Domination And Resistance

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Domination and Resistance

A term initially formulated in the eighteenth century, clad society became much more

widely used at the end of the 1980s when tides of apparently unorganized overturned some

regimes. Previously non-political forces some of these took place in the Far East. In 1986, the

authoritarian President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines was overthrown by waves of

’people power’ demonstrations in Manila supporting Corazon Aquino. The widow of one of

his most famous victims, Benigno Aquino. In 1987, demon stations in Seoul destabilized the

plans for an orderly handover of power by South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan to his

chosen successor. General Roh Tae Woo Thissetintraina sequence of events which led to the

reintroduction of democracy. In spring 1989 a demon striation in Beijing by thousands of

students mourning the death of the Chinese Communist Party’s former General Secretary. Hu

Yao bang, turned into a massive challenge to the nation’s leaders on Tamari Men Square and

in many other cities of China that drew in hundreds of thousands of protestors and was only

put down on four June with the loss of thousands of lives.

The biggest demonstration of the potential power of civil society, however, came in

the autumn of that year in Eastern Europe. It was a civil society that brought down the

communist regimes there and hastened the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. This was even

though those regimes had had decades to organize the repression of opponents and to

establish mighty secret police forces. They had brutally suppressed demonstrations in

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Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, which served as enduring lessons. The victory

of the demonstrators in Eastern Europe has achieved with minimal casualties. It was a

striking affirmation of the potential political power of civil society.

By 1989 the communist regimes in Eastern Europe were beset by mounting

difficulties. Their leadership was aging, and the economies were stagnating The systems

themselves had been imposed by the USSR after the Second World War and lacked

widespread legitimacy Attempts by individual states to extricate themselves from Soviet

tutelage had provoked brutal repression in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 All

attempts at organized political opposition were crushed. However, the Soviet Union was

descending into turmoil after four years of perestroika, which was failing to deliver the

promised economic revival. The new Soviet leader, Gorbachev, no longer seemed to offer the

same unconditional support for East European leaders in return for political loyalty as

Brezhnev had done He started pressuring them to reform their systems as he had done

The crisis first broke out in Poland, where the regime was among those most beset by

economic and political problems. There the independent trade union, Solidarity which had

been challenging the administration throughout the decade despite martial law forced the

government into round the table negotiations over reforms. As the price for agreeing to

participate in what were expected to be rigged elections, it extracted an agreement for its

legalization. However, contrary to everyone’s expectations, including its own it won all but

one of the seats that it could contest in the elections in June This fatally undermined the

legitimacy of the communist rulers and by September, Solidarity had become the dominant

actor in a new government.

The ferment of expectation and resistance spread to other states East Germans tried to

flee to the West by traveling to Hungary and seeking asylum in the West German embassy.

The Hungarian authorities were reluctant to suppress them when Moscow would not commit

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itself unequivocally to support such action. Their indecision was noted and spread to other

capitals. It further encouraged hopes of change. The aged East German leader, Honecker, was

deposed, and his successors also began to make conciliatory noises. Demonstrations started

taking place and when they were not repressed involved masses of people. By November the

protests had spread to Prague, and there the authorities quickly capitulated with virtually no

loss of life in what came to be known as the Velvet Revolution’ Change was remarkably

peaceful and amicable (Miller et al. p.45). Also in November, the new East German

leadership abandoned rather feeble attempts to keep the Berlin Wall closed with the Wall

open, it was no longer possible to prevent people from crossing to the West After that

resistance in most East European regimes crumbled. The last to do so was Romania in mid-

December, although it was accompanied by street fighting and the filmed execution of the

former dictator Ceausescu and his wife.

The regimes collapsed remarkably quickly after over forty years of repression.

Through a combination of circumstances, they had become sclerotic, brittle, and weak.

However, it had taken the courage and heroism of tens of thousands of demonstrators in all

the states to reveal this by challenging the authorities. Although primarily not organized

beforehand, they quickly found ways of Cooperating Decisively. It was a time and movement

of joyous good humor or, as one account put it, ’a carnival of revolution (Kenney, p.34) The

legend of the power of civil society was born.

Would be reformers started looking at other authoritarian regimes to try to identify

analogous groupings to those in Eastern Europe in the hope that they could achieve similar

results. It did not matter whether these groups were well-organized or agreed on their long

term goals. They contained the germ of freedom, if only some way could be found of

incubating it Policy-makers in Western governments and international charities had become

disenchanted with giving aid to governments in the developing world which had failed to

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reduce poverty and in particular. they were exasperated by official corruption, so they

fastened on civil society and the voluntary sector as instruments to spread good governance

and democracy. Aid money was liberally dispensed to non-governmental organizations

(NGOs) in the developing world in the hope that they would spread their enthusiasm and

experience among fellow citizens. They had the advantage of large numbers and, unlike

political parties in dictatorships, they operated at the grassroots Even existing democracies

such as Japan began to pay more attention to their NGOs as potential political actors, or at

any rate as institutions with legitimate political inputs to make. The 1990s was a heroic

decade for civil society It became one of the top items on the international agenda It was this

noble aspect of civil society that many people found so inspiring It seemed to symbolize the

possibility of the oppressed rising and overthrowing their oppressors

Besides, there was the economic appeal of voluntary associations for helping with

welfare in developing world countries where a welfare state would be beyond their means.

This was attractive for aid donors because it provided them with opportunities to ensure that

their aid reached the grassroots and because often they involved women, who had previously

been excluded from this. It was attractive for the governments because it helped to reduce the

pressure on them to provide welfare, and it was appealing for the recipients too because it

provided them with opportunities to organize and stand up more for their rights. Left inclined

local authorities in developing countries occasionally experimented with ways of drawing

selected groups of citizens into active participation in the compiling of budgets, for example,

in Porto Alegre in Brazil (Bruce, p. 45) and Kerala in India This was blurring the distinction

between civil society and elected representatives.

This chapter has concentrated on views of the state from below and attempts to

influence it has also discussed the concept of civil society and the enormous impact it has had

on policies of the developed world towards the developing world. Since the 1980s, yet, as we

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have seen, it also suffers from significant ambiguities and contradictions, which make it

another essentially contested concept. The final section focused on the impact of new

communications technologies on political life Although we are only at the beginning of the

revolution in political behavior that they herald, it is clear that they may make the concept of

civil society even more unwieldy (Luke p. 76). Not only do they enable citizens within states

to organize for the pursuit of political goals more efficiently than ever before, but they also

blur the boundaries between national and foreign politics. Even more, neither the Internet nor

mobile phones are great respecters of national frontiers. Like-minded groups can organize

much more freely across them. This was already seen in the demonstrations that disrupted the

1999 WTO summit in Seattle, which brought together protest groups from around the world.

Since then WTO and the annual G8 summits have tended to attract similar swarms of

protesters, although not with the same degree of violence. What is clear is that these new

possibilities for group self-organization are not only transforming civil society within

individual states. They are also beginning to promote what can be described as international

civil society, i.e., a global community of political activists and organizations that demand a

more significant say in the running of international politics. The new technologies are not

merely promoting alternative views of the state from below They are also promoting

alternative views of the international order from below Castells has written of the emergence

of the ‘network society’ It may also be the beginning of the ‘network world.’

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Work Cited

Miller, Daniel, Michael Rowlands, and Chris Tilley, eds. Domination and resistance.

Routledge, 2005.

Scott, James C. Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. Yale university

Luke, Timothy W. Screens of power: Ideology, domination, and resistance in informational

society. University of Illinois Press, 1989.ess, 1990.

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