The age of protest
What’s fuelling the anger?
The world is in a rage. Across the globe, angry people are taking to the streets in vast numbers. Sometimes the proximate cause is a price hike: in India, it was of onions; in Chile, of the fares on the metro. In Lebanon, it was a new tax on using WhatsApp; in France, higher fuel duties sparked the gilets
jaunes protests. But the protests elsewhere – in Hong Kong, Moscow, Barcelona, Algiers – are more overtly a response to political repression and corruption. A new age of revolution is upon us, and though the causes are various, they have a common thread, said Joshua Keating on Slate: austerity and the worsening inequality it brings. Globalised capitalism has increased prosperity for some, but many feel the benefits have passed them by – that they’ve been denied access to the promised land of middle-class status. And with the worrying prospect of a collapse in economic growth, the middle classes too feel squeezed, said Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post. And what’s more, they have the capacity to voice their anger.
There have been other moments in history – think 1848 or 1968 – when mass protest has broken out in lots of different countries, said Gideon Rachman in the FT. What makes 2019 distinctive is that instead of being organised by central committees, the rebellions are usually leaderless – “convened by smartphone and inspired by hashtags”. In Hong Kong, for example, Beijing has struggled in vain to locate the ringleaders. Social media also enables different revolts to inspire each other: Hong Kong protesters have been carrying Catalan flags. But there’s one other key factor behind this year’s wave of revolt, said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian: youth. True, the young are always at the forefront of demands for change. But what’s striking about this point in history is that there are more of them than ever before. “About 41% of the global population of 7.7 billion is aged 24 or under”; in Africa, where mass protests have also broken out in many countries, “41% is under 15”. And almost all are reaching adulthood in a world scarred by falling living standards, austerity programmes and recession.
But we need to be more specific in locating the mainspring of this global frenzy, said Niall Ferguson in The Sunday Times. Corruption, climate change, price rises, inequality – it’s true that one or more of these may lie behind the various protests, but seldom, if ever, all. (In Chile, for example, inequality has actually been falling.) But there’s one factor that does unite them, a factor that also applied in 1848 and the 1960s (but not on such a gargantuan scale): the huge and rapid expansion in student numbers. It turns out that “in every country where large-scale protests have been reported in the past year, higher education is at an all-time high”. In Chile, the share of the relevant age group in tertiary education has risen from 18% in the late 1980s to 90% today; in Hong Kong, from 13% to 72%; in France, from 34% to 64%. And there simply aren’t the jobs for them. It is this mismatch between “the unparalleled glut of graduates and the demand for them” that is filling our streets with rage.