The past 12 months have seen protests around the world make headlines and dominate social media feeds.
But a recent report by the International Federation for Human Rights warned that the right to peaceful assembly and demonstration is under growing strain, even within liberal democracies.
In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Danny Bird speaks to historians Katrina Navakas and Timothy Garton Ash to explore how protest has both challenged and changed the course of history.
The first question I want to ask is, what defines a protest?
What distinguishes it from, say, a revolution or a riot?
Because it seems that these concepts are often muddled or can become conflated.
A protest quite often is defined by the law, and that's why it's a mutable term.
And that term has changed over time.
And certainly in England and Wales.
Our first definitions really come in 1714 with the Riot Act, which defines what a riot is as opposed to a demonstration or other types of protest.
So to be a riot in the 18th century, you had to have 12 people.
Anything less than that was just a disturbance.
And a riot obviously involves violence, it involves breaches of the peace.
And the origins of the modern demonstration, as I see it, come in the 19th century and with the rise of the democratic movement.
So we think of protest as people out on the streets, as people making a claim, using collective action, using large crowds.
And that is a feature of the rise of democracy, rise of the idea of the people again which emerges around that time.
But it depends on the circumstance.
It depends on the country.
It depends on the legal status of what is allowed and what isn't on the streets.
Let me add a couple of things on that.
I mean, first of all, obviously, one person's protest might be another person's right.
So it's very much a matter of definition.
But I think that whereas there have been protests in a sense throughout human history I mean, in ancient times there were slave protests, there were peasants' revolts and so on
I would very much agree that what we think of as protest is a product of modern history since, I would say, late 19th or early 20th century.
And I would add one other thing that for much of modern history, revolution has been associated with violence.
And for me, what we think of as the politics of protest is essentially about nonviolent action.
So think Gandhi in India.
Think the civil rights movement.
Think the people power in the Philippines.
And, of course, the peculiarity of 1989 the so-called Velvet Revolutions, which I'm sure we'll come on to is that, for the first time, nonviolent protest and revolution come together and you have a non-violent revolution.
So I think the politics of protest is indeed about people power, about popular demonstrations, and I think I would want to stipulate that it's associated with peaceful protest.
If we look back across history, some protests seem to genuinely change the course of events, while others just fade away.
What do you think makes the difference?
Is it timing, tactics, leadership, or something peculiar to a specific moment in history?
Well, all of the above.
But if I can make a little commercial for this book which I co-edited with my colleague Adam Roberts, which is Civil Resistance and Power Politics, we looked at 18 cases over 100 years, from Gandhi all the way through to the more recent color revolutions.
And of course, it's complicated.
But I would say, number one, it never works just on its own.
A protest in itself is not enough.
You need certain external and internal conditions which are favorable to it.
But the other thing is you need a strategy.
It's not simply an expression of anger or of moral disgust.
And those protests that are successful.
Have a strategy which involves working out how you're going to swing certain elements forward among those in power.
Now throughout modern history.
The whole point about protest is that it has a cumulative impact, particularly if it's peaceful protest.
So I think it's the external and internal conditions and then having a strategy.
Definitely agree.
I always use the idea of critical mass, that there's always activists in a protest movement or a social movement, political movement.
And they're always going to try and protest whatever the conditions are.
But you need a critical mass of the people supporting.
And quite often that requires either an ideological shift or a belief shift in the bigger cause.
But it also requires that combination of circumstances where either there's a state breakdown quite often a successful process happen in the aftermath of wars or big economic depressions, where there is some sort of structural breakdown that allows people the opportunity to gather support.
And Also, that the state and powers of law and order are weakened.
So you can have a strong movement as you like, but you've got to guarantee that the police or the army won't be sent in and put down your movement, certainly on a repeated basis.
So there is a combination of both those big structural factors and a sense of a critical mass that people are joining the movement because they can see it will become successful.
Protest is often celebrated as the heartbeat of democracy, yet it's just as often treated as a threat to order or respectability.
With a view to historical examples...
Why do you think it continues to make society so uneasy, even in countries that pride themselves on free expression?
So particularly in the British case.
In England and Wales there hadn't been a right of assembly or a right of free speech in statute law until 2000, the Human Rights Act.
So it's almost permissive that you're allowed to protest.
And there's always been what we classifies right wing or oppositional protests.
And a lot of legislation that emerges, certainly in the 20th century, is about dealing with the far right.
And so there's always a tension over that question of freedom of speech or freedom of assembly if those protest movements, such as a fascist movement, a far-right movement, are allowed that sort of same leeway that left-wing movements are.
And we see that in 1936, the debates over the right of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists.
Should they be able to march?
Who has the right to stop meetings occurring, particularly in private spaces, not necessarily on the street, but in private halls?
Are the police allowed to go in and arrest people for what they say?
So there's always been that tension, certainly in the 20th century, over freedom of speech versus.
Is this going to lead to a breach of the peace?
And that's quite often what the police are judging.
The potential of disorder is around.
Will this speech act then incite a crowd into violence?
So that's the tension that I see certainly in protest to the present day.
So even in the most free societies, no freedom is unlimited.
The freedom of assembly, the freedom of speech, none of them are unlimited.
Because if they were, we come up against Karl Popper's famous paradox of tolerance that unlimited tolerance leads to the end of tolerance right.
Because you're tolerating the enemies of tolerance, the enemies of democracy.
I think in the British case that legitimate limit has sometimes been confused with the one Katrina was alluding to, which is public order, because I think in English and then British history.
We've had a very strong notion of public order, what's sometimes called the natural tranquility of the kingdom which, in my view, goes well beyond what is actually a legitimate limit on freedoms.
In the case of the kind of countries I've spent most of my life studying, namely authoritarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere, the matter is much simpler.
Rulers governments, authorities don't like protest because it allows their people to speak, and they're afraid of their own people.
So in those cases, they're trying to shut people up and to stop them finding their voices.
And here, as we were saying a moment ago, the key moment is when you break through the barrier of fear.
So if you take autumn 1989, friends of mine leave their apartment in Leipzig.
They're the only two people going to a demo against the East German communist regime.
They reach the next street corner and they see two other people, and then the next street corner and suddenly there are 10 people and then 12, and then 200, and then a thousand people.
And this so-called cascade effect, or what Katrina was saying, you know, the critical mass breaks through the barrier of fear.
And that's what every authoritarian or totalitarian ruler is most afraid of.
Think of the expression on Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu's face when he suddenly saw that the people were booing him.
Yeah, that is a remarkable piece of footage.
I want to focus a little bit more on what you were saying there about Britain, because I think what you were getting at was there is this prevailing tendency That political and social change came about through steady reform, not revolution or public disorder.
How accurate do you think that is?
And why do you think that perception has proven to be so enduring?
Again, I'll always blame the Victorians.
The wigwam of history that we're always in moderate progression.
But quite often that story misses out the Irish dimension.
And for quite a long time.
The Irish were treated almost as a kind of testing ground for the most extreme forms of policing, public order or restrictions on constitutional rights.
So from the 1690s onwards, when William of Orange took over by force, we tend to think of the Glorious Revolution in Whiggish terms, as a kind of peaceful revolution.
William was asked to come over, but actually he forcefully took over Ireland.
And so the story from then onwards has that mix of the myths that the Whigs created around peaceful reform, that we gradually extend the franchise through peaceful protest.
In fact, it's always been quite loss-making.
Think about the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, which was the first mass demonstration event that involved law and order, the magistrates and military, killing about 18 people, injuring many hundreds, in a peaceful demonstration where they were just campaigning for the vote.
All those events happen throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
And although legislation seems to follow, it's not a direct consequence.
There is a struggle all the way through, from groups of democratic political societies, through trade unions, unemployed groups, suffragettes.
All use some sort of force, some sort of pressure.
It's not all peacefully won.
But we also have the extreme of Ireland as well and their own parallel history that shows that even the history of the British Isles isn't purely peaceful.
All nations tell themselves fairy tales, and that's one of our fairy tales.
But there's also another aspect of this which is part of protest is taking a risk, is putting your physical person, your body, in places where you know you might get hit over the head or, in the worst case, shot.
And that's a.
The violence that comes from the side of the state boomerangs back against those in power.
So we celebrate the Tolpadl martyrs.
A crucial moment in the story of Ireland is the so-called Bloody Sunday massacres.
The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in November 1989 starts when students are beaten by the police.
So, if we're thinking about the violence, sometimes peaceful protesters are not only taking the risk of a violent response from the state, but almost expecting it, because nothing will mobilize a wider population more than particularly seeing their children beaten.
And in terms of Governments have always tried to regulate protests through legislation and policing.
What patterns do you see across time in how authorities justify those constraints, and do they ever really change?
Do you think
Certainly in the British case we see that actually general public order legislation is quite late in British history to arrive.
Most legislative attempts are directed at particular political movements, particular social movements.
They're not generic.
So in the 19th century the measures taken against the Chartists or against trade unions, or against the suffragettes are very specific.
And even public order legislation in the 20th century is aimed at In the 1936 case.
It's aimed at the fascist versus communist disorder in the East End.
Or in 1986.
Even it's aimed at the striking miners, football hooligans, individual groups that perhaps aren't connected as a movement, but are targeted because the specific political crisis of the time deems them to be the causes of disorder or causes of protest.
So I think even today, although the legislation over the last few years has become much more broad, it's still passed in reaction to individual movement.
And I think that's a continuity throughout certainly British history.
First of all, obviously there's a big difference between authoritarian and democratic regimes, because authoritarian regimes will find all sorts of different and often totally spurious justifications for the suppression of protest.
In the case of democracies, I think there's an important difference between countries that have written constitutions that say something about this and countries that don't.
Now, our problem is we don't have a written constitution.
And for many decades, I think we were sometimes even more free than some countries that did.
But in my view, over the last 30 years, in the process that Katrina has just been describing, namely piecemeal, bit by bit, this little bit of legislation to address that problem, this little bit to address that problem or just to address some public anger, something must be done.
This is something.
We have developed, such a palimpsest of often quite confusing and sometimes badly worded legislation that what we see is that the police have justification, legal justification, to shut up people they shouldn't be shutting up at all.
In addition to which one, I think, relatively new element across the Western democratic world, which is the response to terrorism.
So clearly we did have a genuine terrorist threat.
There's no doubt about that.
But now more and more restrictions on legitimate protest are justified by terrorism.
Although there are some parallels with the 1790s and we think about the origins of the word terrorism in La Terreur and that era of the French Revolution.
Pitt's government, Tory government in the 1790s were just as Worried and fearful of the potential of working class people and large groups of people combining to form revolution, just as happened over the channel.
And so we're also passing similar types of legislation in 1795, 1799 against workers.
What they saw as terrorist action, which we now celebrate as the origins of the early democratic movement, these corresponding societies who wrote to the French revolutionaries.
The London Corresponding Society, the most famous one.
And these people were put on trial and successfully they were found not guilty.
But essentially they're put on what was called seditious charges, that they were being seditious, which essentially is what we now call terrorism.
So these periods of moral panic happened almost sometimes overcome any ideas about the primacy of law and the primacy of freedom of speech in British history even then.
Katrina, your work looks at where protest happens, the physical spaces people can or can't occupy.
How does that geography shape protest?
And do you see echoes of those older battles over space in the way protests are policed today?
So all protest is about claiming a sense of a public space.
So we associate protest with the square, with the streets, with open spaces or civic spaces taking over town halls or county halls or wherever.
It's a claim on being the public in the public space, or at least claiming the symbolism of public spaces like Trafalgar Square which, since it was built in the 1813 to 40s, is associated with being the national public space.
So there's a symbolism around claiming public spaces, and protesters deliberately choose sites that are symbolically significant to either change the narrative, claim that space against the authorities who they want to protest against.
So there's certainly in the history of large demonstrations.
There's battles over these public spaces.
Certainly, in the London context, the battles over Hyde Park are particularly important because again Hyde Park becomes seen as the national site of protest of these large demonstrations.
But in fact It's a royal park, so political demonstrations generally were banned there until the 1860s when the Reform League, this kind of group of quite respectable middle class campaigners for a wider franchise, tried to hold meetings in Hyde Park.
And their supporters ended up physically pulling down the fences and the gates to get in.
And that's the origins of Speaker's Corner.
Speaker's Corner is not actually a site of free speech.
It's a compromise.
It comes out of a parliamentary act in 1872 which delimits where you can speak without having permission in that space.
And those Speaker's Corners, those Spaces of free speech appear in many squares and towns across the country.
But throughout protest history, what do police do?
They move people on.
They try and restrict where protests can go, where marches and processions can go, where the routes go.
So you organise contested routes.
I'm also thinking of long distance routes, like the Jarrow March in the 1930s, claiming to speak for the voice of the, the northeast.
They have to go down to parliament.
So a lot of legislation is around restriction of where people can meet, where people can hold demonstrations.
So, right back to the riot act of 1714, if the magistrates sense that a riot's going to occur, it allows the magistrates to order the crowds to disperse within an hour.
If they're not dispersed, then they can send the military in to disperse them forcibly.
All the Public Order Acts have spatial elements to them.
Even to the present day, it's about where you can hold a protest.
Tactics like locking on to a fence we associate that actually with the suffragettes initially locking on to the gates of Downing Street.
Restricting where people are allowed to protest is a hugely spatial phenomenon and we see it throughout policing and legislation.
Protests are also political theatre, and squares are the great stages of the political theatre of protest.
Indeed.
So think about it.
Tiananmen Square is the great location of the Chinese protests in 1989.
Wenceslas Square in Prague.
Velvet Revolution of 1989.
I will never forget watching the scene 300000 people massed in Wenceslas Square being directed by Václav Havel, who was, of course, a playwright himself, and all shaking their keys, making an amazing noise.
So the location, the physical location in the capital city, in a great square, is essential to the political theatre of protest.
Now I feel like we have discussed them quite a lot throughout this conversation, and that is the suffragettes, who are widely celebrated today, and their militancy has almost been recast as moral courage.
I want to ask you both why do you think some protest movements, such as the suffragettes, who obviously use these very disruptive tactics, have almost been absorbed by posterity as being on the vanguard of progress?
And what makes some protest movements still regarded with suspicion today, and they're often erased.
But why are some kind of celebrated by posterity and others relegated to oblivion?
So the suffragettes eventually won.
So their cause becomes a respectable one, which is democracy, which by the 20th century most people regard, certainly in Britain, as a good thing.
So that militancy, which is widely criticised within the women's suffrage movement at the time, becomes recast, as you said, in terms of a valid form of protest, when in fact the main conflicts that happen are when the more militant ends of the suffrage movement, such as the East London Federation of Suffragettes, do more spectacular types of protests.
They're doing so out of a realisation that the more moderate, peaceful wings of the women's suffrage movement are not getting anywhere.
It is a shift of tactics that occurs in the 1900s, but it's also very media savvy as well.
The suffragettes in particular are in control of that early mass media.
Newspapers large, almost stunts that would capture the front pages of the newspaper press.
Some of the acts are set up for the media.
Others are much more based around threatening individual politicians like Churchill and bombing post boxes and shops and the like.
But certainly that is kind of incorporated now in a kind of justification because they won, whereas other movements who do very similar types of tactics do.
If they don't win, then that's not written into the national story.
Quite often the losers aren't written into a national story of progress.
And I think a lot of historians would argue that history can go backwards as well as forwards.
But most people want to believe that certainly the British story is progressive and that the winners win and the losers lose.
So i think that's why that kind of courageous element of militancy in the women's suffrage movement is accepted, whereas other forms of violence aren't as accepted as as necessary.
Yeah, although of course so-called freedom fighters in countries fighting for their independence I mean fighting with a weapon in the hand.
If they succeed, I'll often celebrate it as heroes.
No, you've got it in one.
If you want to be kindly remembered by history, you've got to win sooner or later.
You know, the famous line, why doth treason never prosper?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
But it can be later.
In other words, these positive memorializing of the protesters are often many, many decades after the event, right.
Just up the road from where I'm speaking to you in Oxford is the Martyrs Memorial.
Well, you know the Protestant bishops who paid the ultimate price.
But then you know, the Reformation succeeds, and then they are celebrated.
In Czechoslovakia, a very, very brave student called Jan Palach set fire to himself and died in a terrible way in 1969 in protest against the Soviet invasion.
The other day I was standing on Jan Palach's square.
There wouldn't be any Jan Palach Square if the Czechoslovakia was still in the Soviet bloc.
I do think that there is a very particular category of hero here, which is the martyr, the someone who actually pays with their life.
Those have a very special place in these stories because everyone can relate to the hero, extraordinary heroism of making the ultimate sacrifice.
Certainly, successful political movements are very keen to create their own narrative and they like to have those canon events that chart progress in their own history.
And quite often it's around martyrdom.
So for the democratic movement it's the peterloo massacre, for the trade union movement it's the toll puddle martyrs.
There's these key events that movements like to use and they might gloss over some of the more unsavoury elements of the actual history.
But they can manipulate the story to fit their current political goals and say look, we've a much longer history heritage of fighting.
That we want to pay tribute to our forebearers and we're fighting for them.
So certainly, that myth creating, that narrative creating, is an important part of political movements' own sense of identity, their own organisation.
I'd like to ask you both about the conjunction of social class and protest. phenomenon?
And do you think that factor is prevalent throughout the history of protest?
When I get asked well, what are the most successful protests or campaigns?
Quite often it's around the abolition of slavery or the abolition of slave trade.
And the repeal of the Corn Laws.
So this is early 19th century and both movements are very much led by quite wealthy middle class, well-connected people groups, men and women who are able to have influence in Parliament know the MPs sometimes are MPs William Wilberforce, for example.
And they were able to have single-issue protests and single-issue campaigns that have that level of respectability and importantly, financial backing that enabled them to get their case won if it is based on getting Parliament to either repeal an act or pass an act.
The working classes in particular have had a much longer struggle to have their cases heard or their protests listened to, partly because of the quite strict class hierarchies in Britain in the 18th and 19th century into the 20th century.
And again it's finances, amongst other things, that people with less means take longer to be successful.
Because you need to campaign, you need to fundraise, you need to have influence to have an effect, certainly in parliamentary terms.
So I think it's even more important, when we read about the history of working class protests, that they were able to achieve so much with much more limited means than higher classes than them.
So obviously there are some class-based protest movements, and the Labour movement is the most obvious example.
But I would say that typically, protest succeeds best precisely when it jumps across class barriers and unites several different parts of society, because rulers always try to divide and rule right.
So throughout the history of Eastern Europe, imperial powers would play the social question against the national question right.
They would say, you Polish nobles have very different from these ghastly Polish presence.
So you stick with us and don't try and get with them to fight for Polish independence.
Right.
And there are many other examples in modern history.
The Solidarity Movement in Poland in the 1980s, which is one of the great examples of a really mass popular protest movement sustained over a whole decade, was successful precisely because it overcame the divides that had been so consequential in Polish society for so long.
It brought together the intelligentsia, the workers and the peasants, as they were still called, the farmers.
And for centuries, the authorities had played one class against the other.
And through a conscious learning process, they came together.
So class-based may be but much better if you can pull a few classes together.
That's also the difference with 20th century protests, in the sense of prior to the 1960s.
Certainly in Britain and Ireland movements are very class-based and the Labour movement is the strongest.
Whereas from the 1960s onwards we see these much more amorphous grouping social movements that aren't based on traditional party structures or trade union structures but are again trying to connect very local struggles with global movements and ideologies, such as the environment movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, peace movements, anti-nuclear movements.
And again, those movements tend to be much more cross-class because they're seen as global movements rather than something particular to a class struggle.
The other thing we haven't talked about is generations.
We have several striking examples, 1968 being a great example, where across the entire continent, including Britain, it's a generational protest movement.
And, you know, I think climate change was another example of that.
And it looks as if the generation Z or Z political protest movements might be a third.
So I think, I think in our time arguably, each generation may be at least as important as That's the big question, isn't it?
Certainly, I think what we've been talking about in terms of how do you organise against repressive regimes that there needs to be this sense of a critical mass, that people have to break out of the silos of either class or generation and have a sense that you need a large group of people, however they're organised, to remove that sense of fear.
That's one of the kind of key goals, I think, of a protest movement that can be successful.
The power of the mass is still very important and it might be organising on the internet and virtually, rather than in a particular space or place, but certainly there's still a value in thinking about yourself as the people if you are being repressed by a government or a regime.
So I think Rob obviously, that it's important to learn from history, particularly in terms of protest.
And indeed, a lot of the history of the protest is a history of political learning.
The Hungarians have a violent revolution in 1956 that's violently repressed.
The Czechs and Slovaks in 1968 go too far and say we're going to leave the Warsaw Pact, and so the Soviets invade.
And so by 1881, the Poles are being more cautious.
And I would say two or three, maybe four lessons.
First of all, keep non-violent discipline.
Adam Michnik, the great Polish dissident, said we've learned from history that those who start by storming Bastille will end up building Bastille themselves.
It takes longer being nonviolent, but you get to a better place.
Secondly, I very much agree with Katrina.
You've got to have a critical mass.
You've got to have these cascade effects.
You've got to have the political theater.
You've got to keep it coming.
Particularly in the age of social media, a flash mob is just that.
It's not even here today, gone tomorrow.
It's here at 9 a.m., gone at 10 a.m.
Thirdly, you've really got to have a strategy.
You've got to work out what you're trying to change in society or in the international system, and then how you're actually going to use protests to change it.
So, for example, in terms of political change, it's always crucial to identify the potential defectors in the current power structures.
Who are the people who might potentially come over to our side?
Because that's how non-violent protest ends up succeeding.
So yeah, I'm sure protest has a great future and can learn a lot from the past.
That was Katrina Navakas and Timothy Garton-Ash speaking to Danny Bird.
Katrina is Professor of History at the University of Hertfordshire and author of Contested Commons A History of Protest and Public Space in England.
Timothy is Emeritus Professor of European Studies at St Anthony's College Oxford, and a Senior Fellow of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
His most recent book is Homelands, A Personal History of Europe.
