Deadline: 07.07.2008.


Speaker: Professor Stephen Zunes (Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he chairs the program in Middle Eastern Studies)

More information about the speaker is available at his webpage: http://www.stephenzunes.org/
 
Professor Zunes presentation will argue the importance of differentiating between U.S. democracy promotion (to which he takes a rather skeptical view) and indigenous nonviolent action campaigns for democracy (which he supports), but which some people mistakenly confuse as one and the same.
 
Date: Monday 7th July
 
Time: 7.00pm
 
Venue: Westminster Forum, 5th Floor, Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street (nearest tube Oxford Circus)
 
All Welcome. Refreshments of wine and nibbles will be provided
 
More detailed summary of the presentation:
 
Although he is one of the more prominent critics within the academic left of his country of U.S. intervention and hegemonic aspirations, his research supports the argument that there is no evidence that the United States nor any other government was responsible for the "color revolutions" that toppled the corrupt and semi-autocratic regimes in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine and that neither the United States nor any other government has ever provided any training, advice or strategic support for the kind of mass nonviolent action which could threaten the survival of an unpopular regime.  While the United States, other Western governments, and a number of private and publicly-funded foundations provided certainly provided funds for poll watchers and related independent election monitoring as well as a financial support which enabled some opposition groups to cover some of the costs of computers, fax machines, printing, office space, and related expenses, this limited amount of financial support cannot cause nonviolent liberal democratic revolutions to take place any more than the limited Soviet financial and material support for leftist movements in previous decades caused armed socialist revolutions to take place.  As Marxists and others familiar with popular movements have long recognized, revolutions are the result of certain objective conditions.  Indeed, no amount of money could force hundreds of thousands of people to leave their jobs, homes, schools, and families to face down heavily-armed police and tanks unless they had a sincere motivation to do so.
 
This is very different than the various CIA-backed d'etats, sponsorship of paramilitary groups, and other forms of overt and covert intervention which the United States has supported, which is based upon a minority seizing power by force.  By contrast, neither the CIA nor any other part of the U.S. government knows the first thing about nonviolent action, grass roots organizing, coalition-building among popular organizations, or any of the other necessary components of making a successful nonviolent uprising possible.  Indeed, the forces that toppled Milosevic in Serbia, for example, have hardly been puppets of the U.S. agenda since coming to power.
 
It is also ironic that some in the European and North American left, after years of romanticizing armed struggle as the only way to defeat dictatorships, disparaging the potential of nonviolent action to overthrow repressive regimes, and dismissing the notion of a nonviolent revolution, are now expressing their alarm at how successful popular nonviolent insurrections can be, even to the point of naively thinking that nonviolent revolution is so easy to pull off that it could somehow be organized from foreign capitals. 
 
In reality, every successful popular nonviolent insurrection has been a home grown movement rooted in the belief by the majority of the population that their rulers were illegitimate and the current political system was incapable of redressing injustice.  By contrast, no nonviolent insurrection has succeeded when the movement’s leadership and agenda did not have the backing of the majority of the population. “Leftist” critics of nonviolent pro-democracy movements parallel right-wing supporters of U.S. intervention in that both denigrate the power of individuals to overthrow oppressive institutions and instead appear to believe that such social and political change can only come through the manipulation of foreign powers. The conspiratorial thinking and denigration of genuine popular movements which have been appearing increasingly in leftist circles serves to strengthen the hand of repressive regimes, weaken democratic forces, and bolster the argument of American neo-conservatives that only U.S. militarism and intervention – and not nonviolent struggle by oppressed peoples themselves – is capable of freeing people from repressive rule.
 
It also ignores the fact that the majority of autocratic regimes overthrown by nonviolent movements in recent decades have been regimes supported by the United States, such as Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Pinochet in Chile, and Traore in Mali, just to name a few.  Furthermore, the highly-selective U.S. "democracy-promotion" agenda tends to be focused on elite-driven top-down institution-building, not the bottom-up broad-based coalition-building necessary for a successful unarmed insurrection.

More info:

David Chandler
Professor of International Relations
Centre for the Study of Democracy
University of Westminster
32-38 Wells Street
London, W1T 3UW
 
Email: D.Chandler@Westminster.ac.uk
Personal webpages: http://www.davidchandler.org