Revolt of the Citizens

2011 was the year of the demonstrators. People throughout the world went out in the streets and occupied public places in order to demand a greater voice and more freedom. The American Occupy movement is planning new campaigns and protests against the monarchy are once again on the rise in Bahrain. So May offers the opportunity for an interim assessment of the citizens’ movements with articles from Germany, Russia, the Middle East, and the USA. It is no coincidence that Bob Dylan sets the tone here: His lyrics provide editor-in-chief Yves Kugelmann with keywords for thoughts about people in a revolt ranging from the Biblical mythos to the citoyen. Dylan represents the American tradition of social movements, which is the focus of this issue in the tradition of aufbau being founded in Manhattan by German-Jewish refugees who fled from the Nazis.

We were able to enlist historian Walter Laqueur – who was born in 1921 in Wroclaw and has been a long-standing aufbau author – for a global overview of the revolts and demonstrations. Laqueur considers economic problems to be the primary causes of the new social movements. They may be successful only in exceptional cases, “but the grievances that have produced the protest movements will not simply disappear, and new and possibly stronger protests could be the result.”

Robert Reich examines the socioeconomic context of the Occupy movement: According to him, the dramatic redistribution of income, assets, and opportunities to the uppermost “One Percent” of the American population has triggered “moral outrage” – especially in young people. The academic and commentator sees parallels to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. At that time, the moral sensibilities of the students were offended by the disenfranchisement of the blacks in the American South. Susannah Heschel discusses the friendship between her father, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, and Martin Luther King against this background.

In Germany, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Pirate Marina Weisband welcome the new citizens’ movements while Wolf Biermann looks at the “courage and outrage citizens” with skepticism. In contrast, the residents of the Arab world are fighting to make the transition from subjects to citizens in the first place. The Bahraini activist Ala´a Shehabi – whose husband was recently released after being tortured during his imprisonment by the Bahraini monarchy – provides information on this topic.

The aufbau website provides more in-depth information on the phenomenon of Occupy in two gripping articles. In his analytical text on the New York Occupy movement, Michael Greenberg sees it as a utopian attempt at overcoming the politics of America that are dominated by lobbies and the power of big money by means of political theater that is simultaneously intended as an alternative plan for life. Aufbau editor Andreas Mink invites civil rights veteran Marshall Ganz of Harvard University to share his thoughts. The latter explains the dramatic pendulum swings between leftist and rightist movements in the USA since 2008. How did it happen that Barack Obama’s enthusiastic grassroots organization from the past election campaign was replaced by the conservative Tea Party, which has now been followed by Occupy Wall Street? In his essay, Vienna author Robert Menasse explores the extent to which the middle class has influenced the concept of the citizen in Europe.