Hugo Dixon

The views expressed are his own.

The most electrifying event of the year, for me, was the Egyptian revolution. I’d long had an interest in Gandhian-style struggles. Here was a nonviolent struggle unfolding in real-time against Hosni Mubarak’s repressive regime. Tens of millions of people were gaining their freedom.

The media coverage of the events in Tahrir Square focused on the Facebook revolution. But when I went to Cairo shortly after, I discovered that the use of social media was only part of the reason why the dictator had been toppled. Behind the protests was a cadre of activists who had been trained in the techniques of nonviolent struggle. This realization was a eureka moment. If it was possible to overthrow dictators with comparatively little bloodshed – less than a thousand died in Egypt’s revolution — many millions more elsewhere might be able to gain their freedom given proper planning and training.

2011 was a banner year for nonviolent struggle. Not only did it witness the successful Arab Spring revolutions against dictators in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen; it also saw three Arab kings – in Morocco, Jordan and Kuwait — liberalize their political systems to head off similar protests. And the brave people of Syria went out on the streets again and again, despite being arrested, tortured and killed in their thousands.

Further afield, the Burmese regime started to reach an accommodation with pro-democracy activist, Aung San Suu Kyi, after two decades of nonviolent opposition; China experienced increasing stirrings of protest, for example when citizens posted nude photos of themselves on the internet after the authorities ruled that a photo of Ai Weiwei, the dissident artist, was pornographic; and even Vladimir Putin had to face demonstrations after seemingly widespread vote-rigging in Russia’s parliamentary elections.

The techniques of nonviolent struggle have also been used for purposes other than bringing down dictatorships. A man called Anna Hazare led a successful campaign against corruption in India. Meanwhile, the West had to contend with the Indignant anti-austerity movements in Spain, Greece and Italy as well as the anti-banker Occupy movements in the United States and Britain.

And don’t forget Leymah Gbowee, one of the winners of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. She helped end Liberia’s civil war in 2003 by getting women from Christian and Muslim communities to go on a sex strike until their men stopped fighting. The technique has a long pedigree, at least in literature. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, first performed in 411 BC, is a comedy about how women used sexual abstinence to force peace talks between Athens and Sparta in the long-running Peloponnesian War.

2011 was the most successful year for nonviolent struggle since 1989 when peaceful revolutions led by the likes of Poland’s Lech Walesa and Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Havel, who died at the weekend, swept away the old communist regimes of Eastern Europe. But nonviolent struggle hasn’t mown down everything in its path this year. The Occupy movements haven’t achieved much apart from raising consciousness. The transition to democracy in Egypt is still uncertain. Pro-democracy protests in Bahrain were snuffed out with the help of Saudi tanks. Bashar Assad is still in power in Damascus. And Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was brought down by a bloody civil war and foreign military intervention, not by unarmed protesters.

The Gandhi network

Over the past year, whenever I could tear myself away from the unfolding drama in the euro zone, I turned my attention to nonviolent struggle. How were these movements organized? Did they draw inspiration from common sources? And what were the ingredients of success?

The trail began in early January, several weeks before the Tahrir Square demonstrations. I was in Delhi meeting Kiran Bedi, a key member of Hazare’s anti-corruption campaign. I wanted to know whether Mohandas Gandhi, the leader of India’s independence struggle against the British in the first half of the 20^th Century, was still relevant today. Of course, she replied, explaining that they had chosen January 30, the anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination, to hold their anti-corruption demonstration.

It wasn’t until August, though, that the campaign gathered momentum. The decisive moment came when Hazare announced he would go on a public hunger strike, a classic Gandhian technique, until the government agreed to create a tough anti-corruption watchdog. This posed a dilemma for the authorities. Either they would let the 74-year-old man go on strike and they would look weak; or they wouldn’t and they would look brutal. The police chose the latter option, arresting Hazare and over a thousand of his supporters on the grounds that they were holding an illegal demonstration. Indians came out in their millions in protest. Some kids in an orphanage even staged a hunger strike in sympathy.

The so-called dilemma action was perfected by Gandhi in his salt march in 1930. At the time, salt-making was a British government monopoly. Gandhi declared he was going to march to the sea and make his own salt, daring the authorities either to arrest him or display their impotence. After weeks of dithering, the British arrested Gandhi — triggering a massive civil disobedience campaign which led to over 80,000 people being put behind bars and paved the way for the end of British rule. Today’s Indian authorities made the same mistake as their British predecessors.

But this is moving too fast. Long before Hazare’s victory, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had fled Tunisia and Mubarak had resigned in Egypt. When I went to Cairo a month later, I met Saad Bahaar, a former engineer who had been training activists in the techniques of nonviolent struggle for six years. I was stunned. How had he learned what to do? He pointed, among other things, to the work of Gene Sharp, a frail 83-year-old Boston-based academic who has been studying and proselytizing this type of warfare for about 60 years.

I’d never heard of Sharp, who runs a small think-tank called the Albert Einstein Institution. But I sought him out and devoured a clutch of his books, including his classic treatise, The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Sharp had analyzed how the pillars on which dictators’ power rests could be undermined systematically by nonviolent struggle. He also listed 198 tactics that could be used. Sharp had taken the insights of Gandhi and others and developed them into a quasi-science.

One of Sharp’s concepts – political jujitsu – is particularly powerful. This is the idea that violence inflicted by a dictatorship on peaceful protesters could boomerang on the regime and destroy it. Bystanders would abandon their neutrality; the regime’s pillars of support would become shaky; if the activists had the courage to maintain their struggle, the tyrant would ultimately collapse. But – and this was a crucial “but” – the revolutionaries had to maintain their nonviolent discipline, according to Sharp. Otherwise, they would lose the active support of the masses and, in a trial of strength, the regime would overwhelm them.

Boston is one node in a loose network of activists involved in nonviolent struggle. Another is Belgrade, home of Srdja Popovic, a 38-year-old Serb who was a founder of the resistance movement which helped bring down Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Popovic now runs Canvas, a group that trains activists around the world in nonviolent struggle. The tall angular Serb has simplified and popularized Sharp’s work, adding a huge dose of energy and humor as well as real-life experience.

Then there are academics who have helped refine the techniques of nonviolent warfare by studying past campaigns. For example, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan studied 323 liberation struggles between 1900 and 2006 in their new book Why Civil Resistance Works. They discovered that 53 percent of the nonviolent campaigns succeeded in bringing about regime change, roughly double the 26 percent success rate for violent ones. The nonviolent struggles were also faster – taking on average three years to reach their goal rather than nine. And such campaigns had a good chance of ushering in democracies whereas regime changes brought about through violence tended to lead to new dictatorships.

Ingredients of success

The overall message of these activists and academics can be boiled down to several simple points. Success comes from having a clear and powerful goal, unity among the opposition, good strategic planning, tactical innovation and nonviolent discipline.

The first point can be illustrated by comparing Hazare’s anti-corruption campaign to the less successful Occupy movements. Hazare had a precise goal that resonated with a huge swathe of Indian society. The Occupy movements and their close relations, the Indignant movements, haven’t yet articulated clear goals nor have they yet achieved anything concrete.

The perils of abandoning nonviolent discipline are also shown by Italy’s Indignati and Greece’s Aganaktismenoi. In the former case, protests were hijacked by a group of anarchists called the Black Bloc; in the latter by demonstrators throwing Molotov cocktails. Almost all the media coverage focused on the fringe violent elements rather than the peaceful masses.

Colonel Gaddafi’s bloody overthrow is, of course, the supposed counter-example from 2011 to the merits of pursuing a nonviolent struggle. It seems to suggest that violence pays. As such, some members of the Syrian opposition are advocating it as a model they should follow – although the main umbrella body, the Syrian National Council, is still pushing the nonviolent approach.

But the lessons from the Libyan revolution aren’t clear-cut. For a start, it’s unknowable what would have happened if the people had pursued a nonviolent campaign: they might eventually have got their way with less bloodshed. Although estimates of the Libyan death toll vary widely, the Transitional National Council has used a number of 25,000. If the same proportion of Syria’s larger population was killed in a conflict, its death toll would be 89,000 – much higher than the 5,000 so far estimated by the United Nations.

The Libyan campaign also relied on France, Britain, America and other countries attacking Gaddafi’s forces from the air. That can’t easily be repeated in Syria. Foreign powers aren’t always willing to play the role of global policeman – and, when they are, they typically want something in return such as control of a country’s natural resources.

How the Syrian conflict plays out will determine many people’s perceptions of the value of nonviolent struggle. At the moment, it looks like there is a significant risk of it descending into civil war. But even if such a tragedy unfolds this won’t prove that Gandhian-style campaigns are worthless. 2011 has already shown the power of the technique in other countries. As more people learn the strategy and tactics of nonviolent struggle, it will become more powerful still.

The opinions expressed are his own.

The UK’s self-immolation beggars belief. The government’s clumsy attempt to extract concessions from euro zone countries in their time of need has set off a chain reaction which could undermine Britain’s interests and even drive it out of the European Union.

It’s not clear what David Cameron thought he was doing at the European summit in the early hours of Dec. 9 when he demanded vetoes on financial regulation in the EU. Was the prime minister asking for something he knew was unacceptable so that he could return to Britain and parade as a hero in front of the euroskeptics in his Conservative Party? Or did he just vastly overestimate his negotiating position, thinking that the euro zone countries were so desperate to save their single currency that he could bounce them into accepting the British demands by presenting them with a take-it-or-leave-it offer in the middle of the night? If it was the former, Cameron was cynically putting his personal interests above those of the nation; if the latter, he was just extraordinarily inept.

Cameron did little to win allies for his position, not even circulating his list of proposals in advance of the summit, according to Reuters. Even worse, he put Britain in the position of seemingly being prepared to blow up the single currency if he didn’t get his way. In fact, Cameron didn’t have the power to stop the 17 euro zone countries from agreeing to sign a new treaty committing themselves to fiscal discipline. They just sidestepped the existing EU treaty. What’s more, they got all nine of the other countries which are part of the EU but not the single currency to sign up too. So all Cameron achieved in the middle of the night was to irritate Britain’s partners massively and isolate the UK 26-1.

Where does London go from here? One approach would be for Cameron to carry out his next threat: to try to stop the euro zone countries from using the European Commission and the European Court of Justice to police their fiscal discipline on the grounds that these institutions belong to all 27 countries. It’s not clear whether this is a legally winnable position, but pushing it would certainly make Britain look petty and further antagonize other European countries.

Meanwhile, members of Cameron’s euroskeptic wing will find it hard to hide their desire to see the single currency wrecked — something that could further madden those whose livelihood depend on it.

Unnecessary battle

None of this was remotely necessary. The euro zone countries weren’t trying to impose fiscal discipline on Britain, only on themselves. In fact they weren’t trying to impose anything on the UK. True, France has often seemed like it wanted to undermine the City of London’s position as a financial center. But until now, it has had zero success because the UK has always managed to assemble enough allies to support its position. In future, though, that can no longer be guaranteed. France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy may find he has allies if he wants to push through regulations that disadvantage what he calls his “British friends.” The risk of an inner club acting as a caucus and imposing its wishes on the UK has increased significantly.

The danger extends beyond financial services. Britain has been the main campaigner for free markets within the EU in recent decades. Although it hasn’t achieved everything it wanted, there have been notable successes such as creation of the so-called single market. Germany which, in some ways, is closer to Britain than France in its economic thinking supported these initiatives. But Angela Merkel isn’t going to be so keen to do the UK favors after Cameron snubbed her. The same goes for Italy, whose new prime minister Mario Monti, was a natural ally for liberalization given his passionate advocacy of the single market.

The British PM, meanwhile, has been reduced to the pathetic position of saying that the Netherlands, a fine but rather small country, will protect its interests in the single market. But even the Dutch finance minister has said: “The situation for the UK is very serious…..If you don’t have a seat at the table, you don’t participate.”

The biggest worry is that a vicious cycle develops — in which the euro zone squeezes the UK off the top table because of its lack of cooperation, London behaves increasingly like a spoiled brat because it is frustrated by its lack of influence, and this further antagonizes the big continental powers. Life could ultimately become so uncomfortable that Britain leaves the EU.  It would then lose the automatic right of access to the world’s largest  market. Although the rest of Europe might still let British business and finance operate on its side of the English Channel, it would largely dictate the rules of engagement.

Such an outcome would be disastrous for the City, British industry and UK foreign policy. Why would the United States, China, the Middle East and India want to deal with London if it had no friends in Europe? It would also be harder to persuade foreign business to locate in the UK if it had only second-class access to the single market.

Not all lost

But it’s not too late to retrieve the situation. The business and financial community can and should put pressure on government to find some face-saving position that allows Britain to move on in harmony with the rest of Europe. Something along the following lines might work: the UK would reverse its opposition to the existing EU mechanisms being used to enforce fiscal discipline on the euro countries while also saying how much it wanted to support them in their time of need; the other countries would then say how what they were doing would in no way undermine the single market while also asserting that they had no intention of imposing any new taxes on the UK, including the so-called Tobin tax on financial transactions, unless London wanted them. The euro zone wouldn’t actually be giving anything away as the UK already has a veto on new taxes. But such a declaration would sound good.

Getting to such a position wouldn’t be easy given that Cameron would have to eat his words and France would have to be persuaded to let Britain back into the fold. But Sarkozy may no longer be France’s president in five months; and the UK government may not be totally impervious to argument.

One pressure point are the Liberal Democrats, the minority partners in the coalition. They think of themselves as pro-Europeans and are aghast at Britain’s far from splendid isolation. Their leader, Nick Clegg, who is also the deputy prime minister, foolishly backed Cameron’s negotiating strategy without thinking through how it was likely to play out. He has now performed a U-turn, saying he is “bitterly disappointed” at the outcome. That, of course, is not the same as leaving the coalition. The LibDems will be reluctant to go down that route because they are scared of being slaughtered if there is a new election. But the chances of a collapse of the government have definitely risen.

Another pressure point, paradoxically, may be Boris Johnson, the euroskeptic Mayor of London. Cameron may well have hardened his line on Europe because he didn’t want to be outflanked by Johnson, a hugely popular figure in the Conservative Party. But the summit’s outcome isn’t in the interest of the City and therefore isn’t in the interest of London. If bankers can bring this point home to Johnson, who is an old friend of mine and whom I informally advise from time to time, he may soften his line — allowing Cameron to take a more accommodating position too.

Salvaging the situation will be tricky. But Britain doesn’t have an interest in being at loggerheads with the rest of Europe or vice versa — especially when the region’s worst financial crisis in a lifetime is still raging.

PHOTO: Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron (C) looks at Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel (L) at a European Union summit in Brussels December 9, 2011.  REUTERS/Yves Herman

The euro zone will probably get another short-term fix at its summit this week. Exactly how the fix will work isn’t clear. But both Germany and the European Central Bank have softened their positions so much that some sort of solution is in the works. The ECB will probably cut interest rates and spray more liquidity at the troubled banking system; it may also step up its purchases of government bonds; and some scheme for assembling enough money to bail out Italy and Spain — probably by getting national central banks to lend money to the International Monetary Fund, which could then pass it on to Rome and Madrid – may be unveiled.

All this would be cause for celebration. The problem is the price that Germany and seemingly the ECB are demanding for their help: fiscal discipline, embedded in a treaty. Merkel wants the European Commission in Brussels to have the power to overturn irresponsible national budgets and for the European Court of Justice to fine governments that step out of line.

This idea for a treaty is stirring up all sorts of problems. One is that Britain, which is not part of the euro zone but is a member of the European Union, wants a quid pro quo for signing a revised treaty – probably in the form of returning powers over social and judicial affairs to London or getting some veto over the regulation of financial services, the UK’s largest industry.

An even bigger problem is the objection of many people in the euro zone to Disziplin being imposed by Berlin. Even France’s Nicholas Sarkozy, who is backing Merkel’s plan, has had to swallow hard before embracing a policy which would involve a loss of sovereignty, and is still wrangling over the details. The opposition socialists, which look likely to defeat Sarkozy in May’s presidential elections, have been quick to dub the plan an “austerity treaty.”

Handing powers to Brussels at Germany’s insistence isn’t popular with France’s right-wing parties either. In fact, it is likely to be pretty unpopular right across the euro zone. Even the president of the European Parliament, a body which normally supports anything that increases the European Union’s power, has said treaty change could be “dangerous” because citizens were unlikely to warm to the idea.

This is not to say that Europe’s governments won’t sign up to the German plan. Fear over what would happen if the euro collapsed is now so high that they will probably fall into line if this is what is needed to unleash the ECB. But a marriage based on fear is not the most attractive or most sustainable one. It will breed resentment. This could be expressed in the growing popularity of right-wing nationalist parties. There is even a chance that the proposed treaty changes, which will require unanimity, would be voted down by at least one parliament or torpedoed in at least one national referendum.

Merkel says she wants “more Europe.” But she is offering a lot less than the fiscal union that many pundits outside Germany are clamoring for. They want the euro zone’s governments to guarantee each others’ debt, by issuing euro bonds. A fully functional fiscal union would also have a large central budget that would transfer resources from booming regions to struggling ones. Germany’s chancellor is against these ideas for the simple reason that her people are not remotely ready to bail out other parts of Europe on a permanent basis. Nor, for that matter, are the Dutch, the Finns and some other nations.

Merkel’s idea of discipline is not in itself a bad idea, mind you. Governments ought to run their finances responsibly. The problem is that she is trying to achieve this through rules.  An alternative would be to impose discipline through the market. If bond investors knew that profligate states might have to restructure their debts in future, they might rein governments in before their debts got out of hand in the first place.

It might be objected that the markets did a terrible job holding governments to account during the bubble years. This is true. But that’s partly because governments gave investors artificial incentives to buy their bonds. There’s now a golden opportunity to set a new baseline for market discipline by making clear that investors will have to share the pain if a euro zone country racks up excessive debts. To be fair, Germany has been pushing this idea, but France wants it abandoned. Even if Berlin gets its way on this, it won’t be giving ground on the need for rules.

The discipline of the bond markets may not be an appealing slogan. But it is less unpalatable than the discipline of remote bureaucrats dictated to by Berlin. Europe’s citizens can probably understand that, if you borrow too much money, you have to dance to your creditors’ tune. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the way the debate is going. The price for a short-term fix could be a long-term problem.

PHOTO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel makes a point during her speech at the German lower house of parliament Bundestag in Berlin December 2, 2011. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz