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

82 States fight back
The attempt to dismiss protest as deviance in effect sows the seeds of
upstream consequence that arise in part from government statements and
press releases which are then fed back to Whitehall via focus groups resulting
in legislative responses. In the jury room, citizens appear to make finely
balanced discriminating judgements in cases that will become more frequent
given legislative programmes. The Serious Organised Crime and
Police Act, 2005 contains provisions to prevent protests within one kilometre
of the House of Commons and to secure the visual enjoyment of
Parliament Square. News coverage of the Act set it in the context of the
vandalisation of Churchill’s statute on May Day 2000 with Nicholas
Soames MP describing a four year peace vigil opposite the House of
Commons as an ‘offensive encampment...defacing a principal focal area of
tourism’ (Today, BBC Radio 4, 28.01.05).
This is tantamount to making aesthetic preference a basis for legal sanction
and extends the power of judges to prescribe appropriate dress codes in the
courtroom to the public sphere. More importantly, moves to harmonise UK
terrorist law in terms of its treatment of foreign and native suspects clarifies
the stakes of pushing the legal defence of democracy to the limits. At
the time of writing the British security and political states continue to refine
strategies of confinement for protest events, the spatial separation of
protestors from sites of contention and a proliferation of criminal offences.
The British tradition of tolerance towards ‘eccentric radicals’ appears to be
at an end.
Genoa – death at high noon
This final account is the most tragic and charged of the chapter, following
the shooting and subsequent death of one young Italian activist, Carlo
Giuliani, and the systemic beating of activists in Genoa. Activist accounts
of these events make harrowing reading (On Fire 2001, Neale 2002, Notes
from Nowhere 2003). The sense of shock, fear, bewilderment and disbelief
arising from the intensity of assaults incurred in a Western Democracy is
tangible. We present this material as dispassionately as we can having
absorbed a significant amount of video capture, written, verbal and media
accounts all of which have been triangulated and filtered, a process assisted
through the presence one of the authors on the streets during the event.
The divided nature of Italian civil society, characterised by ‘the Southern
problem’ has been a significant issue since its formalisation by Antonio
Gramsci. Events in Genoa in 2001 were suffused with the long shadows
cast by the history of tensions between the formal associations and organisations
of the Fascist right and Marxist left in a particularly volatile
European democracy. Some sense of this history is necessary to make sense
of the particular shadows cast in Genoa.
Despite the ascendant neo-liberal paradigm, a vibrant left remains a feature
of Italian political life. The Worker’s Power (Potere Operaio) movement