Part 3: Awareness, Knowledge and the Future13

Chapter 13: Civil Society and Unions: Instruments of Peaceful Contention

A dismissed electrician climbs the wall of the Gdańsk shipyard, and a union is born that defeats the Party; some two million people join hands in a human chain across the Baltic states; a spring in Prague buried by tanks grows back from under the snow two decades later; monks in Myanmar march with their alms bowls turned upside down in the face of the generals. The chapter reads civil society as the infrastructure of popular contention, calling on Tocqueville, who saw “an association” in America where in France he saw “the government”, and on Orwell, who distinguished weapons that concentrate power from small weapons within reach of everyone. Contention, it argues, was never made the preserve of the strong: “prepare against them whatever you are able”.

The book is being prepared for publication, in Arabic. These pages offer glimpses of it, not its text.

Cases in this chapter

• 37

  Solidarity

  When the union defeats the Party

  1980–1989Chapter 13Civil society
• 38

  Lithuania and the Baltic Way

  When a human chain breaks the shackles of empire

  1989Chapter 13Civil society
• 39

  The Prague Spring

  When freedom is buried, then grows back from under the snow

  1968Chapter 13Civil society
• 40

  The Saffron Revolution

  When the saffron robe becomes a shield

  2007Chapter 13Civil society

The Cases