States and Social Movements

Hank Johnston

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745659114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Defensa política

Since the late eighteenth century, politics, protest, and the state have evolved together, each shaping the other in significant ways. This engaging and succinct treatment of protest-state interaction shows how the modern national state developed in tandem with social movement mobilization, arguing that to understand the state fully, you cannot ignore the role of political protest. Today, social movements are an integral part of politics: modern democratic states are, in reality, social movement societies, and protest mobilization permeates how politics is regularly accomplished. States and Social Movements presents a balanced and comprehensive assessment of various theories of social movements, engaging both state-centered approaches, and cultural and agency-based perspectives. Hank Johnston takes a broad view, analyzing democratic transitions and revolutions, how protest occurs in repressive states, and concluding with an exploration of the emerging repertoire of global social movements, where these movements come from, and if they spell the end of the modern state as we know it. States and Social Movements cuts to the core of how social movements interact with all types of state system to produce variable outcomes such as democracy, policy reform, repression, insurrection, and revolution. As such, it is essential reading for students and scholars of sociology and political science interested in the important research area of contentious politics.

1

The State, Protest, and Social Movements

Social movements and protests occur within state systems. Their targets are usually state authorities who are in positions to make changes and reforms that answer protesters’ demands. While it is possible that protesters sometimes challenge nonstate institutions, such as university administrations or religious organizations, in the twenty-first century, the vast majority of protest campaigns and social movements target the state, which is the main justification for this book. Indeed, social movements and protests have become so common today that they are considered by most social scientists who study them as a regular part of politics – contentious politics is the term that is widely used. Nowadays, people rely not only on political parties and elections to make their preferences known, but also on protests, demonstrations, petitions campaigns, marches, and organizations that pursue their demands for social change. These are all important vehicles for how interests are asserted and defended in contemporary politics. This is the main theme that I will develop in these pages, that social movements are politics by another means – peoples’ politics, not elite politics.

The starting place to trace the relationship between protest and state is the emergence of the modern institutions of governance, a process that began over two centuries ago, roughly in the mid-eighteenth century. The structure of the eighteenth-century state was very different from the complex, bureaucratized modern states that we take for granted in the twenty-first century. Today, the state touches many aspects of our daily lives, from collecting taxes to regulating the economy, who can marry, and what is in school textbooks. Moreover, modern democratic states are based on the presumption of responsiveness of elected officials to those they govern. All this provides fodder for a broad range of claims against the state and sets the stage for popular pressures through both institutional channels (party politics) and noninstitutional ones (protest and social movements). The premodern state, in contrast, touched people’s lives only occasionally. Life was mostly village-based and rural, and protests infrequently erupted when traditional obligations were broken or conditions became intolerable. Part of becoming modern was the state’s growth and extension so that it affected people’s lives more regularly and more broadly. In this chapter I will briefly trace how the modern state developed from premodern autocratic monarchies based on tradition and the interests of the landed elite, and – more central to the theme of this book – how this transition occurred in tandem with the emergence of the modern social movement. The bottom line is that we cannot fully understand the shape of the modern state without considering the role of social movements and protest.

When we look back to the autocratic agrarian states of the premodern period, for example Henry V’s Kingdom of England (1413–1422), we encounter state elites – King Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, the Duke of Bedford, and other nobility – who took the right to rule for granted and were not remotely democratic in their relations with their subjects. They drew upon power and wealth based on traditions and land ownership to enforce their rule, often with impunity. The idea of rulers being responsive to those they ruled developed alongside the modern state and, in part, was put into practice in democratic governance through pressures from those classes outside the landed nobility. This means that a good part of state development occurs on the fault line between the actions of the rich and powerful to preserve their privileges and those classes seeking greater say in how they are governed.

In this chapter I will develop the theme that a complete history of the modern state must consider the actions of the popular classes that, from time to time, exerted pressure on state elites through collective violence, insurrections, protests, and social movements. Against elite interests, popular interests are given form and substance by collective action. Throughout the centuries, state elites have kept an eye on those they rule, whether they be the slaves of the fourteenth-century Inca Empire (only infrequently), rural peasants of seventeenth-century France (perhaps more often), or angry taxpayers in twenty-first century North America (frequently). But let us be clear: for most of history, when a ruler’s attention turned to the common folk, it was usually not from compassion or concern for their well-being or a desire to protect their interests, but for practical considerations of maintaining power and squelching the threat of rebellion. The long-term effects of popular mobilizations and protests have been to force the ruling classes – slowly at first and more consistently in recent times – to consider the popular will in state politics.

This chapter will outline the development of the modern state, its basic contours, and how popular collective mobilizations were an important force in keeping state elites open to the claims of ordinary citizens. Historically, they brought new elites who were more responsive – at least to their particular constituency – into the state system, thereby institutionalizing changes that made the state more accessible to ever-widening circles. Although this is usually not the intended consequence of social movements, to this day they continue to bring new challenging groups, new ideas, new coalitions, and new interests into today’s system, such that the strong undemocratic tendencies are often mitigated to the extent that social movements mobilize.

The emergence of the modern state

What exactly is the state? In intellectual history, the state has often been approached from an abstract, philosophical perspective that asks questions about its ideal form, its essence, and why it exists at all. Some of the most influential thinking along these lines occurred during the Enlightenment, a Western intellectual movement that roughly spanned the eighteenth century. This was when the seeds of the modern state were just budding, and Enlightenment ideas provided the food and water for the early sprouts. Central among them was the idea that the state was a contract entered into by members of society. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), for example, proposed that individuals naturally sought their own interests, and it was the contractual provision of the state that prevented “war of all against all.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) saw the state as the basis of the common good of its members. In his treatise, Social Contract, Rousseau offered the vision of universal participation of all citizens in the state, a radical notion in the eighteenth century. Through participation in the state, and submission to its decisions, the individual benefits from the moral order the state sustains. John Locke (1632–1704) held that the state existed to preserve the natural rights of individuals, but, unlike Hobbes, he saw human nature as capable of reason and tolerance. He nevertheless arrived at a similar conclusion that the state was necessary for individual members to resolve conflicts that inevitably arise. Locke recognized that when the state did not do this, rebellion was likely.

Social contract theories of the state exerted strong influence on the political thinkers of their day. Locke’s and Rousseau’s ideas had a significant impact on the founders of the new North American republic of the United States, and animated the passions of many French revolutionaries in 1789–1790. But these concepts of universal rights, the social contract, and the virtues of universal citizenship are lofty ideas. When we get our feet back on the ground, and especially when we consider the historical evidence, the picture of the state is neither one of states insuring the liberty and enjoyment of all, nor people freely entering into compacts for the common good. Rather, one encounters messy conflicts among the nobility, capitalists, military, priests, and the popular classes. Throughout the course of history, the experience of most human beings was not one of freely entering into a contract to form a state, but rather that the state was simply a fact of life. They were born into it with authority relations already established, rulers over them who made demands and took taxes. For the vast majority of the people for most of recorded time, the state was given and inevitable, like death and taxes.

In fact, returning to our original question, “What exactly is the state?,” there is good guidance for the answer in “death and taxes.” According to less abstract and more empirically grounded analyses of state development (Moore 1966; Skocpol 1979; Tilly 1992; Mann 1993), the necessities of war and securing territorial boundaries were key forces in shaping the form of the modern state. Throughout history, the basic activities of the state – extracting resources, waging war, protecting your allies, or jailing your opponents – have all derived from the state’s monopoly of coercive means. Max Weber accurately described the modern state as having “a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber in Gerth and Mills 1946: 78). Warmaking especially mobilizes the means of violence, and since the fourteenth century advances in military technology, such as gunpowder, siege machines, and artillery, have made warmaking bigger and more expensive. Because the security of the state was a sine qua non factor for perseverance of elite interests, the increasing costs of maintaining an efficient military forced state elites to be flexible in their hold on power, with two fundamental effects that shaped the course of state development by opening it to popular influences.

First, the composition of elite groups and their balance of power began to change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the rise, first, of mercantile capitalism, and then of manufacturing and industrial capitalism. Previously, many European states were dispersed agrarian kingdoms, such as France in the sixteenth century. Monarchs exercised weak control over their subjects and relied on the loyalty of landowning nobility in the hinterland to maintain authority. Large and dispersed agrarian states always faced the threat that feudal or prebendal lords would foment rebellion against the king or emperor. Thus, the relative weight of wealth and power among the monarch and his various princes was delicate and contingent, and the stability of the state hung in the balance.

If we cross the English Channel to sixteenth-century England, the presence of a large commercial city, such as London, offered the king a source of revenue in the form of customs, taxes, and loans to the crown that enabled him to maintain a sizeable army to counterbalance peripheral challenges from his nobles. Throughout Europe, growing cities – hubs of trade, manufacturing, and concentrations of wealth – could tip the scales regarding coercive potential, and therefore had direct impact on the international system (Tilly 1992). Given the high-level resource demands of warmaking – fielding large armies, building navies, casting cannon, purchasing muskets, and so on – the wealth of cities was crucial in the development of the national state. States with prosperous cities and large territories from which to extract wealth and personnel for warmaking had clear advantages over smaller kingdoms and city states. The wealth of merchants and capitalists bought for them a place at the table of state power. The rise of commerce and manufacturing, plus the costs of maintaining a credible military, made the state an arena for the playing out of complex interests, sometimes competing and sometimes intertwined – as it had always been – but now among new classes and status groups (Mann 1993). Power and influence were not granted freely or easily to commercial classes, and I have subsumed centuries of conflict, war, insurrection, intrigues, and assassinations under these generalizations. Also, let me be clear, this process was not some kind of early “democratic reform” of the state, but it did mitigate somewhat the autocratic rule of traditional elites and draw wealthy merchants and capitalists into governance both at national and municipal levels. As we move into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more and more of social life became politicized, and parties formed to pursue the interests of different groups (Tilly 1993).

Second, prior to the nineteenth century, “states were little more than revenue collectors and recruiting sergeants” (Mann 1993: 504), organized to extract wealth and personnel to feed national armies and navies. It was through the demands of warmaking on the populations of these emergent national states – demands of conscription, of taxation, of billeting, price increases on basic necessities, wartime marketplace shortages, and more extraction through tolls, tariffs, customs fees, and stamps – that popular discontent accumulated. These demands often caused disgruntled resistance, but sometimes they exploded into rioting and protest. Elite survival hung in the balance; for, if the state could not successfully wage war, elite prosperity and dominance could not be assured. As war became more costly and more common, there was a limit to what the popular classes would endure. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, we begin to see a dynamic between extraction by state elites (for war) and increasing responsiveness of the state to popular pressure (in compensation for state intrusion into everyday affairs). Responsiveness took various forms, depending on where the pressure came from, urban or rural, upper or lower echelons of society. This dynamic, however, gave shape to both the modern bureaucratic state as we know it today, and, standing against it, to the modern social movement repertoire, also as we know it today – meetings, marches, demonstrations, and strikes. But first, we need to be clear about where the modern social movement came from, namely, how it evolved from the premodern repertoire.

The premodern protest repertoire

The premodern repertoire of protest corresponded to a form of society that was predominantly rural, local, parochial, agrarian, traditional, and highly stratified. State authority was quite limited when compared to depth of penetration in daily lives that one encounters today in the modern state. The premodern agrarian state was split between its local organization presided over by landowners and magnates, and its fragmented and limited national reach embodied in relations between the king and his local representatives. In this context, the premodern protest repertoire was local in focus, limited in duration, and often quite dramatic in how it took direct action about grievances and claims. It was also split in the same way that the state was divided between national and local levels. Demands, claims, and grievances were directed, not at the king or parliament, but at local authorities, whose task it was either to ameliorate or repress. The village rallies, targeted rural violence, and other unique forms of protest characteristic of the medieval and preindustrial periods began to fade as the modern state emerged around 1800.

This general outline follows Charles Tilly’s (1995) analysis of popular protest in Great Britain, 1758–1834. The process is summed up by his general, three-part characterization of premodern contention: it is parochial, that is local; it is particular, namely focused on pressing issues such as food shortages or outrage at an arrest or press-gang conscription; and it is bifurcated, representing the split quality of the state described above. We can see the parochial and particular dimensions in a few examples of premodern forms that were practiced in various European regions. Grain seizures from the storehouses of merchants who were suspected of hoarding or unfair pricing were common. In these cases, community outrage was characteristically immediate and focused. The merchant might be subjected to public shaming such as “donkeying,” “rough music,” “charivari” (shivaree), “Katzenmusik,” or “haberfeldtreiben.” In donkeying, the offender was paraded through the village, often hooded, sometimes seated backwards, to endure the insults and missiles thrown by outraged villagers. Rough music, charivaris, or Katzenmusik were also public shaming rituals in which villagers gathered at the house of the offender to sing songs, make raucous noises, and hurl insults. In figure 1.1, the nineteenth-century Bavarian practice of haberfeldtreiben is shown, in which local male villagers gathered at an offender’s house at night, shooting guns in the air, banging drums and pots, hooting, shouting, and blowing horns to rouse him to meet his accusers. This was a highly ritualized display of community morality. Elsewhere, similar actions may have had a more spontaneous quality, yet within the bounds of community norms and with the same result. The offender became a marked man or woman, and the shame was considered unbearable and often led to exit from the community.

Rural riots and peasant jacqueries often focused on injustices of the landowners, unfair or burdensome taxation, and rising food prices. Other times, villagers expressed their discontent by property damage. A common action was the destruction of workhouses where the poor were made to work for local entrepreneurs as a condition of the pittance they received for support.

Figure 1.1 Community protest against offender in Haberfeldtreiben

The injustice of such forced labor was apparent to local villagers, and they frequently attacked the houses and tore them down. Also common was the destruction of fences that enclosed fields that once were open to villagers, or forests that were a source of game. These collective actions clearly communicated to the local lord or magistrate popular discontent. It was their responsibility to take appropriate action, either to address the villagers’ demands, sometimes at the national level in Parliament, or, more likely than not, to punish them (or a mixture of both). In cities, contours of the parochial, particular, and bifurcated repertoire took the form of (much larger) crowd action against unfair market practices, such as incorrect weights and measures, or when shortages of bread occurred, food riots in which merchant houses and storerooms were attacked and robbed. Riots against customs houses and press-gangs were also common. Later, the breaking of machines by workers (called Luddism in England) was a particular and parochial form of urban labor unrest that often merged vengeance with other grievances such as food shortages.

Other historians have chronicled the premodern repertoire and its variations (Rudé 1964; Bohstedt 1983; Wells 1983; Steinberg 1999). Hobsbawm’s (1959) classic study of primitive protest and rebellion included the categories of social banditry and mafias, both of which reflect a time in history when state capacity was limited. I mean by this that there were vast swaths of territory that the state apparatus did not fully control. Social bandits such as Hereward the Wake, Eustace the Monk, Fulk FitzWarin, William Wallace, and of course Robin Hood (the legend, that is) were seen as protectors of the poor against the arbitrary power of local magistrates and landowners, but this was more popular myth than fact. The social-change goals of most bandits were quite limited. The same was true of the mafia in rural Italy in the nineteenth century. Hobsbawm considered some mafia organizations as antistate pressure groups that existed – again – where state capacity was limited. Mafias were built on kinship and pseudo-kinship ties bound by traditional codes of honor, courage, and hierarchy. In Hobsbawm’s view, they existed partially as a way to help the rural poor by protecting them from landlords and offering services, which encumbered them with a debt to the organization. Mafias were a premodern form of social organization that was strong enough to resist a weak national state. Hobsbawm notes that, as the Italian state strengthened, mafias became less oppositional and more an arm-of-state administration in remote areas. In a sense, the state expanded its capacity by co-opting maf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• 1 The State, Protest, and Social Movements
• 2 Protest in Contemporary Democracies
• 3 The Social Movement Society
• 4 Repressive States and Protest
• 5 Revolutions and States
• 6 Globalization, Protest, and the State
• References
• Index