PRESENT TENSE:LAST YEAR, THERE was an outbreak of misty-eyed reminiscing about the events of May 1968, when student-led protesters took to the streets of Paris. That year has become a byword for those groundbreaking days of counter-cultural protests and civil disobedience, and the demonstrations at the Sorbonne, Berkeley, Chicago, Prague and elsewhere remain the high-water mark of 1960s radicalism. While last year's coverage diverged on the actual achievements of the 1968 protests, their enduring relevance is not in doubt.
Contrast this with the widespread portrayal of the G20 protesters in London, and the continuing coverage in the wake of allegations of excessive police force. Broadly speaking, both the 1968 protesters and the G20 demonstrators were concerned with social justice, civil liberties and global equality. But where the 1960s trailblazers are acclaimed as history-makers, their modern equivalents are relegated to a considerably more marginal role. For instance, the Daily Mail’s report on the first day of the protests boasted the headline: “35,000 protesters turn out for G20 march in London . . . but police arrest just one.” The message seemed to be: why has the Met turned down this opportunity to apprehend so many obvious troublemakers?
Sky News made it sound like the barbarians were at the gates, or congregating at Bishopsgate at the very least. Its report from a March 28th rally in Hyde Park organised by the umbrella group Put People First, also spoke of the huge scale of the security operation being put in place to counter the risk posed by all these protesters. And yet, behind the reporter, actor Tony Robinson was on stage addressing the crowds of potentially threatening activists. Certainly, the prospect of Baldrick organising a revolution is quite alarming, but hardly the stuff of national security alerts.
Now neither the Daily Mailnor Sky News are likely to be terribly sympathetic to the broad political ideology espoused by anti-G20 protesters, but these examples are indicative of the recurring media narrative that is applied to the inevitable gathering of demonstrators whenever there is a G-Whatever meeting or the like. It runs something like this: (a) Speculate about how violent the protesters are going to be; (b) In the early stages of the demonstrations, remark on how little violence there has been so far; (c) When there are acts of violence, or at least vandalism (and something will always get broken, and tempers will always run high), report it in detail, thereby confirming the necessity of step (a). Discussing what they are actually protesting about is rarely a priority, especially now with the recent development of a subsequent step: (d) Shocking reports of excessive police force and provocation.
This has been the narrative template at least since the Battle of Seattle in 1999, when extensive protests against the WTO conference resulted in widespread unrest. That was the first occasion many people heard about what was then rather misleadingly called the anti-globalisation movement, and the events were so unprecedented (and the nickname so catchy) that it became the paradigm for future such demonstrations. However, this repeated narrative dehumanises the protesters as mere vandals, behaving dangerously beyond the mainstream, while marginalising the substance of their concerns. In the process, the policies of whoever it is they are protesting against are implicitly validated and positioned as self-evidently reasonable.
Part of the problem for the protesters is the sheer variety of issues they are campaigning about and the difficulty in parsing those issues for an attention-starved audience. In London, the thousands on the streets would have included environmentalists, debt protesters, civil libertarians, trade unionists, anarchists and probably a few opportunists with a strong aversion to intact windows, to name but a few.
But arguably the more significant problem faced by such protesters is that “anti- globalisation” tag, as if they are trying to fight the inexorable tides of global commerce. Of course, those concerns, which are more accurately about the gross global inequalities resulting from neo-liberal economic policies rather than an attempt to halt a globalised economic model, have been proved rather prescient. Since the financial crisis hit and brought with it a wave of government bailouts of financial institutions, those accusations of a corporate kleptocracy appear tragically accurate. Dismissing the spiritual descendants of the 1968 student protesters as mere militant holdouts against economic progress now seems almost as misconceived
as believing that deregulated markets would ensure endless growth. When the story of these strange times is being retold in 40 years, what place will there be, if any, for the demonstrators of 2009?
Shane Hegarty is on leave