University of Illinois Chicago political scientist Kelly LeRoux (who got her PhD at Wayne State University here in the D) and co-author Anna Bernadska recently published a study, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, that shows a positive correlation between participation in the arts and engagement with civil society. They analyzed more than 2700 respondents to the 2002 General Social Survey, conducted biannually by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and generally considered one of the primary sources of data on American social trends. Their analysis found that people who have direct or indirect involvement with the arts are more likely to also have direct participation in three dimensions of civil society: engagement in civic activities, social tolerance, and other-regarding (i.e., altruistic) behavior. These results hold true even when factoring in demographic variables for age, race, and education.

Most studies on the social impact of the arts address economics and related externalities such as improved educational outcomes and general community well being. (See, for example, the work of Ann Markusen of the Project on Regional and Industrial Economics at the University of Minnesota summarized in my blog post here.) The study by LeRoux and Bernadska is different in that it empiricially investigates ties between the arts and citizenship. Instead of seeking a market rationale for arts patronage, the authors stress the benefits for civic virtue. The study is also noteworthy because rather than looking at the direct impact of community and other arts projects, such as mural painting, theatrical productions, and the like, it takes an audience-studies approach more typically associated with media and communications analysis.

It’s important to note that the authors demonstrate correlation not causation. In statistics, correlation establishes the dependence of certain variables on one another, which is useful in predictive modeling. But the relationship, either positive (the more of one variable, the more of the other) or negative (the more of one variable, the less of the other), doesn’t necessarily mean that the one is specifically the cause of the other. There may be other factors at work (called intervening variables) not measured in the analysis. While that may be the case, the study is still useful in suggesting additional ways in which the arts benefit society.

Not the least of these is the development of the critical function, which is fundamental to the advancement of discourse and building consensus on matters of common concern within the public sphere, which civil society theorists see as key to a viable, participatory democracy. Indeed, German social scientist and political philosopher Jurgen Habermas in his important study, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (MIT: 1991 [1962]), cites the development of the field of literary criticism and aesthetics over the roughly 150-year period in Europe starting in the late 17th century as laying the groundwork for citizens to think independently and thus reflect upon their role in society and ultimately act as political agents. More recently, French philospher Jacques Ranciere in books such as The Future of the Image (Verso: 2009), Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (Continuum: 2010), and The Emancipated Spectator (Verso: 2011), has established the link between aesthetic practice and political action.

This also explains why anti-democratic forces in American society have worked so hard, starting with the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s, to eliminate public funding for the arts. It turns out, that Big Bird really is potentially subversive.

This post also appears in Motown Review of Art.

When analyzing politics and society in the Arab and Islamic world, it is admirable and important to break away from a Western-centered analysis. This move is not sufficient though. There is a temptation to continue to fall back on theories and rhetoric that have emanated from the west and have informed exactly that from which one attempts to break away. Furthermore, when discussing public discourse in the Arab world, it is imperative that one addresses the importance of Islam and its continuing vital role in Arab and Middle Eastern politics, despite Western scholarship’s tendency to suggest a historical end that involves the marginalization of religion. I appreciate Professor Challand’s posts in Deliberately Considered and the admirable move of breaking away from Western-centered analysis, but I think his posts suffer from theoretical temptation and an insufficient appreciation of the role of Islam.

It is true that civil-society is more than “NGOs and the developmental approach which imagines that the key to progress is when donors, the UN or rich countries, give aid to boost non-state actors, in particular NGOs, in the ‘developing south'” as Professor Challand asserts in his post “The Counter-Power of Civil Society in the Middle East.” I believe, though, that one must also conceive of civil-society and democratic institutions as more than a source for “collective autonomy” using other than secular slogans in the tradition of Tocqueville and Hegel.

Writing a history of democracy would have to include analysis such as de Tocqueville’s, but we should also remember that de Tocqueville wrote:

Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Quran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others.

Tocqueville criticized Islam for allowing no deviation from its laws which to his mind covered all aspects of private and public life. But he failed to recognize the diversity of civil-society and the capacity for democratic institutions embedded in Islam’s structure and its ability to adapt to changing times, in part because it does not possess the characteristics of Catholicism. Ernest Renan later argued that Islam is not able to develop its own modernity, diverging from Tocqueville, but making the same mistake of essentializing Islam in a static history, laying ground for much of today’s claims that Islam and democracy are incompatible. These assertions often mobilize a rhetoric that promote tired tropes of “separation of church and state” and that democracy is contingent on secularism.

In fact, secularism has a much different meaning in the Arab world than it does in the West for two reasons. Islam never had a clerical hierarchy (although this phenomenon developed in Shi’ism later, albeit in a much different way than Catholicism) and therefore never had to answer the same questions regarding state-church relations that were prevalent in European political history. Despite this fact, Islam and the state did evolve separately due to negotiations of autonomy and the political domains of Islam and the state. “Secular” as European vocabulary to describe the dichotomy between Christ’s heavenly body and earthly body, once represented by medieval kingship and later by the Church, is not the same in Islam. In fact, the lack of a hierarchical authority in Islam and its partial reliance on consensus, or ijma’, is precisely what lends to it the ability to foster civil-society and diverse political groups, as well as various “schools” of law. An example is the mass proliferation of diverse Sufi brotherhoods in the fourteenth and fifteenth century. According to Richard Bulliet, “By the eighteenth century, there were thousands of Sufi brotherhoods reaching into every Muslim community and spreading knowledge of Islam into new lands.”

Furthermore, “secular” as a modern political concept in the Islamic world has come to mean the marginalization of the clergy and Islam in favor of modern military organizations, state-run schools, and state-sponsored religious institutions. The secular Arab dictatorships, which are currently undergoing fundamental changes, have implemented these practices and have been some of the most brutal regimes in the world. The attempt to relegate Islamic politics to the sidelines, a process which included the state’s co-opting of previously autonomous religious institutions, such as Islamic universities (al-Azhar University in Egypt is an example) and charities (waqf), only resulted in the alienation of segments of society that have been forced to take up alternative political methods, which sometimes include violence.

It is also untrue that the language of current opposition movements in the Arab world is a “secular re-imagining of the people as a united nation,” as Professor Challand calls it, presumably meaning that religious language is abandoned in favor of modern political vocabulary. Currently in Jordan, protests involve a number of groups, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood (or the Islamic Action Front, as it is called in Jordan), as well as many other opposition and counter-opposition groups. Many of these parties use discourse that is couched in Islam and ethnicity (especially Jordanian vs. Palestinian ethnicity and nationality).

In closing, Castoriadis’ analyses and modern political thought that relies heavily on Marxist theory, though they make valuable contributions to interpreting revolution and revolt, are simply inadequate to explain Islamic politics. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 serves as a lesson as to how intimately connected revolution, democracy and religion are now connected in the Muslim world. While secularism supposedly goes hand-in-hand with the development of democracy and the modern state, it was Islam that opened revolutionary potentials, democratic and anti-democratic. The Iranian experience revealed how transformational potential can be and has been heavily steeped in Islamic political theology. The revolution was not only a watershed in Islamic and Iranian politics but also a wake-up call for critical observers, who previously expected an unfolding of modern history that would increasingly push religion out of politics. In order to effectively understand the Islamic world, scholars and analysts must not only re-evaluate the theories on which they rely, as well as history and historiography, but also their rhetoric and the words that they mobilize.

Like a whole lot of other people, I am trying to get a handle on Occupy Wall Street. It’s obvious that this is a very special movement, but I am trying to figure out what makes it so special. The one-month-old movement is being accused of being unclear, directionless, fragmented, vague, fuzzy. Indeed, it is not made up of disciplined cadres marching with mass-produced banners. It does not have a Central Committee, and though it is an expression of what one Zuccotti Park woman veteran calls an Economic Civil Rights Movement, it stays away from specific demands. These are there, too, but not easy to list or prioritize. It is not just about jobs, not only about mounting poverty, or student debts that now total more than all our credit-card debts; it is not only about corruptibility of the political system, and not only about accountability of the banks and bankers. It is – not unlike the Civil Rights Movement – about something much more fundamental. And I think it has something to do with the way we are locked in to rigid ways of thinking and talking about democracy.

There is nothing new in the observation that we are often imprisoned by language. Language is a conventional system of signs, and if we want to communicate we have to rely on its conventional usage. But there are dimensions and usages of language that, when tweaked a bit, have the capacity either to keep us captive, or to bring in some fresh air, helping us breathe. That we are captives of language, confined within a language that does not serve us any more, is conveyed vividly by Susan George when she says that “cost recovery” is the polite way of saying “make families pay to educate their children.” Indeed, we hear it all the time: education is a very good investment. On the other hand, a pleasantly surprising example of a more refreshing linguistic game comes from Occupy Wall Street: “Yes we camp!”

Something has happened to our thinking and talking about democracy, and we academics are not without guilt here. We have put too much trust in the kind of formal democracy, procedural democracy, that our political science has tended to prefer, as it brackets sentiments and makes it easier to operationalize and easier to build a “legitimate” academic discipline around. And, indeed, one ought to be wary of what overly emotional politics may lead to. But one has to see that there are vital dimensions of democracy that in the process have been overlooked by social scientists and thus also by policy makers, a situation that can lead to inaccurate policy guidelines and often to disastrous policy decisions.

With their focus on various aspects of formal democracy, academics have facilitated the easy prescriptions for democracy that are handy for the policy experts. And American policy experts are known for peddling an easy, “one size fits all” prescription for young or aspiring democracies: you just have to fulfill 3 conditions: have free elections, a free-market economy, and civil society.

Well, these requirements may very well bring about parodies of democracy, as when democratic elections result in anti-democratic regimes like those of Putin or Chavez; or when globalized free markets bring about staggering impoverishment, unashamed, blatant economic exploitation, or bloody civil wars over resources; or when civil society is a masquerade of so-called non-governmental organizations that in practice serve as a facade for the government or are  maintained by capricious foreign donors and carry out projects that fit their ever-changing guidelines.

And what if in old democracies like ours, our political rights, the right to elect our representatives to Congress, are hostage to forces we actually have little control over, such as campaign funding? I hate to think it’s true, but I recently read that the cost of electing our next president will be over one billion dollars for each candidate! So is democracy failing us?

OWS, with its emphasis on consensual decision-making, has raised many hopes and expectations. I realize there are many ways of understanding it. I see it as a movement to recover the meaning of democracy by searching beyond the models that delineate the procedural mechanics of it, which often collapse into a minimalist view of democracy as an institutional arrangement for competing interest groups with their eye on the people’s votes. Their return to consensus is the return — at least in part — to the original meaning of the word consensus, “feeling with.” Even “participatory democracy” does not seem to grasp it for me anymore. The civic exercise of direct democracy through the “General Assembly” taking place in Zuccotti Park, and spreading to other places, arises from a strong sense of indeed being born free and equal in dignity and rights and of acting towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood — that sense which is so well captured in the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Again, this movement is not about serving different interests groups. It is about something else, and it is unprecedented. It is not about a change of government or even of the system. It is about 99% of the people losing trust in the workings of democracy, and therefore losing hope in the sense of their lives, and in the sense of the lives of their children. A not easily measurable goal, and yes, we do not have a language for it. We do not know how to name it. But I do think that it is asking for a fundamental change on a grand scale that would make possible the recovery of our lost capacity for the enacting of democracy.

Certain lost dimensions of democracy– described variously as deliberative, agonistic, or performative — represent a kind of political engagement — critical for any democracy — in which the key identity of its actors is that of citizens, and in which the good of society at large, and not that of a narrow interest group, is at stake. And the OWS movement gets it! Democracy, after all, is also about equality of opportunity and the promise of a better life.

The goals of Occupy Wall Street inevitably appear fuzzy because the protesters are trying to expose the many ways in which something as intangible and subtle as human dignity is being damaged, and the way humiliation is going unnoticed. The assemblies are a cry against the kind of language and the kind of politics — with its political formulas, processes, and mechanisms — that in effect disregard the citizens and their personhood, along with the related notions of agency, equality and liberty. This remarkable movement can help us to recover democracy’s lost treasures.

This summer, a group of miners in Albania’s richest chrome mine in Bulqiza staged a spectacular strike. Ten miners barricaded themselves 1400 meters, nearly one mile, underground and refused to eat and drink. The workers’ drastic measure followed earlier protests both at their own mine in the north and in the capital Tirana. After 23 days of underground protest, ten miners replaced the first weakened crew, continuing the hunger strike to express opposition to low wages, unsafe working conditions, poor management, and the lack of investment in the mine in general. The hunger strike was part of a three month long work stoppage by some 700 Albanian miners. But Albania is no Tunisia, Egypt or Libya. While being one of Europe’s poorest and most corrupt countries, it has been dealing with slowing economic growth and weak political leadership beyond the attention of the global media. The miners don’t seem to be the vanguards of a civil rebellion, but rather the players in an act overshadowed by an ongoing fight between two political parties and their leaders. DeliberatelyConsidered asked Ermira Danaj, an Albanian participant in the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies’ Democracy and Diversity Institute, for a report. – Esther Kreider-Verhalle

DC: Were any of the miners’ demands met?

Ermira Danaj: This time, the miners have won, but it is one of the very few victories for workers  fighting for their rights. The owners of the mine promised to continue investments in the mine, in a transparent manner. They also agreed to improve working conditions, to pay a 13 month wage, to pay the workers for half the period they were on strike, and a wage increase of 20%. During the first hunger strike, miners from other regions and workers from other sectors, facing the same problems, had started showing their solidarity with the miners. This was very unusual. After a regional court had decided that the protesters had to leave the mine, the miners left voluntarily, but stubbornly started their hunger strike again in another location not far from the mine.

The history of Albanian mining after 1990 is not a happy story. During the communist regime, the export of chrome was very important for the country. But after 1990, along with the rest of the industrial sector, the mining branch collapsed. The new democratic government – democratic in the sense that it was the first government within a pluralistic political system – aimed to privatize state owned enterprises. The socialists who came to power in 1997 continued the free market reforms. Yet, critically, privatization never focused on the workers’ working conditions, their contracts or wages.

Privatization of the mining sector began in earnest in 1994, largely supported by foreign investors. While the mineral resource of chromium continued to be vital for Albania’s economy, the conditions in the mines deteriorated, with numerous serious injuries and yearly deaths. For a number of years, the US Department of State has lamented the poor working conditions in the Bulqiza mines in its annual Human Rights Reports.

In the past three years, many protests have been organized but with little effect. Conditions have not improved and the struggle for fundamental workers’ rights has not been publicly recognized. Neither had the miners received much support from workers in other sectors or from civil society. The only organization that supported the miners’ protest earlier this year was The Political Organization, a newly founded organization aiming at raising critical debate in the country, while supporting workers and vulnerable people. During earlier protests that lasted several days in front of the government’s building in Tirana, the group brought the miners food, clothes and blankets.

DC: The small city of Bulqiza, about 30 miles north of Tirana is dependent on the mining industry. Investment in the mining sector is crucial both to the economic vitality of the region and the country. Chromium is used to produce steel and aluminum alloys, and is exported to the biggest American steel producers and other foreign companies. The Bulqiza mine has been in foreign hands since 2007. It’s owned by the Austrian corporation Decometal DCM, whose Albanian subsidiary ACR runs it until 2013. Has there been any improvement at all?

Ermira Danaj: In several press conferences and other media appearances ACR representatives have reported their investments not only in the Bulqiza mine but also in other industrial sectors. The miners’ main demand has been an improvement of their working conditions, while their calls for wage increases always came second. The miners argue that their lives and their futures are dependent on the mines. The investments are needed to ensure that they and the city as a whole have a future. Because ACR will run the mine until 2013, the workers worry about what will happen after that, if sufficient investments are not made now. Just to give you an idea of the current working conditions: The miners’ third demand was to have showers in the mine and clothes!

DC: There is a history of tension between the new foreign owner, the Albanian government, and the miners’ union. There have been talks in January 2011 between the Union and the Austrian owners with the Ministry of Labor as mediator. Both sides signed an agreement that there would be no further increases in wages until 2013. Their average wages are more than double the Albanian minimum wage of about 140 Euro per month. Also, the Albanian authorities fined ACR in July 2011 because it was not living up to its investment contract. And, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Energy suspended part of ACR’s license after two weeks of strikes at the mine. The same Ministry has been said to be in favor of the demands of the miners but to be against the method of striking, and instead prefers a dialogue.

Ermira Danaj: The strike is a legitimate action when workers’ rights are not being respected and workers are exploited. And the word “dialogue” has been one of the most harmful words in Albania, at least during the last years, because any form of oppression and exploitation is depicted and covered up by the word “dialogue.” When the dialogue is not working, and the workers’ conditions remain unchanged, then there are other possible instruments such as protests and strikes. In Albania the hunger strike has been quite delegitimized. And usually, the motifs behind protests are party politics. The three month long miners’ protest has been one of the very rare cases of persistent action. And while it is true that miners in Albania earn about 300 Euro (406 US Dollars), mining is dangerous and most miners suffer from health problems.

DC: Where do Albania’s political leaders stand on the problems?

Ermira Danaj: The miners’ issues are not addressed in political debate. Discussions between the members of the two major parties focus on fights between the leaders, and on gossip. Programmatic and ideological differences are all but ignored. In addition, the workers’ unions are weak and of little help, split as they have been for years according to party affiliation.

DC: Opposition leader Edi Rama did write an opinion piece in a local newspaper supporting the miners, while PM Berisha accused Rama of using the miners for his own political gain.

Ermira Danaj: This is the main issue here, the fact that the miners’ strike is used just as another element to feed the political struggle between the main parties. And in this context, instead of an op-ed piece, one would prefer to hear from the opposition leader an alternative position on the problems in the privatized mining sector. What will the opposition do if they come to power? Or, they could organize any political action in support of the miners. Unfortunately, in Albania there are only meetings and protests before elections, or after them, to protest the results.

Interestingly, because they feel they have nowhere else to turn the protesters asked for support from the American Embassy in Albania. The head of one of the Unions that backed the Bulqiza miners made an appeal to the US Ambassador to support the miners and to visit them to personally observe the working conditions. The miners had no expectation whatsoever that any Albanian politicians would support them. They made their appeal to the US ambassador because he is considered a good friend of the Albanian people and he represents a country where democracy and human rights are respected. The past two years,  the U.S. has been very involved  in Albania’s political crisis and the US Ambassador has stepped in before. This appeal for support to the US Embassy indicates not only a fundamental crisis in the Albanian political system, but also in civil society and in society at large. During their underground strike, the workers saw no other hope than to make an appeal to a foreign embassy.

DC: The story of Albania’s desperate miners was not covered in American media. How was local coverage?

Ermira Danaj: In the absence of any sensational political fight and in the middle of the media’s silly season, the hunger strike received quite some media attention. Yet, by focusing on the wage issue, they were inaccurately reporting the story. The investment issue was not part of the story, while, oddly enough, they did bring up the retirement age of the miners. Under the communist regime, the retirement age was 50 and currently it is 60. But the issue of retirement is up to the government. It has been an election issue, but it wasn’t part of the strikers’ demands that were all directed to the private owners of the mine.

Currently, the workers are in a trap between the private mine operator, the state and the media. The company and the state are not engaging in serious discussions about investment. Political debate is only about personalities and not about pressing issues. During the last two decades, our society has been preaching individual success as the ultimate value; fighting for workers’ rights looks so old-fashioned. So, given that the workers were doing the state’s job and were pushing the issue of investment with the private owners, the miners of Bulqiza scored a great victory. They did it all by themselves, they persisted, and weren’t corrupted. With their sacrifice in the form of a hunger strike 1400 meters underground, they showed others that resistance can work.

The school offers hands-on media training that gives students the skills to handle professional video- and photo cameras, and editing software. In addition, the curriculum offers courses in entrepreneurship, web design, writing, and media ethics. One of the goals is to prepare students to become community journalists, enabling them to tell the stories of the small communities around them. Ideally, the graduates would not only witness the development and reconstruction – or lack thereof – of their country, but also investigate and critically reflect upon it. Not only as community journalists, but also as civic journalists they could start making products that can function as forums for discussion and that can build up both their own as well as others’ social capital in the process.

In the daily practice of Haiti, this is all easier said than done. While it would be a challenge to give a similar 4-month crash course to any group of young people, trying to do it in Haiti exposes one to the country’s idiosyncratic trials.

Haitian media – they mainly exist in the form of radio and newspapers – have a long history of being mere tools to earn and secure political power. Only in the 1970s, still under Duvalier’s dictatorship, did one radio station start to air local and international news in Creole, the language of the majority of Haitians, instead of French, the language of the elite. It took until 1986, the year of Duvalier’s fall, before journalists enjoyed a meaningful freedom of the press and played a supporting role in the newly developing civil society. The military coup of 1991 that forced out Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country’s first popularly chosen president, reintroduced the old repression of the media.

The return of Aristide and the rule of his successors have not necessarily laid the groundwork for a strong role for the media in the developing democracy. The damage to the media has endured. The well-known Haitian journalist Michele Montas-Dominique – widow of Jean Dominique who was murdered in 2000 – has lamented the “balkanization of the press.” In the 1990s, many frequencies on the FM band had been doled out to the military and the elite and many of these stations are still controlled by sponsors who do not support democratic rules of government. In addition, Montas-Dominique has long been worried about the lack of objectivity and professional ethics of Haitian journalists, many of whom are not bothered by working on the side for private and government employers.

Under the country’s ever demanding circumstances, Haiti Reporters is trying to work on the grassroots level. All the issues that have plagued Haitian journalism have been hampering speedy progress. Also, the school and its staff are significantly challenged by a lack of entrepreneurship in general and a struggle with the existing power relations – both between and among the different classes and groups. But even in these tough conditions, there is plenty of reason for optimism. Not in the least because of the highly motivated students, a few of whom have already shown that they can land jobs and internships.

So far, the school has attracted mainly students from the country’s tentatively developing middle class that, if they stay in Haiti – as opposed to fleeing or emigrating – can become a vital engine for development. For example, it has been an interesting experience for the students to make a short film about the Dance Company Tchaka Dance, that performs in the refugee camps or filming a project in Port-au-Prince’s Cité Soleil, one of the world’s biggest slums. It forced the students to be exposed to the difficult living conditions of many of their compatriots. Vriens, the school’s director, who has been traveling and working in Haiti for many years, has pointed out the apparent denial by the rich of the existence of the poor. It is one of the unsettling realities of Haitian society, which needs attention if a majority of the populations is ever going to be a meaningful participant in the political process.

The school’s goal is to give young people a practical education that gives them the tools to earn a living in Haiti. Although foreigners are currently in charge of the school, Haitian lecturers play an important role. Sooner rather than later, the Haitians themselves will have to take over the school’s management. In addition, a Haitian association has been created that can function as an independent production company for its alumni. The fact that it is a small-scale operation, located in a fairly poor but decent neighborhood, is working in its favor as compared to the slowly moving, bureaucratic multi-million dollar projects of the aid industry.

The loose network of big NGOs has grown into a powerful outside force that is not centrally organized, operating next to, instead of in tandem with, the weak Haitian government. As well intentioned as the aid may be, it contributes to a form of second-hand democracy that isn’t locally instigated. Since the end of 1990s, Haitians have spoken about their demokrasi pepe, or second-hand democracy, after the Creole description of the loads of used clothing from the United States that are resold on the streets. Haiti Reporters is trying to design a new boutique, owned and staffed by Haitians, addressing a pressing need in Haitian society.

Benoit Challand, the author of Palestinian Civil Society: Foreign Donors and the Power to Promote and Exclude (2009), is currently Visiting Associate Professor at the New School for Social Research.  He is affiliated with the University of Bologna where he has been teaching Middle Eastern politics since 2008. He has been Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute at the Center on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding in Geneva, working on its Religions & Politics project. -Jeff

We are witnessing the emergence of the counter-power of civil society in the wave of revolts in the Middle East and North Africa.  It is embedded in nationalist revolts in which youth and trade unions have played and very well may continue to play important roles. I choose the phrase ‘counter-power of civil society’ to describe the ongoing developments in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya, and also the little covered protests in the Palestinian territories, because I believe that there is more to civil society than its organized form.  There is more to civil society than NGOs and the developmental approach which imagines that the key to progress is when donors, the UN or rich countries, give aid to boost non-state actors, in particular NGOs, in the “developing south.”  In fact, overlooking this, leads to a complete misunderstanding  of present transformations.

In western social theory, civil society is described by Hegel and Tocqueville (among others) as opposition to the State, or as an intermediary layer of associations between family and the State.  This has been the counter – power in the Middle East and North Africa.  Thus, when we read in this Sunday’s New York Times that “Libya has no civil society,” it is not only a conceptual error.  It makes it impossible to understand what is happening in the region.  It’s one thing to say that Libya does not have a national chapter of Human Rights Watch, or a cohort of service-providing NGOs. It is quite another matter to say that Libyan or Tunisian people cannot organize themselves on their own to cover their needs and express their autonomy, as they have done in the last weeks.

To escape western-centrism and avoid thinking of it as a residual category, I define civil society by saying that it is the source for collective autonomy. The rendering of autonomy in Arabic illustrates my point as the term is translated as tasayyir daati – that is the “self-impulse,”  or “self-drive.”

Cairo graffiti, translation from Arabic "ash-sha’b yourid isqat al-nithaam” the people want the fall of the regime © Unknown | occupiedlondon.org/cairo

And indeed, once the initial spark was lit, it was as if the Tunisian people moved as a whole, into spontaneous protests. Egyptian, Libyan, and Yemeni people called for the fall of their respective regime. The slogan “ash-sha’b yourid isqat al-nithaam” [the people want the fall of the regime], appearing across the region, captures this social cohesion (the people) and the unity in the project.  The BBC also had a picture of a similar slogan on some governmental building in Libya last week.

These protests entail a radical break with the fragmented social structures existing in many Arab countries. Are these revolts or revolutions? Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997), the Greek libertarian Marxist exiled in France tried to answer a similar question in the case of the Hungarian 1956 revolt. To paraphrase his seminal “The Hungarian Source“ (published in 1976 by Telos), one could say that this moment of self-organization in Egypt was coupled with a moment of radical re-imagination, by placing the nation itself at the heart of all these protests. Make no mistake: we are talking about the secular notion of territory, homeland (in Arabic ‘watan’) as opposed to the religiously tainted notion of an Islamic ummah.

Protesters camping out on the Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain, March 4, 2011 © Stepnout | Flickr

This secular re-imagining of the people as a united nation against its leaders is true for all of the ongoing revolts. Thus, sectarian, religious or class divisions are transcended into a call for national unity. This trait is valid for all ongoing protests:

– Think of the Egyptian Copts and Muslims protecting one another on Tahrir square while praying,

– Bahrainis chanting that it is not about being Sunni or Shiite, but about the defense of the watan (“Sunni and Shiite Brethren! This country / nation (watan) is not for sale!”)

– Ibn Thabit, a Libyan rapper, invoking past resistance of Omar Mukhtar to Italian fascism as an example for the nation and for youth to take the street against Col. Qaddafi,

– or Palestinians youth calling (on a Facebook page called in Arabic “National Unity”) for a national protest on 03/15 to end their own political divisions.

This idea of spontaneity which translated here with the idea and practice of self-organization of the people on the street, can be seen both as the strength of these regional protests, and as their weaknesses. Revolution is, we are told by Castoriadis, the explicit self-institution of society, the expression of the capacity to choose the content and the form of the protests. While in Tunisia, it appears that there has been a real split inside the army, which enabled a fully-fledged expression of such a capacity, this soon was threatened in Egypt, where the armed forces own so much of the economic sector. By entrusting the army with managing the post-Mubarak transition, the people in Egypt have probably lost to another group its capacity to decide what to do and how to do it.

After decades of Orientalist depiction of the Middle East as essentially anti-democratic, it is with a great sense of elation that one witnesses the surge of spontaneous civil societies. Middle Easterners are no exception in their desire for equality and freedom. Yet, one needs to be cautious about the chance of their success, because there are too many counter-powers to civil society itself.  To which I will return in future posts.