The EconomistNovember 16th 2019 551I
t is hardto keep up with the protest
movements under way around the world.
Large anti-government demonstrations,
some peaceful, some not, have in recent
weeks clogged roads on every continent:
Algeria, Bolivia, Britain, Catalonia, Chile,
Ecuador, France, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras,
Hong Kong, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Lebanon,
Pakistan and beyond.
Not since a wave of “people power”
movements swept Asian and east Euro-
pean countries in the late 1980s and early
1990s has the world experienced such a si-
multaneous outpouring of popular anger.
Before that, only the global unrest of the
late 1960s was similar in scope.
Those earlier waves of protest were not
nearly as coherent and connected as they
are sometimes portrayed. The unrest of the
late 1960s ranged from intraparty power
struggles in China to the civil-rights move-
ment to protests against the Vietnam war
and Soviet domination of eastern Europe.
And the people-power revolutions of 20
years later—in countries as contrasting as
Burma and Czechoslovakia were as markedby their differences as their similarities.
Even so, today’s movements seem strik-
ingly unconnected and spontaneous.
Some themes crop up repeatedly—such as
economic discontent, corruption and al-
leged electoral fraud—but this seems more
like coincidence than coherence. The ini-
tial causes of the protests could hardly be
more varied: in Lebanon, a tax on phone
calls via services such as WhatsApp; in
Hong Kong, proposed laws allowing the ex-
tradition of criminal suspects to China; in
Britain, a government bent on Brexit.
Anxious to impose a pattern on these
seemingly random events, analysts have
come up with three categories of explana-
tion. These are economic, demographic
and conspiratorial.
Economic explanations make much of
the way in which seemingly minor knocks
to living standards (a 4% rise in metro faresin Chile, for example) proved the final
straw for people struggling to get by in in-
creasingly unequal societies. For the left,
this is just the latest paroxysm of a dys-
functional and doomed capitalism. As an
Australian socialist journal puts it: “For
more than four decades, country after
country has been ravaged by neoliberal
policies designed to make the mass of
workers and the poor pay for what is a
growing crisis in the system.” Even fans of
free markets see growing inequality as a
cause of concerted anger—with Chile, one
of the world’s most unequal better-off
countries, often cited as an example.
The demographic explanation notes
that the young are most likely to protest,
and the world is still fairly youthful, with a
median age of 30 and a third of people aged
under 20. Niall Ferguson, a historian, has
drawn parallels with the 1960s when, as
now, there was an “excess of educated
young people” because of a boom in tertia-
ry education, producing more graduates
than there were jobs for them.
As for conspiracies, governments like to
hint that sinister outside forces are stirring
things up. The Chinese foreign ministry
has suggested that the protests in Hong
Kong were “somehow the work of the us”.
In Latin America it is whispered that social-
ist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela have fo-
mented unrest elsewhere to distract atten-
tion from their own troubles.
Economic and demographic factors and
even outside meddling have sparked someProtest movementsWe all want to change the world
Economics, demography and social media only partly explain the protests roiling
so many countries todayInternational
56 Tear-gasAlso in this section