Identity

5 REVOLUTIONS OF DIGNITY

The demand for the equal recognition of dignity animated the French Revolution, and it continues to the present day.

On December 17, 2010, police confiscated the produce from the vegetable cart of a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, ostensibly because he did not have a permit. According to his family, he was publicly slapped by a policewoman, Faida Hamdi, who confiscated his electronic scales as well and spat in his face. (That Hamdi was female may have increased his feeling of humiliation in a male-dominated culture.) Bouazizi went to the governor’s office to complain and to get his scales back, but the governor refused to see him. Bouazizi then doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire, shouting, “How do you expect me to make a living?”

News of this incident spread like wildfire throughout the Arab world, triggering what became known as the Arab Spring. The immediate effect was felt in Tunisia, where less than a month later widespread rioting led to the resignation and departure of the country’s long-standing dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Massive protests broke out in other Arab cities, most notably in nearby Egypt, where that country’s strongman, Hosni Mubarak, was driven from power in February 2011. Protests and uprisings took place in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, as populations felt empowered and were suddenly willing to criticize authoritarian leaders. What was shared among all of these protesters was resentment that they had been humiliated and disregarded by their governments.

In subsequent years, the Arab Spring went horribly wrong. The greatest tragedy occurred in Syria, where that country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, refused to leave power and launched a war against his own population that has to date killed more than 400,000 people and displaced millions more. In Egypt, early democratic elections brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power; fears that they would impose their brand of Islam on the country led the military to stage a coup in 2013. Libya and Yemen have descended into bloody civil wars, and authoritarian rulers tightened their grip throughout the region. Only Tunisia, where the Arab Spring originated, looks anything like a liberal democracy, but it is hanging on by a thread.

It is easy to look back on these events and argue that the Arab Spring from the beginning had nothing to do with democracy, and that the dominant political trend in the region is an intolerant form of Islamism. Yet this doesn’t do justice to the political passions that were unleashed by Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation. The Arab world had been suffering under repressive and stagnant dictatorships for years; why all of a sudden did masses of people risk their lives in response to a single incident?

The particulars of Bouazizi’s story are critical. He was not a protester or a political prisoner mistreated by the regime, but an ordinary citizen who was struggling to make a living in the informal economy. Many entrepreneurs in the developing world remain informal because governments make it too difficult to comply with a host of legal requirements to run a formal business. What made Bouazizi’s experience all too familiar to millions of people in the Arab world was the way that he was treated by the Tunisian state: the goods on which his living depended were arbitrarily confiscated, he was publicly humiliated, and when he tried to complain and receive justice, no one would listen. The state was not treating him like a human being: that is, a moral agent worthy of a minimum amount of respect, who would at least have deserved an explanation or justification for why his livelihood had been seized. For millions of people in the Arab world, his self-immolation crystallized the sense of injustice they felt toward the regimes they were living under.

The Arab world subsequently fell into chaos because the Arabs themselves could not agree on what type of regime would replace the old dictatorships. Yet for a moment in 2011 they had a strong consensus on what they didn’t like: authoritarian governments that treated them at best as children, and at worst as subjects to be cheated by corrupt politicians, exploited economically, or used as cannon fodder in wars.

Over the past two generations, the world has seen a large number of spontaneous uprisings against authoritarian governments, from the protests that brought down Communist regimes in 1989, to the South African transition from apartheid, to other citizen mobilizations in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s, to the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine in the early 2000s in which recognition of basic human dignity was a central issue.

One of those uprisings, indeed, came to be known as the Revolution of Dignity. In November 2013 Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych announced that he was suspending his country’s attempt to finalize an association agreement with the European Union and would seek instead closer cooperation with Russia and Russian president Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union. Yanukovych had been president at the time of the Orange Revolution in 2004; his effort to rig his reelection triggered a popular uprising that drove him from power. Yet by 2010 he had returned to the presidency as the corrupt and squabbling Orange Coalition that came to power failed to deliver on its promises.

Yanukovych’s effort to take Ukraine back into the Russian orbit triggered a series of spontaneous protests in the capital city, Kyiv, where by early December nearly 800,000 people had gathered in Maidan to support continued alignment with the EU. The regime responded with violence, but as in many situations of this sort, the killing of protesters simply fueled the level of outrage and increased the size of the crowds supporting the Euromaidan movement. Following the deaths of more than a hundred protesters in February, Yanukovych lost control of the situation and left the presidency for a second time, leading to a new political opening for Ukraine.

Since these events, Ukraine no more than Tunisia has become a successful liberal democracy. Its economy and politics are dominated by a small group of oligarchs, one of whom, Petro Poroshenko, was elected president later in 2014. The government, while democratically elected, is rife with corruption and has been under attack by neighboring Russia, which seized Crimea that same year and started a war in eastern Ukraine. Yet it is important to understand the underlying motives of the political actors who brought about Euromaidan and the Revolution of Dignity.

The uprising was not about democracy, strictly speaking, if by democracy we mean public choice expressed through elections. Yanukovych had been legitimately elected president in 2010, based on support from his Party of Regions. Rather, the fight was over corruption and abuse of power. Yanukovych as president had been able to accumulate billions of dollars of personal wealth, as revelations about his gaudy palace and other holdings were soon to reveal. The Party of Regions received strong support from a shadowy oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, who controlled most of the large industries in eastern Ukraine. The choice between aligning with the EU or with Putin’s Russia was seen as a choice between living under a modern government that treated people equally qua citizen and living under a regime in which democracy was manipulated by self-dealing kleptocrats behind a veneer of democratic practice. Putin’s Russia represented the epitome of this kind of mafia state; closer association with it rather than Europe represented a step into a world in which real power was held by an unaccountable elite. Hence the belief that the Euromaidan uprising was about securing the basic dignity of ordinary citizens.

The impulses evident in the early stages of the Arab Spring and in the color revolutions point to what is the moral core of modern liberal democracy. Such regimes are based on the twin principles of freedom and equality. Freedom can be understood in a negative sense, as freedom from government power. This is the way that many American conservatives interpret the word: individuals should be allowed to get on with their private lives as they see fit. But freedom typically means more than being left alone by the government: it means human agency, the ability to exercise a share of power through active participation in self-government. This was the sense of agency felt by the crowds in the streets of Tunis or Cairo or Kyiv, who for the first time felt that they could change the way that government power was being used. This freedom is institutionalized in the franchise, which gives every citizen a small share of political power. It is also institutionalized in the rights to free speech and free assembly, which are avenues for political self-expression. Many modern democratic constitutions thus enshrine the principle of equal dignity. They are drawing on the Christian tradition that sees dignity rooted in human moral agency. But that agency is no longer seen in a religious sense, as the ability to accept God; rather, it is the ability to share in the exercise of power as a member of a democratic political community.

In modern liberal democracies, the second principle, equality, has seldom been understood to imply a commitment to substantive economic or social equality. Those socialist regimes that tried to make this a reality soon found themselves running afoul of the first principle of freedom, requiring as they did massive state control over their citizens’ lives. Market economies depend on the individual pursuit of self-interest, which leads to inequalities of wealth, given people’s differing abilities and their conditions of birth. Equality in a modern liberal democracy has always meant something more like an equality of freedom. This means both an equal negative freedom from abusive government power and an equal positive freedom to participate in self-government and economic exchange.

Modern liberal democracies institutionalize these principles of freedom and equality by creating capable states that are nonetheless constrained by a rule of law and democratic accountability. The rule of law limits power by granting citizens certain basic rights—that is, in certain domains such as speech, association, property, and religious belief the state may not restrict individual choice. Rule of law also serves the principle of equality by applying those rules equally to all citizens, including those who hold the highest political offices within the system. Democratic accountability in turn seeks to give all adult citizens an equal share of power by enfranchising them, and allowing them to replace their rulers if they object to their use of power. This is why the rule of law and democratic accountability have typically been tightly intertwined. The law protects both the negative freedom from government abuse and the positive freedom of equal participation, as it did during the civil rights era in the United States. Democratic participation for its part shields the judicial system from abuse. During the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, Parliament rallied to protect the independence of courts, as Polish civil society sought to do in the year 2017, when judicial independence was threatened by the ruling party.

Real-world liberal democracies never fully live up to their underlying ideals of freedom and equality. Rights are often violated; the law never applies equally to the rich and powerful as it does to the poor and weak; citizens, though given the opportunity to participate, frequently choose not to do so. Moreover, intrinsic conflicts exist between the goals of freedom and equality: greater freedom often entails increased inequality, while efforts to equalize outcomes reduce freedom. Successful democracy depends not on optimization of its ideals, but balance: a balance between individual freedom and political equality, and between a capable state exercising legitimate power and the institutions of law and accountability that seek to constrain it. Many democracies try to do a whole lot more than this, through policies that try to promote economic growth, a clean environment, consumer safety, support for science and technology, and the like. But the effective recognition of citizens as equal adults with the capacity to make political choices is a minimal condition for being a liberal democracy.

Authoritarian governments, by contrast, fail to recognize the equal dignity of their citizens. They may pretend to do so through flowery constitutions such as those in China or Iran that list copious citizen rights, but where the reality is different. In relatively benevolent dictatorships, such as those of Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore or China under Deng Xiaoping, the state adopted a paternalistic attitude toward its citizens. Ordinary people were regarded as children who needed protection from a wise parent, the state; they could not be trusted to run their own affairs. In the worst dictatorships, such as those of Stalin and Hitler, large swaths of the population—kulaks (rich peasants), the bourgeoisie, Jews, the disabled, non-Aryans—were regarded as subhuman trash that could be discarded in the name of collective good.

The desire for the state to recognize one’s basic dignity has been at the core of democratic movements since the French Revolution. A state guaranteeing equal political rights was the only rational way to resolve the contradictions that Hegel saw in the relationship between master and slave, where only the master was recognized. This is what drove Americans to protest during the civil rights movement, South Africans to stand up against apartheid, Mohamed Bouazizi to immolate himself, and other protesters to risk their lives in Yangon, Burma, or in the Maidan or Tahrir Square, or in countless other confrontations over the centuries.