th Report on employment among Italian university graduates], University of Bicocca, Milan, April 2015; and INS, At-Tashghreel wa al-Batāla [Employment and Unemployment], Tunis, 4th Trimester 2015.
- 28.
Interview held in May 2013.
- 29.
In the Italian procedural law, it is the institute, which allows a defendant not to show up in a court for justified reasons. A group of civil society actors requested an abrogative referendum in front of the abuses committed by several political figures under investigation included former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
- 30.
From the statute of Fondazione Teatro Valle Bene Comune—0.4, teatrovalleoccupato.it.
- 31.
Interview held in Rome in March 2012 and June 2016.
- 32.
His writings are available on delestal.blogspot.com. The Teatro Valle Occupato group inspired other groups and cultural scenes in the country and abroad. After leaving the building in August 2014, the group has been ceaseless negotiating with the City of Rome the legal reopening of the theater as a project of participatory performing arts, in line with the principles of the foundation artists wish to establish, but the public administration refused to give continuity to the model of democratic theater management applied by the artists. Confronted with public disinterest, and aiming at denouncing the state of neglect which the theater was left in, artists tried to symbolically re-enter the since almost two years closed theater on June 11, 2016, but were kicked out by the police.
- 33.
Interview held in Zagreb in May 2013 and May 2016.
- 34.
Mekkī’s intentions were collected in Tunis in January 2012 and May 2016.
- 35.
“In 2008, Facebook was not at all known, especially in our poor towns.” By the end of 2010, Internet landscape in Tunisia was already something else. A survey conducted in January 2011 revealed that Tunisia, a country of ten million inhabitants, had 1.97 million Facebook users, 18.6 % of the total population and 54.73 % of its Internet users. This explosion of Facebook was the result of the regime’s tampering with traditional media. See R. Ferjani and T. Mekki, “Révolution et contre—révolution en Tunisie: le virtuel miroir du réel” [Revolution and counterrevolution in Tunisia: virtual as a mirror of reality], Médias, 30 (autumn 2011). pp. 79–82 (Ferjani and Mekki 2011).
- 36.
Top Goon evoques Top Gun, the 1986 movie by Tony Scott, whose main actor was Tom Cruise. The founder of Masāsit Mati, whom I invited at a human rights film festival in Italy in 2014, has used a nickname hiding his identity until he left Syria.
- 37.
See Razan Ghazzawi, “Interview with Comic4 Syria Artist”, Arte, 8 November 2012 (Ghazzawi 2012).
- 38.
The international office’s name is Presidio Europa. It has developed a network of citizens’ initiatives and platforms struggling against unnecessarily imposed large infrastructures in Europe and the Mediterranean, starting from the No-TAV struggle against the high-speed train line in the Susa Valley. I met Sabine last time at the annual forum of the international network held in May 2014 in Rosia Montana (Romania), a region threatened by large gold mining projects.
- 39.
Bräutigam’s intentions were collected in the Susa Valley in August 2012.
- 40.
Youth movement formed spontaneously on 24 October 2011, the day after the elections for the Constituent Assembly of Tunisia, in protest against alleged electoral fraud and manipulation. Interview held in Bardo in December 2011.
- 41.
Political scientists those days were even addressing directly the civil society to ask for robust corrective intervention in the constitutional debate. Commenting on the draft constitution, political scientist Khadija Wöhler-Khalfallah said that the separation of powers was not treated with the necessary urgency. She called on the civil society in a last effort to make a success of the constitutional work (“Lecture critique du quatrième brouillon de la nouvelle constitution tunisienne” [Critical Review of the Fourth Tunisian Constitution’s draft], Nawaat.org, 10 June 2013) (Wöhler-Khalfallah 2013).
- 42.
The debate was around “equality” versus “complementarity”. The text finally included in the Constitution is, “The State commits to protect women’s accrued rights and work to strengthen and develop those rights. The State guarantees the equality of opportunities between women and men to have access to all levels of responsibility in all domains. The State works to attain parity between women and men in elected assemblies. The State takes all necessary measures in order to eradicate violence against women” (National Constituent Assembly, The Constitution of the Republic of Tunisia, art. 46, 27 January 2014) (National Constituent Assembly 2014). The text proposed by an-Nahda said, “the State shall guarantee the protection of women’s rights and sustain their achievements on the basis of the principle that women are complementary to men in the family and join men in the development of the country”.
- 43.
Interview held in Athens in June 2012.
- 44.
Interview held in Luxembourg in September 2012.
- 45.
Interview held in Frankfurt in May 2012.
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Solera, G. (2017). A Revolutionary Contagion. In: Citizen Activism and Mediterranean Identity. Mobility & Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45961-5_1
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