It is a classic in conversations about our political discontent: today we are asleep, we are more submissive. There are no longer social protest movements like those of the 80s, like those of the massive 14-D or that fight against the closure of shipyards in the north of Spain. What before there was more commitment of the personnel with the causes, the greater dedication to them, our elders achieved more political conquests than we did.
Like all commonplace, this one deserves to be analyzed. Today we have two studies that could help to dismantle or at least challenge these types of claims.
A protesting planet: this is how the world went between 2006 and 2020
The German think tank Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) and the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, an NGO based at Columbia University, last week published Global Protests: A Study of Key Issues of Protests in the Century XXI. The researchers analyzed thousands of articles published on the web from hundreds of media written in Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Chinese and Hindi.
They covered 16 years, from 2006 to 2020, and what happened in 101 countries. Its main conclusion is that we are in a period of great turmoil and rebellion, similar to the degree of protests that occurred in convulsive moments such as 1848, 1917 and 1968. The number of protest movements it has tripled compared to the mid-2000s, and the largest increase in protests has taken place in Central Asia and Europe. They also point out that there are more protests in countries with a higher-income population, although the degree of the increase in protests is the same in all the countries analyzed.
Why? The majority of protests in recent years, 54%, revolved around a feeling of democratic failure, against political systems or their representatives. 28% of the total included demands of the “real democracy” style, the most common demand of all those produced. The vast majority of the protests have had a peaceful appearance, however, and always according to what is glimpsed by what is published in the press about them, there has been a slow but steady increase in violence within them, to the point that in 20% of them there are outbreaks of group violence of some kind, vandalism or looting. In half of the protests there were arrests and in almost 30% of them some form of police violence is recorded.
And what is the other great conclusion of the study? That, according to the researchers, if there has been an increase in protests what has not been produced is an adequate response from politicians. 42% of the protests were marked as “successful” totally or partially in achieving their objectives (which is a higher percentage than other studies of this type), although if we only take data from Europe, the percentage drops to 33%. Furthermore, as protests increase around the world, their degree of political success diminishes.
Of course, the researchers acknowledge that their study, based on what is published in the digital press, is limited. There is a risk of publication bias, the possibility that, for example, it is not that now there are more demonstrations, but that before they were not talked about, that there was a media silence. It is necessary to consider, for example, if in China, the United States or Spain in 2006, citizen protests were more or less silenced than now.
As an anecdote, this work gives some curious details about our country. If we look at the total number of protest episodes from around the world, a total of 900 recorded in the study, in France 11 took place while in Spain 18, the same as in Italy. What’s more, the feminist demonstration in Spain in 2018 was the eleventh most attended of all those years, and therefore, it was the most important in Spain, with an estimated 5.9 million attendees, and also the most important for the feminist movement, with even more participation than the women’s marches in the United States when Trump came to power. Other Spanish manis also sneak into the world top: 29th, 33rd and 35th places are occupied by the 2010 macha against fiscal austerity and the protests for the independence of Catalonia in 2017 and 2012.
According to this study on world protests 2006-2020, and which recognizes the limitations of its results due to the deficient sources (what was published in the press), the 2018 Spanish feminist march was the eleventh most attended protest in the world. https://t.co/1DpIT5AcNy pic.twitter.com/El6xsKinlw
– Flamenca Stone (@flamencastone) November 7, 2021
The nostalgic dream of Spain that was mobilizing
Now we go with the work of 2011 entitled The Normalization Of The Protest: The case of the demonstrations in Spain (1980-2008), based on CIS surveys and data from other official organizations.
Their results are striking, even counterintuitive: taking as a sample what happened between 2002 and 2008, a particularly quiet period throughout the world, one in five Spaniards, 21.3%, took to the streets at some point. We are the ones who most express ourselves of all those analyzed in Europe: in France, 15%, in Norway, 8.8%, 8.6% of Germans or 4.1% of British, among all. Data from Italy would be missing.
According to the researchers, in Spain everyone is manifested, including older people, right-wing people and religious people, something that, as a general rule, does not happen (or rather happened) in other countries. In what we do go behind than other societies in terms of political participation is in being involved in associations or political consumerism (The political struggle centered on what we consume or stop consuming, such as what we eat or the energy we contract).
What has made us especially prone to protest was the “Political learning” what the majority supposed marches against terrorism and the “relearning” of the conservative demonstrations of the second half of the 2000s against Zapatero’s social measures (homosexual marriage, “express divorce”, etc.), as well as that, according to the authors, there are in our country “democratic deficits of the political system” that make it more normal than in other environments that we have to take to the streets to protest.
And yes, there can also be some nostalgia: now we do not express ourselves less. “The official data […] from the eighties to the present they indicate an increase in the number of demonstrations and protesters. Thus, the percentage of people who declare having participated in a demonstration doubles in the course of these almost thirty years, going from 20 percent at the beginning of the eighties to 50 percent at the end of the first decade of the century ”, it is explained .
What has happened to us, and something common to other countries, is an accumulation of things: manifestas are no longer characterized by physical repression, so more people are encouraged to go to them; the population level of studies has increased, since traditionally, highly educated people tend to demonstrate more; women have entered public life, so the peanuts are no longer masculinized; There have also been an increase in protesters “not very interested in politics”; Internet it has made it easier to connect people who no longer have to organize around associations and collectives to mobilize; and the intermediate age groups have become the protagonists of the demonstrations.
That is to say, that the increase in participation has modified the traditional profile of the protester (tended to be young men on the left, educated and from big cities) to a more heterogeneous one and, ultimately, more similar to the population as a whole.
In case you want to see the complete picture, this is the evolution in the number of demonstrations and protesters in our country between 1984 and 2009, just before the post-crisis period that did include the work of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and which would lack the 15M mobilizations, Real Democracy Now, feminism or Catalonia, which makes us think that, although there was a slump in the protests between 2005 and 2008, it is very possible that the degree of citizen participation has grown, although not as in the peaks of 97 or 2004 (anti-terrorist demonstrations), yes at least as the average of the historical series.
“If we consider the average number of annual attendees per thousand inhabitants, it goes from an annual average of 59 participants in the second half of the eighties, to 74 in the nineties and 89 in the first decade of the twentieth century.”
What if what happens is that we no longer demonstrate for the labor issue? That is what is often said by some sectors, who perceive that there is less interest for causes related to the practical issues of life. That could not be the case either: according to the study, between 2008 and 2009, the last years of the series, the percentage of manifestations with work motivation accounted for 40%, a proportion of the total that would only have been achieved in other periods of economic crisis such as the transition and the early 1990s.
Curiously, and as the other experts on international work conclude, in Spain there has been a “normalization” of the protest as a tool to show discontent in a country that perceives that the democratic system has great shortcomings when it comes to responding to its social demands. That we protest, but those protests are not invariably answered by politicians.