Materializing the Global Dimensions of the Arab Spring Over Space and Time

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FACULTEIT POLITIEKE EN SOCIALE WETENSCHAPPEN

Materializing the global dimensions of the Arab spring over space and time

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CLAUW OLIVIER

MASTERPROEF POLITIEKE WETENSCHAPPEN afstudeerrichting INTERNATIONALE POLITIEK

PROMOTOR: DR. KOENRAAD BOGAERT

COMMISSARIS: PROF. DR. SAMI ZEMNI

COMMISSARIS: PROF. DR. CHRISTOPHER PARKER

ACADEMIEJAAR 2013 – 2014

Abstract

This article argues the different protests that sprung up since Mohamed Bouazizi’s self- immolation to be a part of a global movement instead of an amalgam of distinct, national struggles. By tackling the revolutionary phenomena in their spatio-temporal dimensions it explores how three decades of neoliberalism have reconfigured the lives of the subordinate in a market-oriented geography of uneven development and created a soil for growing popular discontent. The article elaborates on the urban level as the privileged space for the regulation of transnational capitalism as well as the building of new forms of community and (transnational) identity, and investigates at which point the upheavals can be framed as urban phenomena. Further, it discusses the constraints of both the national container perspective and the globalist position for grasping the full complexity of the multiple dimensions underlying the on-going cycle of protest. The article examines why local actions of certain groups resonate with distant and different grievances of others and provide inspiration to activate dormant potentialities at the domestic level. By interacting and expressing mutual solidarity and the claims they hold against global capitalism, but first and foremost by the very act of occupying – as allies in a common struggle – the protestors pointed out the global dimensions of the Arab uprisings themselves. They created the space for redefining fundamental political questions about democracy and social justice and taught us that acting differently implies a conditio sine qua non for creating other globalizations.

Nederlandstalig abstract

Dit artikel kadert de diverse protesten die sedert Mohamed Bouazizi’s zelfverbranding de kop opstaken als een onderdeel van een globale beweging die het specifieke van de lokale strijd overstijgt. Onderzoek van de historische processen die aan de massademonstraties voorafgaan wijst uit hoe de neoliberale hervormingen van de voorbije decennia het leven van de ondergeschikte klassen hebben hertekend in een marktgerichte geografie van ongelijke ontwikkeling en een voedingsbodem creëerden voor de huidige protestgolf. Het artikel verduidelijkt de rol van de stad in de regulering van het transnationaal kapitalisme en belicht diens mogelijkheden voor de opbouw van nieuwe gemeenschapsvormen en (transnationale) identiteit. Vanuit dergelijk perspectief wordt onderzocht op welk vlak de protesten als stedelijke fenomenen kunnen worden beschouwd. Waar containervisies en over-gesimplificeerde globale perspectieven er niet in slagen de meervoudige gelaagdheid en de complexiteit van de huidige protestgolf te omvatten, focust dit artikel op de vragen waarom lokale sociale grieven en protesten het latente revolutionaire potentieel van samenlevingen aan de andere kant van de wereld activeren en weerklank vinden in de slogans, statements en (inter)acties van een gedifferentieerd amalgaam aan demonstranten. Via hun interactie en wederzijdse solidariteitsbetuigingen en hun afkeer van de werking van het globaal kapitalisme, maar bovenal door de manier waarop ze het bezetten van publieke ruimte beleven, wezen de activisten zelf reeds op de mondiale dimensie van het protest. Ze creëerden de ruimte om fundamentele politieke vragen inzake democratie en sociale rechtvaardigheid te herdefiniëren en leerden ons dat anders handelen een conditio sine qua non is voor het creëren van andere vormen van globalisering.

Materializing the global dimensions of the Arab spring over space and time

In a world in which velocity is king and political questions about democracy, representation and equality are being redefined in terms of efficiency, budgetary discipline, flexibility and global connectivity, neoliberal globalization has been imposed upon us as the one story, an inevitable, political neutral force acting beyond the scope of political agency (Parker, 2009). This very tale of inevitability actually constructs and legitimizes a subjective political reality which assembles the interests of certain groups over those of the rest of the population and transforms citizens into mere consumers. Over the past decades market-oriented policy reforms have been the prerogative of a range of geographically differentiated processes of class formation which have gradually compromised the lives of the subordinate classes and created a soil for popular turmoil. Along these lines, the wave of protest that submerged the Arab region in 2011 did not really come as a surprise. While analysts in international mass media explained the Arab revolts as an Arab awakening (a rise against authoritarianism and decades of political stagnation) and criticized the turmoil that struck the West for being ignorant of what it really wanted to accomplish and for not offering alternatives, I argue that the worldwide protests did not sprout up out of nowhere and should rather be interpreted as phenomena which inevitably emanate from social conditions. Studying social struggle is a multidimensional engagement, exploring matters beyond a revolutionary momentum, container perspective and the protesters’ demands and grievances most cited by mass media. Far more than willing to deliver a state-of-the art contribution to social movement theory or a full-scale politico-economic critique of the working of neoliberalism, in this article I aim to sketch some insights which allow us to draw a number of parallels at work in the wave of protest that has been cross-cutting the globe in recent times. I begin with a brief outline of the historical developments in the social, economic and political architecture of the state that have led to an entanglement of political and economic interests, facilitated the restoration of elite power and created a soil for popular discontent. Next, I will highlight the key role played by the urban level in the regulation of international capitalism, investigate at which point the diverse protests can be framed as urban phenomena and explore how local triggers in such a setting can grow out to be something much bigger, crossing borders, cleavages and continents and go through a global dimension. Further, I will consider the local upheaval a part of a cycle of protest that transcends the national container. We must however not venture the pitfall of constructing a single global activist story or future against the monolith of neoliberal globalization. Freeing the concept of space of its linear burden and reframing the position of the local in relation to the global, I perceive the different protests as a part of a wider socio-political phenomenon of men and women all over the globe who are willing to take their future in their own hands. To end 5 with, I will point out how the protesters interact, exchange tactics, declare mutual solidarity and why their actions resonate across the globe, activating the dormant potentialities lying underneath societies, altering existing as well as constructing new (transnational) identities and living through a range of alternative globalizations.

Geographies of social protest in a historical perspective

The protests of the Tunisians are not those of the Egyptians, Greeks, Indignados, Occupy or Gezi activists. Nonetheless there seems to be more at stake than a mere coincidental simultaneity or succession of local struggles. As Koenraad Bogaert (2011 and 2012) already pointed out, we cannot come to a correct understanding of the full complexity of the events without taking into account the historical developments in which he claims the protests to be embedded. While fordism after World War II ruled the Northern hemisphere and developmentalism spread over the Global South, a social contract – on the premise of generalized welfare and a minimum guarantee of social security – had been forged between regime and mass (Walton and Seddon, 1994). Both models of redistribution enabled large parts of the population to ameliorate their living standard. In the Arab region a growing middle class enjoyed the increased prosperity and legitimized clientelist systems of patronage at the expense of their own political rights (El-Mahdi, 2011). From the late 1970s on, when Thatcher and Reagan started dominating the political scene, outdated keynesianist economic recipes have been systematically replaced by their neoliberal counterparts (Hatem, 2012). As Paul Volcker’s skyrocketing interest rates caught the third world in a debt trap, saddling it with a tremendous increase of foreign debt, no choice was left than to accept the structural adjustment programmes – implying austerity measures, deregulation, privatization and market liberalization – imposed by the IMF, the World Bank and the leading capitalist countries (Harvey, 2005). Public assets were being sold far beneath their value to relatives or cronies of the regime and an international financial elite, leading to an entanglement of economic and political interests, causing a growing social inequality and pauperization of the masses and resulting in the enrichment of a glocal elite (Armbrust, 2011). While the Ben Ali clan squeezed Tunisia, the Assads and the cliques around Mubarak and King Mohamed VI acted alike in their respective countries. Though the social evolution in the West has turned out to be less poignant than in the Arab region, we could outline similar arguments as concerned the overlap and concentration of economic and political power and the gradual breakdown of the welfare state. During their terms of office the former chairmen of Halliburton (Dick Cheney) and Gilead Sciences (Donald Rumsfeld) played their role in the multi-billion dollar contracts that were granted to the companies for maintaining domestic security after 9/11 and the war on Iraq, as a part of a larger shock doctrine aiming to dismantle the state-interventionist welfare mechanisms (Armbrust, 2011; Klein, 2007). In 1999 the radical free market economists of the Chicago school, the leading ideologists of neoliberal globalization, worldwide counted over twenty-five secretaries of state and more than a dozen chairmen of 6 central banks. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the euro crisis countries as Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland experienced what the Chicago boys actually mean with shock therapy (a recipe that over the past decades has mainly been served in the Global South and Eastern Europe), their labour markets and social security schemes being reframed in a neoliberal logic, resulting in a drop of real wages, high unemployment and a growing pauperization of the population (Klein, 2007). Technocrats took over key positions in the political and economic spheres as former partners (Mario Draghi), consultants (Mario Monti) and other associates (Lucas Papademos) of the American investment bank Goldman Sachs – who’s introduction of credit default swaps could be argued to be one of the causes of the euro crisis – respectively were appointed president of the European Central Bank, prime minister of Italy and Greece (Wight, 2012). History has repeatedly shown that political choices of this kind consistently involve a significant amount of resistance. Whereas analysts disagree whether food riots result from conditions of hardship or social constructions of injustice, Walton and Seddon (1994) state that they occur throughout the history of market societies whenever severe economic hardship becomes socially defined as the result of public choices that undermine the previous economic and social structure of an earlier moral order. Following the structural adjustment measures, several cities all over the Global South were struck by bread riots (they have come to be known as IMF riots), who confronted the dissolution of the developmentalist models of accumulation, the cancellation of subsidies and price increases (Walton and Seddon, 1994). Walton and Seddon argue the IMF riots, which three decades ago obtained a global dimension, to be generated by similar processes of economic liberalization as those that triggered the classical food riots in 17th and 18th century Europe, albeit in an international perspective and resulting from a closer integration of the global economy. To complement this account, I claim the post-2010 activisms to be the logic outcome of this very dynamic by which the prioritization of capital has gradually become the prerogative for policy makers all over the world. As the workers and middle classes became more and more under pressure, a diverse range of groups have been struggling for years against the on-going corrosion of social rights and public services (see Ayeb, 2011; Bogaert and Emperador, 2011; El-Mahdi, 2011). While the global financial crisis played a key role in this process in which anger or disgust towards the current social and economic inequality affected more and more people, and local catalysts as Mohamed Bouazizi‘s self-immolation in Tunisia or the fraud in the parliamentary elections and the brutal murder on Khaled Said in Egypt triggered mass mobilization (Ayeb, 2011; De Smet, 2012; Hanieh, 2011), the particular form of globalization of the last thirty years is at the root of the diverse and different protests. Whether activists were facing banking bailouts and the forthcoming austerity policies passing the bill to the ordinary man, a bunch of mafia capitalists like Mubarak, Ben Ali and their entourages depriving a whole country of any prospect for the future or macho conservatives like Erdogan and Putin fanatically and brutally implementing their agenda, they took the streets in a call for socio- economic equality and real democracy. 7

Above all the Arab uprisings showed us that politics and economy cannot be viewed apart: economic grievances can hardly be voiced without simultaneously criticizing the larger, political choices of the regime. And as the shape of these regimes is instrumental in their politics of what has been entitled by David Harvey (2005) as ‘accumulation by dispossession’, the struggle against state power and that against capitalist exploitation are part of the same purpose (Zemni, De Smet and Bogaert, 2012). Rosa Luxemburg exemplified that a general insurrection can only occur when both dimensions come together through a series of preparatory partial insurrections. Even though she stated that these revolutions can never be prepared, but instead are largely spontaneous, she also pointed at the importance of grasping the historical processes underlying them. For this reason, we cannot come to a correct understanding of matters without taking into account the historical developments by which political and economic interests gradually entangled and gave rise to a geography of civil-democratic and socio-economic demands (Luxemburg, 2005 [1906]). In Egypt the Popular Movement for Change (2004), known as Kefaya (Enough), aimed its attention to the regime itself, organizing the first anti- Mubarak protests and calling for free and democratic presidential elections (Joya, 2011). Its weakness was to rely solely on political aims for mobilization and from 2006 on the initiative shifted back to the workers’ movement, who engaged in a local wage struggle that eventually developed national aspirations, with a vanguard connecting the squeezing neoliberal offensive to the nature of Mubarak’s regime. The Mahalla strikes could be viewed as the prelude of the 25 January revolution for bread, freedom and social justice, whose mass character and success was enabled by a convergence of political and economic demands, generating a momentum of unity between different groups over multiple cleavages and ultimately leading to the fall of Mubarak (Zemni, De Smet and Bogaert, 2012). Similar conclusions can be made for the Tunisian case. Habib Ayeb (2011) explores how the long revolutionary process, that started in 2008 with protests against the Phosphate Company of Gafsa’s recruitment procedure of offering jobs to candidates from outside the region, finally gained momentum with Bouazizi’s self-immolation. He points out how the socio-economic demands of marginalized groups in the centre, the south and the west spread over the north, the capital and the Sahel and added to this a civil-democratic dimension as the middle classes joined in and called for political change. Tackling the revolution in its thematic and spatio-temporal dimensions provides proper insight of the multiple trajectories at work in the mass protests that finally brought Ben Ali down. As the struggle in the Arab world took mass proportions, it re-activated the dormant potentialities of what the anti-globalization movement hadn’t carried through. Tahrir served as a mobilizing symbol for the socio-economic and political grievances of the Arabs resonated with those in the West. The activists expressed demands for social justice, jobs, affordable housing and against the outcomes of global capitalism and through their occupations they engaged in horizontal structures of radical democracy, by which they questioned the current form of representation in the liberal democratic model (see Bogaert, 2011 and 8

2012; Glasius and Pleyers, 2013). The next section of this article explores at which point the protests could be considered urban phenomena.

Popular discontent at the hubs of global capitalism

During the global demonstration of 15 October 2011 thousands of activists took the streets, occupying squares and claiming public space in more than 900 cities and 80 countries all over the globe (Oikonomakis and Roos, 2013). Interpreting matters as a mere coincidence equates suffering structural myopia as regards the unwillingness to grasp the structural embeddedness and full complexity of the processes at work. Such like analysis solely focuses on the protesters’ most explicitly stated demands and might refer to cities’ magnitude, large populations or spatial opportunities for gathering citizens, meanwhile it neglects the role of the urban level in neoliberal globalization and misses the point of understanding the different protests as urban phenomena, as a part of a wider geography of popular discontent. The Gezi occupation in Turkey for instance has been linked by some to recent restrictions on the sale of alcohol, in order to portray events as a conflict between Erdogan’s Islamism and the country’s secular ethos. As Cassano (2013) argues, there is no indication that this is what ultimately brought thousands of people into the streets. What could be stated is that for certain it was more than just a few citizens of Istanbul disagreeing the chopping down of some trees. Their laments concern the conflict in visions for urban space between elites and the people who actually live and work in the city (Cassano, 2013). For a better understanding, first we must clarify the key role played by the urban level in the regulation of international capitalism. Saskia Sassen (2011) defines cities both as strategic hubs where global trends materialize and privileged spaces where the civic is made and the powerless can make a history. Far more than willing to frame the diverse and different protests as solely urban phenomena, neglecting wider geographies of discontent, she considers the urban perspective a lens for seeing societal trends magnified. Perceived by elites as spatial containers, free of the inertia that encircles national politics, since the 1980s urban policies have increasingly being moulded to the needs of the market (Parker, 2009). Though cities have always been sites of opportunity and disparity, where the rich and the poor lived side by side, three decades of neoliberalism gave birth to new types of inequality and exclusion and turned cities’ governments into stakeholders accountable to non-state and private actors, prioritizing capital flows over residents’ interests (Bayat and Biekart, 2009). Municipal policy makers all over the globe (depicting the global as a regulatory force beyond the scope of agency to whom one can but submit) have actively engaged in the preservation of the very flows that regulate the global economy, their market-oriented projects of uneven development (mirrored by global norms and indexes of democratization, investor friendliness, etc.) being strategic agencies in the current hypermobility of capital (Parker, 2009). Unlike the imagined inevitability of the global diktat, the local (with cities as its strategic hubs) is where these ‘global’ forces are actually being constructed (Massey, 2005). In this relation between local and global actors, the state should still be considered as an important institution, its cities being strategic places where 9 state power is being exercised and (re-)negotiated between domestic and foreign elites (Bogaert, 2013). Sassen (2000) exemplifies how neoliberal globalization goes hand in hand with the occurrence of new centres and margins both between and within cities: sharp disparities arise between new financial hubs and former major manufacturing centres; metropolitan business areas receive massive investments while the low-income suburbs remain neglected; over-valorised corporate wages exercise a downward pressure on the low- and mid-incomes of those urban dwellers who are, whether by cleaning offices, cooking and serving meals or directing traffic, coproducing the context in which capital accumulation occurs. These are just a few examples proving the subaltern (whether policemen, factory workers, waiters, teachers, janitors, poor and unemployed or slum dwellers) to be as much a part of globalization as transnational finance, albeit at lower wages and less favourable terms than those who actively engage in the prioritization of profit over people (Sassen, 2000). The pursued investor friendliness, urban planning, infrastructural prestige projects, privatization of public space and the forthcoming skyrocketing real estate prices are actually segregating those who possess of those who don’t. At the frontier of capital accumulation, poverty alleviation schemes are relocating entire neighbourhoods in the Global South to newly built social houses, integrating the lumpenproletariat into the realm of the market and creating new opportunities for investment as regards the development of both the low budget housing projects and the spaces that slum dwellers will leave behind (see Chatterjee, 2009; Huchzermeyer, 2008; Parker, 2009; Zemni and Bogaert, 2011). The privatization of necessities as drinking water, schools, hospitals and other public services further exemplifies this process of segregation. Far more than pursuing a generalized welfare or realizing trickle down effects in regions that need to catch up with Western levels of development, it appears that uneven development (the production of difference) results out of neoliberal capitalist globalization itself (Bogaert, 2013). The dominance of certain trajectories and industries over others is the result of a political choice that changes the conditions for the whole of the city, undermining the public sector, privatizing public space, dislocating people and redefining political questions and citizens’ lives in a commercial logic. Hence, the prioritization of neoliberal success is to be considered a project of class formation and a key dynamic in the production of poverty and exclusion (Harvey, 2005; Parker, 2009; Zemni and Bogaert, 2011). Besides of being production sites for global industries, cities also count as strategic spaces where the powerless become visible for each other and new forms of the social and political can be made (Sassen, 2000 and 2011). The rise of the level of urbanization is but one reason why cities have increasingly become the locus of social protest. The disparities that result out of transnational capitalism and become magnified in the urban setting are evenly bound to it. As governments no longer function as the sole providers of collective goods and traditional sources of identity formation (nation, village) are weakening, the neoliberal city creates a transnational opening for the subaltern (the poor, impoverished middle classes, unemployed graduates, etc.) for levelling new forms of community and expressing demands to unaccustomed opponents such 10 as foreign capital, the private sector or International Financial Institutions (Bayat and Biekart, 2009; Sassen, 2000). At Taksim square, where poor people were being removed and public space was up to be sacrificed for large infrastructural projects such as a new mosque, luxury apartments and a shopping centre, the protesters stood against the vesting of control over spaces in the hands of non- democratically-elected owners and the exclusion of groups whom we might expect to be allowed there. Resistance against Erdogan’s neoliberal urbanism had been unfolding for quite a while, but all of these diverse and different protests would remain marginalized until extreme police brutality challenged the peaceful actions of the Gezi occupiers. The millions of people that joined the demonstrations throughout the country felt united by a sense of frustration with Erdogan’s autocratic approach to governance and anger at the police brutality towards the peaceful protesters (see Cassano, 2013; Eigenraam, 2013; Hammond and Angell, 2013; Tugal, 2013). However, beneath the calls for the resignation of Erdogan and solidarity against authoritarian politics, lies a growing dissatisfaction with the ways in which urban space and life are being reconfigured into the realm of the market. Even though the future of Taksim and Gezi might still be in doubt, at these sites an unprecedented convergence of people and perspectives has been achieved, driven by politicizing citizens whose multiple trajectories allow us to think of the future in terms of openness and heterogeneity instead of an already foretold hegemonic paradigm (Hammond and Angell, 2013). Accustomed to struggling the hardship of the everyday, organized activism is not of the urban dweller’s prerogative (Bayat and Biekart, 2009). However, since 2011, similar processes of convergence of interests gave rise to the long-lasting occupations of Tahrir, Puerta Del Sol, Syntagma, Zuccotti Park, Avenue Bourguiba and dozens of other urban squares. All over the globe the urban streets met with a diverse range of groups who were increasingly becoming aware of each other’s presence. They were up to make a history of their own, claimed public spaces for expressing grassroots demands and through their actions they constituted new, anti-hegemonic imaginaries of the social and the political. The urban dimension could be considered a leading thread in the diverse protests we have witnessed since Bouazizi’s unfortunate action (see Bogaert, 2012; Glasius and Pleyers, 2013; Sassen, 2011). Sassen (2000) argues the space constituted by ‘the global grid of global cities’ to be the most strategic one for the formation of new transnational identities. Bogaert (2013) adds to this that the impact of neoliberal capitalism cannot be reduced to the key role of a few global cities, as it generated major transformations that concern basically every city in the world. Hence, if all of these cities are incorporated in global economic space, then the protesters’ local grievances too might be engaged within wider power-geometries. The next section of this article handles the question whether the diverse protests should be framed as a global movement or as a set of distinct national struggles.

Transcending the national container: a global movement against neoliberalism?

Having outlined previously the market-oriented reconfiguration of societies in a perspective of uneven geographical development, the diverse local struggles seem to entail the expression of something much deeper or bigger. With both material demands for better life conditions, jobs and social equality and political claims against the current forms of democratic representation (subservient to economic and financial interests and incapable of guaranteeing a certain life standard to the whole of the electorate) at the root of the different protests, we could ask ourselves whether these local movements are to be considered a part of a global movement against neoliberalism. Defining the global dimensions of the Arab revolts, we must not venture the pitfall of constructing a single global activist story against the monolith of neoliberal globalization. Far more than interpreting it as a worldwide conspiracy of glocal elite forces, I define the current form of globalization as a series of neoliberal class projects, each of them designed for and adapted to a particular geographical context, manifesting themselves in very differentiated ways and extending the conditions for capitalist class formation alongside already existing neo-patrimonial and clientelistic formations of power (see Bogaert, 2013; Harvey, 2005; Tsing, 2000). Inspired by the increasing liberation and mobility of capital local ruling elites in both the Western world and the Global South have joined the competitive race for (foreign) investment, implemented the general principles of neoliberal government and integrated these in their development agenda (Bogaert, 2013). Unlike the imagined inevitability of the global diktat (to which those who are in office frequently refer to justify their policies), Doreen Massey (2005) argues that these ‘global’ forces are of course always being constructed in local places. This focusing on diversity and local and regional factors should however not be understood as a call for an anti-global diversity, but for a global one (Tsing, 2000). According to Massey, local places are neither the authentic self-constituting territories communitarianism romanticizes about, just as they are simply not always victims of the global. They stand in contrasting relations to the global and are differentially located within wider power- geometries (Massey, 2005). Instead of searching for a universal logic or discerning the local and the global as separated entities, Anna Tsing (2000) emphasizes the need to focus on their interplay and the forces that connect them. Shifting power balances in global capitalism result in the localization of wider political interests and projects that involve local, national, regional and global actors (Bogaert, 2013). These new power assemblages have confuscated the global future within modernity’s linear heritage, a process by which the norms and values of the major Western capitalist agencies have become policy directives on a world-scale, and by which the developing countries are situated in stages of temporal backwardness. Such like visions present an already foretold future that is inscribed into the story. They deny other people and places having trajectories of their own and obstruct from view the political construction of the particular form of globalization in which local and (trans)national elites have engaged (Bogaert, 2013; Massey, 12

2005). Conceiving the future as open, the post-2010 activisms have strongly opposed to such hegemonic framing of reality. In cities all over the globe the masses took the streets and occupied public spaces for expressing grassroots demands against the modes of inequality through which neoliberal globalization manifests itself in its very localness (Glasius and Pleyers, 2013). For local places have increasingly become incorporated in the global economy, the protesters’ local grievances too might be the expression of a wider, perhaps even global, geography of discontent. The (inter)actions, slogans and statements of several activist groups whether in Cairo, Manhattan, Madrid, Athens, Moscow or Istanbul exemplify how in a context of neoliberal globalization local actions of certain groups resonate with distant, other grievances and struggles of men and women who are willing to make a history of their own, a desire by which each and every one of them is keeping alive the very possibility of the political in his or her own specific way (see Glasius and Pleyers, 2013; Massey, 2005). The question rises whether or not national boundaries in such a politics have relevance. Over the years, a vast volume of scholarly writing has committed to the study of (trans)national movements. Social movement theorists sketch models of diffusion and present us chronologies of events, movements’ ideas travelling from one place to another within a causal sequence (McAdam and Rucht, 1993). Meanwhile they incorporate the very idea of linearity to which I argued the current development paradigm to be indebted, their theories often favouring either the national container or the globalist position, each of them with their own defects. Though Western activists admit that the Egyptian revolution inspired them towards spontaneous mass mobilization (as it showed that it was possible to have a revolution without leaders and overthrow a regime through a non-violent occupation of a square), the idea that the 15-M movement diffused from Egypt – merely adopting a set of ideas and practices developed and transmitted from elsewhere – is overly simplistic, as it fails to encompass the on- going interrelatedness as well as the local and regional processes in which the struggles are grounded (Glasius and Pleyers, 2013; Oikonomakis and Roos, 2013; Tsing, 2000). Just as the story of the world cannot be told by the story of the West, Western activists are not living through a watered down version of what happened in the Arab world. Oikonomakis and Roos (2013) introduce the concept of resonance to explain the full complexity of how the movement for real democracy spread so rapidly across the globe. But even though Tahrir served as a symbol for people whose emotional grievances resonated with those of the Arabs and its perceived success provided inspiration to activate dormant potentialities at the domestic level, other sources of inspiration are to be found in Hessel’s Indignez-vous pamphlet and Iceland’s mini-revolution. Moreover, the vanguard of the Indignados had been experimenting with occupation for years and even their consensus-based model of decision-making did not arrive out of a vacuum (Katsiaficas, 1997; Oikonomakis and Roos, 2013). In line with Anna Tsing (2000), I argue that social struggle should be grasped within the specificity of the events and the regional and cultural processes that enabled this struggle. In his article ‘Global Economy, Local Politics: Indigenous Struggles, Civil Society and Democracy’ Gerardo Otero (2004) claims the nation- state still to be the critical sphere for the imposition of capitalist interests and 13 likewise the privileged arena for groups and classes to achieve a substantial modification of the economic and the political. He challenges the globalist position which mainly focuses on the construction of transnational civil society organizations. As the anti-globalization movement proved to be no match for the International Financial Institutions and the bourgeoisie could be considered the only class that truly has become organized on a transnational scale, Otero argues that the building of alternatives to neoliberal globalization must start from the bottom up. His account of political-class formation theory is useful as it focuses on the questions how subaltern groups at the local level shape grassroots demands, make alliances and strengthen civil society, which is essential for deepening democracy from the inside out. However, I disagree with Otero whereas his analysis fails to encompass the full complexity of the interrelatedness between the local and the global. If local catalysts trigger a wave of struggles against global forces (that are coproduced at the local scale), one could ask himself whether the struggles and forces engaged are local or global? Moreover, if we frame events as a cycle of protest, then the turmoil that has struck the globe over the last couple of years should be analysed as a whole instead of an amalgam of isolated national struggles (Estanque, Augusto Costa and Soeiro, 2013; Hardt and Negri, 2011). Even though the national container remains the central issue in Otero’s contribution, he admits the international sphere not to be totally irrelevant for political action, as solidarity can play between democratic grassroots projects. This provides an opening towards the potential formation of transnational identities in space defined by Sassen (2000) as ‘the global grid of global cities’. She claims its aspects of place-centeredness and trans-territoriality to imply a transmigration of capital, people and ideas. As I already stated above, the story of neoliberal globalization cannot be told by highlighting the key role of a few global cities. Instead it entails a set of policy reorientations that integrated most of the cities on earth in the global economy (Bogaert, 2013). In line with Saskia Sassen, I argue the processes and space that connect these cities (‘the global grid of cities’) also to be a potential place for a new politics. Castells’ concept of ‘hybrid public space’ – the space that was constituted during the cycle of protest and materialized through online action and the physical occupation of urban space – supplements this account (Castells, 2012). It gave rise to new forms of communication, international solidarity and mobilization and the building of equivalence between geographically isolated movements. With the ‘We are the 99%’ slogan Occupy Wall Street attempted to construct such transnational identity. Though Agnes Gagyi (2012) emphasizes in her article ‘Occupy Wall Street? Position-blindness in the new Leftist revolution’ not seeking to blame the movement for failing to represent the whole globe, she states that there is a risk that Occupy Wall Street becomes reliant on emotional enthusiasm and the preferences of a small group. Gagyi argues that the occupy activists who called for world revolution do not represent the 99% of the world population, but are rather an assembly of highly educated and politicized elements who find a soil in alter-globalism and the 1968 tradition, holding immaterial claims based on the value of personal freedom meanwhile ignoring the social position they speak from and the education they enjoyed. As their list of demands contains claims 14 that favour a strong US agency in the world economy (e.g. wanting trading partners to end currency manipulation), she blames the occupy activists to neglect the geopolitical structure of power in which these claims are embedded. Whereas Gagyi ends her essay suitably by stating that a global revolution requires the local to live through its own imaginary and from there add a voice to the global debate, several objections are to be made. First, and though a vanguard of the activists that Gagyi is considering may have been actively engaged in triggering events, it is also true that the occupations mobilized people of different races, religions, gender, generations and social positions (Hatem, 2012). This is a common feature in many of the protests we have witnessed since the global outbreak of turmoil. Second, as Philip Rizk (2014) argues for the Egyptian case, 2011 is not 1968. Unlike the 1968 events that were mainly carried by students and workers and generally have been framed as post-materialistic, the set of values shared by participants of the 2011 street protests transcends understandings of Western movements as post-materialistic and non-Western as solely materialist (Glasius and Pleyers, 2013). The current wave of protest mobilizes people of all kind, in both the West and the Global South, who are claiming their rights for better life conditions and standing against the lack of real representation in the current models of (liberal) democracy (Estanque, Augusto Costa and Soeiro, 2013; Hatem, 2012). Finally, whereas Gagyi properly analyses the play of geopolitics and the preferential base where certain demands become constructed, her focusing on heterogeneity comes at the expense of a full understanding of the fundamental analysis and the potential that underlies the ‘We are the 99%’ slogan. The growing awareness of how the prioritization of neoliberal success is squeezing majorities of populations in many different ways can be considered a leitmotif in the diverse protests (Glasius and Pleyers 2013; Hatem, 2012). Hence, beside of being geopolitically inconsistent, ‘We are the 99%’ could also be interpreted as a call for solidarity to people over cleavages, borders and continents who are living through their own struggle against the modes of inequality and exclusion that are affecting their lives and as a message of hope for a local reframing of the social and the political, thus to engage in alternative globalizations. In a world where the institutionalization of inequality has been the prerogative for decades, we cannot possibly blame the domestic movements’ thematic demands for lacking political correctness. My point is that they are claiming their own right for a better life, stable labour prospects, decent housing and accountable representation, meanwhile expressing solidarity with people in other countries who are suffering resembling or whole other forms of material and representational hardship, even if the implementation of their very demands would entail the preservation of existing and the reproduction of new power-geometries. This global solidarity does not necessarily depend on the interaction of circles of well-educated activists concerned with global issues. Sassen (2011) argues the recurrence of specific local issues in places across the globe (engaging local, immobile activists) to engender formations of discontent that even without direct communication transcend the individual struggle. Even though social struggle should be grasped in its innate localness, the cycle of protest in which we be found demands us for evenly beholding the global scope (Tsing, 2000). This is an essential thought for discerning the multidimensional 15 complexity and the potentialities underlying ‘local’ slogans as ‘Democracia real YA!’, ‘We are all Khaled Said’, ‘Everywhere Taksim’ and ‘We are the 99%’. In short, I reject the national container perspective for isolation and internal processes are as much involved in the formation of the specific as the interactions with the beyond (Massey, 2005). For the very same reason I distance from over- simplified globalist positions that consider the on-going cycle of protest a single global movement against the monolith of globalization. Hence, it might be appropriate to end this section with a call not for a local, anti-global diversity, but for a global one (Tsing, 2000). Next I will focus on the protesters’ interactions and the struggles’ resonance, both core elements in the building of equivalence and the process of (trans)national identity construction.

A cycle of anti-systemic protest and other forms of globalization

To end this article with, I seek to point out why and how local triggers grow out to be something much bigger, cross borders and cleavages and make a global dimension. As I have argued above, over the past thirty years market-oriented policy reforms have been the prerogative of a range of geographically differentiated processes of class formation which have gradually compromised the lives of the subordinate classes and created a soil for popular turmoil (Harvey, 2005; Walton and Seddon, 1994). Throughout the cycle of protest cities have been the privileged places for the constitution of new notions of identity and the space that connects them created opportunities for the building of equivalence between diverse domestic movements (Sassen, 2000 and 2011). Several activist groups (e.g. Comrades from Cairo, Occupy Wall Street, 15-M, the Gezi occupiers, etc.) have engaged in the magnification of similarities and the formation of transnational identity in virtual (dialogues, exchanges of ideas and techniques, calls for mobilization and expressions of solidarity on blogs, activist websites and social media) as well as in real space (with slogans that encompass the broader picture, demonstrations at foreign embassies and some even travel abroad to join a far-away struggle) (Bogaert, 2011; Castells, 2012; Glasius and Pleyers, 2013). For an extensive view of their contributions I refer, among others, to e-zines as Jadaliyya and Roar and the several activist home pages. As if bearing their own struggle’s burden is not enough, domestic movements seek for dialogue with far-distanced companions to whom at the first sight they have nothing in common with. Protesters engage in such activity for the emotional grievances of the distant other are resonating with their own and its perceived success provides inspiration to activate dormant potentialities back home (Oikonomakis and Roos, 2013), no matter how differentiated their geopolitical embeddedness, the hardship they suffer and their lists of thematic demands can be. Contrary to what some might state, the upheavals should not be considered the failed revolutionary project of an activist elite holding the global scope (Gagyi, 2012). Events as the fall of the dictator, the clearing of camps and squares or the electoral success of the Islamists do not necessarily signify that the struggle has ended. While in both the Arab region and the West the upheavals continue or take new forms (as activists engage in a range of pre-existing and new initiatives), the wave of protest spreads to other regions, engages new actors 16 and local grievances and constantly alters its dynamics. Hence, the global dimension of the Arab revolts should be understood as something emerging, open-ended and still on-going, of people of all kind, at many different places all over the globe, who are becoming increasingly aware of the current economic paradigm’s character of dispossession and the unwillingness or inability of their representatives of offering any alternative perspective (see Bogaert, 2012; Hardt and Negri, 2011; Wight, 2012). In a climate of austerity, where severe cuts in public expenditure and new tax rounds cannot prevent the political class of raising their own wages, bailing out those banks who were at the cause of the financial crisis (meanwhile their former CEOs walk away with multi-million dollar bonuses), facilitating the organization of mass events as the World Cup Football and the Olympic Games (spending billions of dollars on infrastructure that is likely to be abandoned after the event) or engaging as investors in infrastructural prestige projects, the institutionalized character of such inequality becomes clear. The parallels underlying the different class projects’ patterns of exclusion and dispossession explain why successful distant struggles resonate with the domestic grievances that have developed underneath the surface of societies for years, and local catalysts ultimately trigger the mobilization of this latent potentiality (Oikonomakis and Roos, 2013). Beside of the amplification effect of local triggers and the power-geometries through which local demands were raised, the building of equivalence (by declaring mutual solidarity and amplifying similarities, meanwhile modifying the identities of those engaged in the alliance) around related issues serves as a key dynamic in the processes of identity formation at work in the diverse protests. As the narratives of the past continue in our present and the distant is implicated in our here, these processes are always on-going (Massey, 2005): instead of merely adopting ideas and living through linear, watered down versions of what’s happening elsewhere, the wave of protest resonates the 99%’s emotional grievances within a matrix of virtual interconnectedness and gives rise to a cross- sectional dispersion of practices, demands and ideas that are being locally reframed, appropriated and transformed, and combined with grassroots experience and repertoires of action (that in their turn generate and disperse new ideas and practices) (Oikonomakis and Roos, 2013). If a global movement can differ from place to place, if it is not about a single, universal struggle and if its actions can change the ideas of those who take part (Massey, 2005), then the mobilizations we have witnessed since late 2010 are a speaking example of it. By interacting and expressing mutual solidarity and the claims they hold against global capitalism, but first and foremost by the very act of occupying – as allies in a common struggle – the protestors pointed out the global dimensions of the Arab uprisings themselves (Bogaert, 2011). For many demonstrators acknowledge that the deplorable situation in which they be found is not an aberration of the system but a core feature of the political implementation of neoliberal capitalist accumulation schemes, their desire for change bypasses the well-known framing and co-optation of demands and ideas within the election programmes of political parties that compete for office (Hatem, 2012). Otero’s (2004) focus on the nation-state makes him argue that accountable leaders should prevent the popular-democratic structures that 17 develop out of grassroots demands from being co-opted by the state. Even though he claims that these structures in alliance may eventually promote alternative democratic hegemonic projects, the state-centeredness of his contribution is problematic for fully grasping the anti-systemic and resonant nature of the protests in question. As years of material and political hardship already provided their societies with an enormous dormant potential and local catalysts and resonant struggles triggered mass mobilization, the spontaneous revolutions of 2011 had no interest in gradually building up their democratic potential nor in obtaining legitimacy to change the system from within (as grassroots movements should according to Otero’s theory of political class formation). For representatives have become submissive to economic and financial interests, instead of deepening the democratic system by engaging in its play, the activists have freed the political of its representational burden and brought it back where it belongs: in public space (Bogaert, 2012; Hardt and Negri, 2011). Throughout the occupations, they lived through horizontal structures of radical democracy, without leaders, pre-existing organizational structures or lists of demands, and by their actions they questioned the democratic character of the current forms of representation. What makes the different protests so interesting is their openness that keeps alive the very possibility of the political, an anti-hegemonic reframing of the political, anti-systemic in terms of liberal representative democracy and taking place at the very moment. They foster the hope of men and women all over the globe who are willing to take the future in their own hands, to produce instead of consume the political and live through other forms of globalization (see Bogaert, 2011 and 2012; Glasius and Pleyers, 2013). Even though after the end of the mass mobilizations some have stated that spring was confronted with winter (Springborg, 2011a and b), it would be wrong to assume the activists to have simply returned to the routine of their everyday struggle. Not only have the upheavals mobilized thousands of people who had never been politically active before, and has this changed for good their visions of what the political might be (Bogaert, 2012). Until today the protests’ alternative economies (e.g. food was distributed to everyone, camp libraries relied on free exchange, solar panels or exercise bikes provided electricity) are being continued or have engaged in a range of pre-existing and new initiatives (Glasius and Pleyers, 2013). While some scholars claim that for realizing real change in existing power structures, the movements need to build alliances with more traditional organizations like labour unions and other solidarity groups (Otero, 2004; Smith, 2012), the preservation of their anti-systemic and structureless character, which created the space for bringing the political back to the people in order to coproduce their own future, might be argued to be evenly important. Only if these alliances could incorporate the fundamental anti-systemic character that defined the very protests, they would fully utilize the opportunities of the newly created space for living through radical alternatives. The boost of alternative economies we have witnessed since the protesters decided to prioritize daily life over city-wide general assemblies makes a good example of this (Glasius and Pleyers, 2013). The reappearance of people’s kitchens (who actually never left), the expanding global success of time banks (the trading of time to provide mutual services beyond the circuit of the market economy), 18 alternative currency systems and co-ops and the revival of knitting courses and thrift shopping are but a few expressions of how people in the aftermath of the global financial crisis are engaging in alternative economic networks, not just as a means of surviving, but as a choice for taking part in a concrete alternative (see Cha, 2012; Glasius and Pleyers, 2013; Kozloff, 2011).

Conclusion

This study sketched a number of parallels at work in the wave of protest that sweeps the globe. It elaborated on the historical developments in the political and economic spheres that gave rise to a geography of uneven development and created a soil for the current popular discontent. By exploring the role of the city in the regulation of neoliberal capitalism and highlighting its potentialities for constructing new forms of (transnational) identity, the article explained how the different protests could be considered urban phenomena. The constraints of analysis that frames events either within the national container or as a single global movement against the monolith of neoliberal globalization was discussed. By reframing the position of the local in relation to the global, this study revealed how the recurrence of specific local issues in places all over the globe engenders formations of discontent that transcend the individual struggle. By their statements, interactions and the occupations they lived through the protesters pointed out the global dimension of today’s struggle themselves. One of the most important lessons of the revolutionary days in which we be found might be that acting differently implies a conditio sine qua non for creating other globalizations. It suitably answers the question how the revolutionary spirit could be continued and translated into concrete action on the ground. As Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, since 1979 mayor of Spain’s famous communist village Marinaleda, stated back in 1985, “it is not enough to define utopia, nor is it enough to fight against the reactionary forces. One must build it here and now, brick by brick, patiently but steadily, until we can make the old dreams a reality: that there will be bread for all, freedom among citizens, and culture” (Hancox, 2013). The actions of the Greek potato movement (who directly connects consumers and local producers, succeeding in lowering prices and supporting farmers), the anti-eviction movements in the United States and in Spain (resisting evictions, forcing banks to renegotiate, repossessing dwellings of evicted families and occupying empty buildings) and the countless other solidarity economy projects exemplify how within a global movement local actions can differ from place to place, are not about a single, universal struggle, and yet all together make for a larger and more complex formation that transcends these local issues (see Ainger, 2013; Glasius and Pleyers, 2013; Massey, 2005; Sassen, 2011). The question rises whether or not a global programme could be constructed out of this global diversity (Bogaert, 2014). The further dynamics of the on-going cycle of protest will point out the relevance of such construction. What could be stated is that, by their actions, the protesters have created the space for redefining fundamental political questions about democracy and social justice, and exemplified the very possibility of living through other forms of globalization. 19

Although the movements that sprung up during the global uprisings of 2011 have strongly opposed to the Western liberal democratic model, the Spanish Partido X, that finds a soil in 15-M, is the first of them to engage in mainstream politics (Benson, 2014). By occupying the space that the Partido Popular and the Partido Socialista Obrero Español have lost since the outbreak of the crisis, tackling financial and political corruption, increasing the minimum wage and the introduction of a maximum wage, they want to beat the party system from within (Hamilos, 2013), the strengthening of participatory democracy (developing their programme through crowd-sourced drafting of public proposals and submitting candidates to test-run events where the network can judge their competence) being their modus operandi (Benson, 2013). While many of us acknowledge the pragmatics of their motives for realizing structural change by tackling the system from within, we can only hope that their turning from street politics into the electoral play will not compromise the potentialities that lie within Democracia real YA!

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