Greek protests show democracy in action

A minister described Greek civil disobedience as 'anomie' – but it is legitimately reclaiming our democracy from failed institutions

guardian.co.uk, Costas Douzinas, Monday 7 February 2011

Greece has recently experienced waves of protests and demonstrations.
Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images

The Greek minister for public transport, Dimitris Reppas, stated last week that the government would not let "Greece [be] exposed to the risk of international disrepute and marginalisation, [the] destination of countries characterised by anomie. The attack on the social acceptability of the free-rider and the political dismantling of its simulacrum of progressiveness is paramount."

The harassed minister was referring to the mass protests that have gripped Greece in the last month. They include the "can't pay, wont pay" movement which encourages people to stop paying the extortionate tolls on Greece's atrocious roads or the public transport fares which went up 40% last week. Doctors have been on strike for a week and have occupied the ministry of health; strikes by public transport employees, despite repeated court decisions declaring them unlawful, have brought Athens to a standstill. A pending farmers' strike will complete the picture. Greece has entered a period of crisis highlighted by the condemnation of the inhumanity of the treatment of refugees by the European court of human rights last week. The minister confirmed it. When governments start claiming that citizens have an absolute duty to obey the law, they implicitly recognise that their policies – and therefore their moral authority – have failed.

What the minister, in his ignorance and desperation, called "anomie", political and legal theory examines under the term "civil disobedience". From Antigone to the campaigners for workers' and civil rights, pacifists, suffragettes and conscientious objectors, disobedience is not simple illegality. It is the outward sign of moral conscience and of political fidelity to the principles of justice and democracy. Throughout history, disobedience has changed regimes, constitutions and laws – as we are currently witnessing in Egypt.

The mass disobedience against racial discrimination and the Vietnam war in the US in the 60s and 70s led to a major debate among judges and political philosophers, which concluded that in certain circumstances disobedience was not only allowed but required – and the courts must protect those who undertake it. The argument following classical liberal philosophy went as follows. Political power is legitimate when it promotes individual autonomy. In its Rousseauian version, we the people are both legislators and subjects, masters and servants. Citizens have given their implicit consent to the constitution and government in a real or virtual social contract and have promised their obedience in return for laws that promote the common good and justice.

But the fact that we have not chosen where to be born and live makes dissent an integral part of the constitutional arrangements. Our implicit promise to obey the government does not mean blanket acceptance of its specific policies. A controversial policy does not become automatically legitimate because it has been enacted in parliament and become law. On the contrary, at this point legality and legitimacy follow different routes. Opposition parties continue their campaign to repeal it, ordinary citizens their fight in the streets. This is where the right and duty of civil disobedience enters the scene. If state laws and policies conflict with basic constitutional principles, the supposedly highest expression of popular sovereignty, the obligation to obey disappears and dissent replaces consent. There is an additional argument: when the law has consistently fallen into disrepute, claims to obedience become weak and contradictory.

The constitutional argument for civil disobedience applies fully to the Greek case. For many years the Greek legal system and its political masters failed to prosecute corruption and tax avoidance. The rule of law in Greece has been associated for too long with the rule of powerful politicians, wealthy industrialists and their promoters in the media. Basic constitutional procedures have been violated by the adoption of the IMF-EU "memorandum" and key social and economic rights have been breached by its provisions. These measures would be enough to justify disobedience. But the sources of disaffection and the justifications for disobedience go much deeper. The liberal theories of civil disobedience and the constitutional arguments of the 60s have been overtaken all over the world by a new type of democratic disobedience that opposes and tries to reverse the decay of our post-democratic politics.

The democratic deficit of our political system is evident and dramatic. In the Greek case, manifesto promises of the government before the last elections were comprehensively broken. No consent has been sought or given to the various measures that are destroying the post-war social bond. These measures have led to the surrender of national sovereignty to a motley crew of international bankers and deluded Eurocrats and the demotion of parliament to the position of a multinational company's local branch executing the orders of the headquarters. In all these senses, Greece is in a state of emergency ruled by the diktat of foreign powers.

Someone who disobeys a public order law by occupying a ministry in order to advertise the unconstitutionality and injustice of these measures acts in the name of the constitution. Someone who breaks a law that violates the basic constitutional guarantees of the minimum standard of living by not paying exorbitant toll duties or transport fees acts in the name of justice. A citizen who disobeys an unconstitutional law replaces the courts when they neglect their duty. If "anomie" exists in Greece today, it is found in the separation between law and democracy and the destruction of any sense of the common good. Disobedience is a moral and civic response to governmental "anomie". It is what preserves democracy.

For the ordinary person, the decision to break the law is the strongest mark that the morality of citizens has not atrophied like that of politicians. It happens when someone reaches the point at which he says to himself "enough is enough – I can't take it any more" and is prepared to risk punishment.

Unlike purely subjective moral decisions, civil disobedience is a collective act. When a large number of citizens realise that the democratic process is malfunctioning and legitimate grievances cannot be heard, the obligation to disobey the law turns them from mere subjects to the law into proper citizens. This is the second achievement of disobedience: it raises people from takers of orders into self-legislating agents of democracy. At that point, the attempt to control bodies and minds, and turn the multitude into a pliant body politic, fails. This is what power fears more than the loss of some euros in the toll stations and metro stations.

A legitimation crisis results from much more than isolated acts of disobedience. It arises when the political system can no longer generate acceptance of its basic policies and principles and has to resort to open coercion, ideological manipulation or lies to keep the population in line. The democratic dissident is precisely the person who acts morally as a member of a political campaign. She defies power on account of a basic conception of the good rather than for individual profit or benefit as the powerful and wealthy have consistently done. When the multitude becomes the agent of morally disobedient action against unjust law, that law decays and passes away – occasionally alongside the government that instituted it. This is authentic morality and democracy in action against the anomie of power.

• This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Greek Left Review