Global warming in the climate of public opinion

Turkey held the world’s attention for the first fortnight in June, and now it is Brazil’s turn to be flooded by a wave of public anger. In the four years since Iranians marched against doctored election results, we’ve witnessed the Arab Spring, the Tea Party movement, the Occupy Wall Street protests, the Lokpal Bill rallies, anti-Putin marches, and, late last year, an agitation at India Gate in response to a brutal gangrape.

The common threads binding together these disparate revolts include: participation in large numbers by young, affluent citizens; a widespread use of electronic and social media; the absence of established political parties and presence of large numbers of ideologically unaffiliated people; and a lack of a coherent leadership, strategy, and, on occasion, even clear goals, giving the protests a spontaneous, unpredictable form. Not all the movements I’ve cited displayed each of these features, but they’ve shared at least some of them.

It’s hard not to conclude that the climate of public opinion is warming rapidly around the globe, causing extreme events with increasing frequency.

The spontaneous outbursts of which I speak occurred mainly in nations or regions that have done pretty well in the era of globalisation, in contrast with more traditional protests witnessed in places going through painful recessions such as Greece and Spain. India averaged over 7 per cent annual GDP growth in the decade before the India Gate demonstrations; the size of Turkey’s economy has tripled under Recep Tayyip Erdogan  and his moderate Islamist AKP party; Lula da Silva and his ex-guerilla protégé Dilma Rouseff have managed to redistribute Brazil’s significant economic gains so that inequality has diminished even as GDP has risen.

Taksim Square, the centre of the Turkish protests, is in one of the most affluent, Europeanised districts in Istanbul, the most affluent and European Turkish city.  The protesters in Brazil, according to one survey, were three times more likely to possess a university degree than the average Brazilian. Over a third of the Wall Street occupiers earned more than 100,000 US dollars a year. One has to rely on anecdote rather than data in speaking of the India Gate demonstrators, but they appeared to resemble counterparts in Egypt, Brazil, Russia, Turkey and the US: mainly young professionals who had never previously thought of themselves as activists.

Not long ago, conventional wisdom suggested that globalisation had bred a generation of rich kids wedded to consumerism, and not-so-rich kids aspiring only to the lifestyle enjoyed by the rich. Larger social concerns had faded from consciousness, reflected, in India, in feel-good, candyfloss cinema aimed at the multiplex audience and television serials obsessed with the minutiae of family life.

Was that analysis misguided? Or was it an accurate account of the first two decades of globalisation, but one that now needs revision? Is there a shift in the base of the economy, in what Marxists call the means and relations of production, that is impelling the change in political expression? Or are matters restricted to the ideological superstructure, such as 24-hour news channels ratcheting up inflammatory rhetoric? Where does social media fit in this analysis? Is it fundamentally altering the way societies operate, are they a temporary fad, or something between these extremes?

I’m not certain myself about the answers to these questions. What seems clear, though, is that distinctions between lean back and lean forward media, and between the armchair and the street, need to be reconsidered to accommodate the feedback loop generated between physical demonstrations, social networks accessed through phones and tablets, and news reports. The influential notion that the middle and upper classes of developing countries seek to withdraw into gated communities cordoned off from public life now seems hopelessly pessimistic.

Educated professionals do want to engage with public spaces: Brazilians want affordable public transport; Turks seek to save one of the few green patches left over from a long stretch of parkland that has been slowly eaten up by hotels and offices; Indians demand cities in which women can work or socialise late into the night without fearing what awaits them on the route home. Behind the immediate spark in all these cases lies an abhorrence of corruption, crony capitalism, and showpiece extravaganzas that feed those plagues.

The protests of the past few years have been remarkably successful in achieving their narrow goals. In India, the government was pressured into responding with unprecedented speed, setting up a panel headed by Justice Jagdish Verma charged with suggesting changes to criminal law with a view to improving women’s security. The Verma committee made its recommendations within 29 days, most of which were incorporated into an ordinance promulgated on February 3 this year, less than two months after the first demonstrations. In Brazil, government officials are already speaking of rolling back fare increases.

Erdogan remains adamant about the Taksim Square renovation, but even if a replica of an old Ottoman barracks does come up as planned in place of Gezi Park, it’s unlikely that a shopping mall will feature within it.

What remains to be seen is whether the larger aims of the protestors can be addressed effectively, or even articulated clearly. Whenever activists like Arvind Kejriwal have tried to channel the public’s amorphous anger into specific policies, they have lost support. And the only recent movement motivated solely by big ideas, Occupy Wall Street, was also the only one to make no concrete gains.

The author is an independent journalist and an art critic.