Reith Lectures 2011: Reith Responses - Dissent As Vocation

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A group of protesters outside the Burmese embassy in London during a 2007 protest
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Brian Hanrahan:
It was the Bahnhofstrasse in the north of the city that most Berliners hurry to check what was happening. It was here in the past that East Germans with permission to travel were filtered in and out of the country. But tonight there were no filters, no checks. At midnight the border was thrown open and the crowds surged through the Open gates.

Magdi Abdelhadi:
It's just been announced on state television that President Mubarak has stepped down and the moment immediately after that the streets have exploded in a cacophony of honking and shouting and whistling and jubilations and people waving Egyptian flags. There is a palpable sense of pride. What a night. This is a historic day in the entire history of Egypt.

Aung San Suu Kyi:
To be speaking to you now through the BBC has a very special meaning for me. It means that once again I'm officially a free person.

Geoff Andrews:
In the first 2011 Reith Lecture, smuggled out by the BBC and recently aired on Radio 4, Aung San Suu Kyi chose dissent as her theme. Released from house arrest at the end of 2010, she has been at the forefront of a long battle for freedom and democracy in Burma and she has paid a heavy price for her own acts of dissent. In her lecture, she talked of the life of the dissidents, of the sacrifices, hopes and fears of the movement she has led for over 20 years. She drew similarities with the Arab Spring and the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989. In the course of her lecture, she used the phrase ‘dissent as a vocation’, drawn from Max Weber, to sum up the choices she has had to make as a long-standing and prominent Burmese dissident. As she argued, this necessarily involves the balance of courage, conviction and compromise. But this phrase, ‘dissent as a vocation’, can also shed light on some the core meanings of politics; of political leadership, of democratic renewal, and of policy-making processes as well as outright opposition; including in the very different circumstances of Western liberal democracies.

Mike Saward is Professor of Politics at The Open University.

Mike Saward:
Aung San Sun Kyi spoke interestingly about the idea of dissent as a vocation and clearly she is playing off Max Weber’s notion of politics as a vocation. And in that context she talked about the importance of passion, of responsibility and of proportion. In a similar way again to that of Weber. Now this I find very, very interesting.

Dissent as a vocation suggests that there is a kind of permanent vocation of dissent. We would think of a political life as something which is open ended. But perhaProtesters dissent as a vocation, is a time limited notion. In that sense it is political, tt’s a version of politics as a vocation. But it’s also for a limited period of time while dissent is perhaProtesters from the Burmese point of view in particular required to shake up the system, to challenge the system in fundamental ways to render it as she would see more democratic, more free, more fair and just.

It’s very interesting I think the idea of proportion and responsibility in the role of dissenter. Now often we think historically and just rhetorically about dissent as opposition, sheer opposition as it were to a given set of rules or regime or government structure or whatever it may be exactly. But the emphasis on moderation as it were, proportion, thinking carefully, strategically, ethically about the extent to which one might dissent. What actions and practices that might involve on the ground. The extent to which, and I think this is uppermost in her mind in many ways, how you would imperil and put in danger followers and colleagues in a dissenting process if one isn’t careful, if one isn’t responsible and proportional.

So I think we can see inflected in this discussion her role as well as a leader of dissent, as it were as a representative in a sense, an informal representative of a group who would respond to her as dissenters and probably put themselves in harm's way if she so called them to do. So I think there’s a very interesting mix here of the notion of moderated passion, the role of strategic responsibility, the role of leadership responsibility within the idea of dissent.

If we think about dissent in the context of liberal democracy. We have great thinkers as it were to refer to. John Stuart Mill perhaProtesters above all who suggested that the lone dissenter, even the single lone dissenter from orthodoxy. Whatever in politics that orthodoxy may refer to is almost more valuable the more they are alone. The more they are a sole voice, the value of their sole voice and what they have to say in a sense increases because a politic can only improve, challenge itself, find new ways to justify itself or to reform. If there are voices which dare to challenge it, which raise uncomfortable issues, which put alternative points of view.

So within a liberal and certainly a liberal democratic order the notion of dissent, be it as it were a dissent within the system such as dissenting members of political parties, for example, established institutions. Let alone dissent from outside, be it in the UK, for example, from the radical side of the Green Movement or from the Countryside Alliance or from a range of other sources. It remains absolutely critical in the sense that John Stuart Mill certainly intended it.

That if there are to be new ideas, if there are to be new ways of thinking about a policy process. If there are to be new ways of thinking about what it means to rule in a democratic manner. Those ideas will tend not to come from within the system because political parties and those who are parts of those parties and civil servants in a very understandable sense are not there to question the contours, are not there to question the procedures through which they, with any luck from their point of view efficiently operate. So dissent is certainly critical even in as it were an established liberal democratic order.

Geoff Andrews:
Professor Mike Saward of The Open University.

From a Professor of Politics to one of Britain's leading online forums for dissent – openDemocracy was set up in 2001 with a mission to create what it calls “a global conversation on democracy”. It's become an open space for many dissident grouProtesters including those in the Arab Spring. Giving a space to marginalised voices has been a feature, as well as the new media such as Twitter and Facebook. In fact, the politics of dissent is openDemocracy's business as its editor Rosemary Bechler explains.

Rosemary Bechler:
openDemocracy was set up in 2001 and the purpose was that Anthony Barnett who is the founder of Charter 88 and has always been very, very interested in democracy suddenly looked to the Internet for the possibility of a global conversation about democracy. And what he was wondering was, was it possible and how was it possible to achieve real democracy at the end of the 20th century given the power of corporations, global media and the impact of inequality.

And he was thinking that the answer to that must be something to do with growing a world conversation, something that could stretch across national silos. And so four people met in a garage and they thought up a website and they called it openDemocracy.

I think it's true to say that the people who were originally involved in openDemocracy had grown up with a sort of highly centralised power of the 20th century, but that the reason why they were all involved in openDemocracy was because they sensed the dissolving force of the Internet. In particular, as a means for breaking down national silos as I've mentioned, and sharing good ideas.

And from the beginning this really was a space in which we wanted, we sought serious, engaged and creative dissent on all sides. We very much wanted differences of opinion to create new ideas. And I think in a sense that meant that dissent was profoundly written into our structures. But in terms of the dissenting voices that became very important to us, and one of the best examples is probably in the events that took place in Iran, where we managed to get in touch with these terrific young bloggers who were speaking about what was happening in their society almost in real time, and in ways that, you know, simply hadn’t been available on more conventional media. So that would be, that’s the best example. Until we hit Arab Spring, of course.

I had a look today at our coverage, we have an 'Arab Revolutions' box on our front page, and I calculated that we’ve produced 250 articles in that box. And so the first thing to say about this is that that began in February, it's now June. And this is an outpouring of attempts to grasp real events as they pass. But it is also fascinatingly an attempt to find out what it means to me by people who are writing in from all corners of the world. And each one of them has a chance to find something in the evidence in front of them in the preceding articles which they can articulate. Because they can compare it with their own situation.

If you ask me to place the Arab Spring and to at least note its similarities with some of the other great ructions in modern history, I have to say that 1989 doesn’t seem to me to be the obvious point of comparison, and that is mainly because the Eastern European countries when they caved in and rejected their system, most of the people who were calling for change were convinced at that time that there was an existing model that they could move to. I think it’s fair to say that they looked to the West.

Geoff Andrews:
Rosemary, if the Arab Spring is something different from 1989, how can we best understand the demands of these dissenters? What about comparisons with the French Enlightenment, for example?

Rosemary Bechler:
I think one would go to the French Enlightenment, and in particular to its unleashing of an ongoing set of claims in the battle between liberty and equality, which began with this declaration that people were equal before the law, the end of, you know, theologically derived forms of status in society. That challenge of equality seems to me to have been working its way out since the French Revolution and still is working its way out quite obviously in the Arab Spring. What I think is not the case is that what we see here is a celebration of Western liberalism. Because I don’t think that Western liberalism has been able to rise to the challenge of the egalitarian demand that the French Revolution triggered off.

Geoff Andrews:
Can you say something about the role of the new media in the Arab Spring?

Rosemary Bechler:
I think it’s been extremely important, and it’s important because communication is the absolute essence it seems to me of what’s going on in these uprisings.

This is about people who have had to experience various forms of repression, unemployment, poverty food shortage, you name it, on their own as isolated individuals or isolated sections of society actually coming into a public square together and exchanging their views about the quality of their lives.

And because communication is the essence of it, it's been, you know, the Internet has allowed this kind of conversation in exchange to not just remain a sort of one-off event that happens to fortunate people who happen to wander into Tahrir Square or any of these other wonderful squares. But it’s actually enabled them to keep in contact with similar agoras in their own countries, and also directly with an international audience. In the Arab Spring that was really important. It was really important to have international witness because of this very crucial question about what was going to happen about non-violent protest whether violence was actually going to succeed in dousing that.

The international community, that is ordinary people not the usual kind of international community, were then a very important witness that preserved this experiment. And it’s important that what’s going on was a conversation, not a whole load of leaders with important expertise telling people what they had to think, but a really much more vertiginous, existential experiment between people as they learnt, learnt about each other, tried to work out how they might live better together and tried to think what relationship that had to the kind of State they really wanted to live under.

Geoff Andrews:
Aung San Suu Kyi in her lecture used the phrase ‘Dissent is a Vocation’. Is dissent Open Democracy’s vocation?

Rosemary Bechler:
I think what’s really interesting about the idea of dissent as a vocation is that it begins to get as close to the big discussion that’s being going on on openDemocracy about what the Arab Spring really is. This question of what is taking place in those squares, this echoing of Gandhi’s phrase about being the change that you want to see, this element in which whether you are a dissenter who’s really up against a power that’s not letting go, or you’re in a much, much better situation at least on the surface in an advanced democratic Western European country.

What is really crucial is that you are allowed to discover your own voice to express yourself to move away from being the indignaos, the humiliated, who’ve been forced in a privacy and alienation. And that what you’re really doing is learning how to live side by side with other people. You’re doing that because our democracy doesn’t encourage that. It actually encourages even our most advanced models, encourages divisions between people.

I would say that openDemocracy’s vocation over the past ten years has been a spacist for dissent. By which I mean that we allow people to say what they passionately believe to each other and we don’t attempt to force them into any kind of straight jacket. We don’t pronounce on what they have to say. I can’t actually put my hand on my heart and say that we structure conversations because we don’t, we structure hundreds and hundreds of on the whole quite well-written articles.

But still if you can compare that to a conversation what is important about it is that we let these points of view, these, we hope passionate arguments have at each other. And we hope that people will come back and carry on developing the ideas. It's in that sense of dissent, which I think is very important, that people are allowed to find their own way, change their own ideas and processes of interaction with other people in that broadest sense of dissent then yes, yes that is what openDemocracy is about.

Geoff Andrews:
In her Reith Lecture Aung San Suu Kyi talked movingly of how dissidents have fought for freedoms that many of us take for granted. The very idea of dissent, of the need to question and contest, represent and oppose has sustained many marginalised grouProtesters in their quest for democracy. And, as we've seen, dissent is part of the life blood of all kinds of politics, including democratic ones, for putting new ideas onto the agenda and for changing policies and procedures, sometimes violent and increasingly expressed in new ways, we shouldn't forget that dissent remains part of our everyday world.

Female protester:
What do we want?

Protesters:
Transparency.

Female protester:
When do we want it?

Protesters:
Now.

Female protester:
What do we want?

Protesters:
Transparency.

Female protester:
When do we want it?

Protesters:
Now.

Female protester:
What do we want?

Protesters:
Transparency. (Fades out)