Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

44 Identities, protest dynamics and technology
analysis of one newspaper per country. Such monochrome renditions
lose the underlying event richness which arises, in part, from the multiple
acts of definition and meaning found within such milieu (McKechnie and
Welsh 2002).
The Prague WB/IMF summit was the first major summit to occur outside
the United States. The event had been identified as a site for a Czech action
long before this but the consolidation of the AGM transformed this
‘national local’ event creating a ‘new’ phenomenon on the streets of Prague.
Claims of ‘newness’ are always problematic within the social sciences, but
this one is justified. The Czech Republic had just emerged as one of the
transition democracies of Eastern Europe, a transition within which many
of the high profile figures from the ‘dissident’ movement formed under
Communist domination became figures of state, including the Czech
President Vaclav Havel and the late Joseph Vavroueek as federal minister of
the environment (Tickle and Welsh 1998). The action on S26 was the first
by the AGM in a country where English was not the primary language.
Since the 1989 ‘velvet’ revolution, when the streets of the capital city had
been occupied by crowds for days on end, S26 was widely predicted to be
a significant protest event. For the post-transition Czech Government it was
certainly the most significant street event to have taken place since 1989.
There are many ‘firsts’ here and this underlines the symbolic stakes associated
with the event for all parties.
Initial conditions and the ‘new democracies’
In terms of complexity theory, the founding of the transition or new
democracies throughout Eastern Europe is a particularly clear example of
the importance of initial conditions in understanding subsequent events.
Here, two important factors are our understanding of the foregoing state of
civil society and the degree of inclusiveness achieved during the transition
period. Many accounts of the transitions assumed that under communist
domination, the associations of civil society did not exist (Schöpflin 1993).
Tickle and Welsh (1998: 164–167) demonstrate the existence of nascent
civil societies of differing compositions throughout the period of communist
domination. Here, environmentally orientated citizens initiatives
formed a kernel around which much broader social and political concerns
became articulated. Even in Poland, where Solidarity formed an apparently
clear example of a transition dominated by religious and trades union
forces, the role of far less formalised network actors using innovative direct
action repertoires was central in reinvigorating Solidarity’s ‘stalled’ initiative
(Kenney 2002). The existence of civil society actors at the point of
transition has to be recognised as part of the initial conditions making the
issue of inclusion critical in terms of understanding the contemporary
milieu. Here we depart from the influential idea (Elster et al. 1998) that the
degree of institutional inclusion achieved during the transition period