Economic revolutions

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

In one way, the events in Yugoslavia are a delayed version of the
anti-communist political revolutions in eastern European countries ten
years ago.

However there are other features which point to the surprising volatility
of modern states. Amplified by 24 hours news reporting, a revolutionary or
near revolutionary mood can sweep over a country within a matter of days.

Such a non-political phenomenon was the mass reaction to the death of
Princess Diana in England. A similar media-fed chain of events led to the
sudden acceleration of pressure on frontier posts in eastern Berlin, which
led to the fall of the Berlin wall. The population had already been
sensitised by mounting visual reports over previous weeks of tens of
thousands trying to leave the country, through Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
On the fateful night they moved from their television screens to test the
ambiguous reply by Schabowski at a news conference, and the Wall fell.

The connection I am drawing in this post is with the potential of modern
media to amplify a change in national mood with revolutionary speed,
provided the preconditions are right (almost as weirdly rapid as the way of
shoal of fish suddenly change direction) - and economic warfare.

It seems highly probable that the Serb opposition watched the wave of
petrol tax protests that spread over many European countries last month.
What is common with events in Serbia this week, is how mass protest,
pitched at a non-confrontational level, can neutralise a police force, that
is unwilling to take repressive action.

That is what happened in Britain during the rapidly developing fuel
blockade. Not only the police, but petrol truck drivers, and petrol
companies expressed a reluctance to challenge the demonstrators.

This week, the opposition in Yugoslavia, were clearly targetting mass
action against economic targets, energy supply resources, key transport
routes. In such large numbers that without draconian action the forces of
the state could not have stopped them, and such action might well have
rebounded.

Yesterday the events in Belgrade were no doubt far from totally
spontaneous, even though it may take ten years to learn all the
connections, including those to foreign funders. The seizure of the
television station is most unlikely to have been just a spontanous
spill-over from popular protest, but will at some level have been a planned
revolutionary objective of at least a section of the opposition. They may
or may not have fully informed Kostunica in advance.

A little known part of this jigsaw of the vulnerability of modern states to
revolutionary change, is the sophistication of the economic warfare carried
out by the IRA in Britain just before the British government agreed to a
cease fire. Although the IRA was using bomb threats rather than trucker
blockades, they aimed their blows at economic targets: not only key
capitalist insititutions, but the main transport routes in and out of the
English conurbations. What those actions lacked of course was massive
popular sympathy among the English population. But they were cripplingly
effective.

This year  I suggest we are seeing a pattern in Europe and in Serbia that
may repeat itself in the coming years: the vulnerability of modern states
to the revolutionary combination of mass protests fanned by 24 hour news
media, coupled with paralysing attacks on economic targets.

Such potentially revolutionary situations are not necessarily progressive.
They may well be populist and reactionary.

But they are a sign that the age of revolutions may not be over.

Chris Burford

London