By Martin Woollacott
GuardianJuly 13, 2001
The veteran Indian journalist MJ Akbar called a collection of his reports Riot after Riot, a reminder that there are regions in the world where a certain level of political violence is part of general expectation. There, the concern is when it goes beyond a particular point. Here in Britain, and in much of western Europe, we often seem surprised that it happens at all. Yet the truth is that violence is an element of political life in Europe as it is elsewhere, if not to the same degree.
This is not just a matter of looking back to the terrible violence which marks Europe's past or of noting what has gone on more recently in Ulster, the Basque country and former Yugoslavia. In even the quietest European polities violence and the threat of violence have a place. Trying to understand that place is not to condone violence, but only to see it as something which can never be entirely eradicated and which, meanwhile, has forms and rules and can be well- or ill-managed.
The typical governmental dismissal of violence as either mindless or malign is clearly not serious. Even as they use these words, politicians know they are misleading. What they are really thinking about is how to respond both to the constituency which is upset by the violence and the one which, to whatever extent, considers it justifiable or at least to have drawn attention to discontents. Hence the use of "mindless", which is addressed to the first group, and the promises to look into factors which may have "contributed" to the outbreak, addressed to the second.
Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern illustrated this very well at Gothenburg. Blair, a man with a particularly strong British penchant for order, strongly condemned the demonstrators. Ahern, leader of a state formed in rebellion and also a man speaking after a failed referendum, chose to emphasise the "widespead sense of disconnection between the European Union and its citizens".
Violent methods and styles, like other kinds of human behaviour, are quickly copied. The wise Irish politician Noel Browne, showing a journalist around a gutted supermarket surrounded by burnt-out cars in north Dublin, sighed as he pointed out the similarity between this scene and those that were then commonplace in Belfast. "They're as wild as cats," he said of the young men who, seeing what was happening up north, had not let the absence of an English oppressor or of a Protestant enemy get in the way of a bit of emulation.
Browne touched on the reasons why the Irish poor might occasionally behave in this way in the concluding passages of his autobiography, where he says: "It is as difficult for a member of the working class in the Republic to leave that class, with all its limitations and penalties, as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle." Some 25 years later, Ireland is changed, and it may be that burned cars are not often found in north Dublin.
Images of violent protest from as far away as Israel, the US, Seattle and Gothenburg may well have affected young men in the British cities which have recently experienced troubles. The much worse French urban violence of the 90s was labeled an "intifada a la francaise" by a French minister. The recognition of such connections is often rapid on both sides, and is often also spurious or exaggerated.
The inner city riot is now a very old story in western countries. The reality underlying such events has shifted from one where there was old-fashioned prejudice and oppression by a dominant group to one in which, in a Balkanised social landscape, one ethnicity is set against another in a scene complicated by different degrees of economic success, by crime and by the inadequacies of community leaders who both perpetuate differences and fail to pick up or deal with discontent.
In European societies the taxonomy of violence is an extensive one. But three forms in particular are usually unacknowledged elements in our political systems. There is the ethnic or racial protest which, however spontaneous and unplanned in its origins, almost always has the result of attracting the attention of the extreme right and the extreme left, looking to use the passions and energies aroused. It also attracts attention and funds from government, looking to damp down those same passions. These kind of riots set off a now familiar dynamic, with an initial emphasis on the criminality of the actions concerned, then investigation of causes, then attempts at economic regeneration, coupled with shifts in the power balance within the protesting community.
Then there is the lawbreaking and violence of radicals, such as members of animal rights, anti-nuclear weapons and ecological movements. Finally, we have the violence of economically motivated groups trying to secure what they deem to be a fairer share of national or European resources in terms of wages, subsidies, protection or tax cuts. French farmers and British fuel price protestors, using similar techniques of blockade, would be typical examples.
In all three cases, the users of violence or their defenders, the government and society at large are involved in a three-way debate, partly conducted in sign language, which tests public interest in the issues raised and public sympathy and tolerance for both the violence and the remedies proposed. The users of violence can sometimes win, whatever governments say, if they take care not to forfeit public sympathy, in which case they can expect a governmental retreat or concession, sometimes immediately but more usually after a careful interval. Each sees what the traffic will bear, and others watch to see what the traffic may bear in future. Alongside this there is a competition between policing techniques and new aids to protest. The internet, mobile phones and urban surveillance cameras change the way political violence happens but not the basic rules of the game.
In some of the countries from which British migrant communities originally came political violence is dramatically worse than it is here. The troops patrolling the steets of Kingston, the bombings and killings that punctuate life in Karachi and the violence that accompanies campaigning in Bangladesh are proof of that. This is not to imply that our ethnic violence is imported, but the opposite: it is part of a European pattern.
Is it too Panglossian to say that western Europe has, on the whole, got its political violence under control, in the sense that we live with it and make some use of it? It is certainly chimerical to imagine we will ever reach a point of such total social harmony that it will disappear altogether. In his Reflections on Violence, John Keane argues that it is the very openness of democratic societies, their pluralism, the lightness of policing, the freedom to associate and communicate, which gives them a tendency to violence. The same qualities, it may be hoped, keep violence occasional and even functional and prevent it degenerating into what he calls the "constant violence of all against all of an uncivil society".
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