The Jasmine Revolution and The Commodification of Protest

There was a brief window of time when the recent upheavals in Tunisia were, from the point of view of the western outsider, raw, spontaneous and out of control.

Though the upheavals are far from over, and the outcomes anything but predictable in the medium term, the packaging of the Tunisia democracy movement had already started before the discredited Presidential Ben Ali family had boarded their plane, with a sizable quantity of the country’s gold reserve in their possession.

The term “Jasmine Revolution” appears to have originated with Tunisian journalist Zied El Hani, and was soon picked up by western media outlets, ever on the look-out for a memorable one-liner. The Washington Post was one of the first mainstream western outlets to use the term, which has since appeared in numerous reports of Tunisia’s moment in the media spotlight.

Colour Revolutions

The tendency to brand mass popular political movements in this way is traceable at least to the convulsions following the collapse of the Communist governments of Russia and eastern Europe in the 1990s. The so-called Rose Revolution of 2003 saw mass protest in Georgia. A year later, the Orange Revolution (a reference to the coloured flags carried by supporters of opposition leader Victor Yushchenko) resulted in the installation of a new government in Ukraine. Meanwhile, a more violent series of protests in the central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan was quickly labelled the Tulip Revolution. In reference to the coloured flags and headscarfs of the protesters (not to mention the colour-washed Twitter profiles showing solidarity) the protests over the disputed Presidential election in Iran in 2009 were described worldwide as the Green Revolution.

The current trend of using colours or flora to describe mass political movements has antecedents in the Carnation Revolution of 1974, which saw the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship and the ushering in of democratic reforms. Earlier still, and more obliquely, the 1968 attempt by Czechoslovakia to break away from Russian Communist control at the height of the Cold War came to be described as The Prague Spring. Early Communists, of course, were quite deliberate in their use of colour and branding in their efforts to maintain and perpetuate a state of worker solidarity and revolution in the early twentieth century. Soviet-era political art work, the red flag and China’s yellow stars, are among many examples of this self-conscious revolutionary branding. Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” of the 1990s reflects aspects of this trend, albeit in a pluralistic  American context. 

Outside Influence

The prospect of mass political movements to establish democratic regimes has received a cautious welcome by successive European and American governments. So much so that a wave of anti-Syrian protests in Lebanon in 2005 was described by the US State Department as The Cedar Revolution – a blatant attempt to link the protests to pro-democracy movements elsewhere. The protests were dubbed the Independence Uprising in the Arab world. The official US position at the time – in the years following the invasion of Iraq – was that widespread popular democracy was imminent across the Middle East. The Lebanon protests provided a useful, albeit temporary, “proof” of the popular will to overthrow dictators and change regimes.

There is ample evidence linking some of the so-called colour revolutions to American think tanks and foundations. The Soros Foundation and the Alberet Einstein Institution are two of the private organisations that are often described as offering training and support to several of the colour-revolution movements and other democratic players around the world.

Keep it Simple

Attempts to commodify popular uprisings by labelling them reflect the dominance of marketing and brand recognition even in the area of civil protest. They also reflect a diminishing of the seriousness of political debate and ideological discourse in many sectors of the western media, where meta-narratives are definitely “out” and regarded as too complex for the average viewer, reader or listener to engage with.  The complexities of Thailand’s political convulsions, for instance, are much easier to report on if the different factions wear coloured shirts. This enables us all to become armchair experts and to evaluate whether the “yellow shirts” or the “red shirts” are really the good guys.

It is important to recognise the role of outside players in this process of revolutionary branding. Mohamed Bouazizi, we have to assume, did not have a marketing strategy in mind when he set himself on fire in the Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid in protest at government corruption. The branding of revolutions is a later development, and part of the jostling for influence that invariably takes place when existing regimes are in the process of collapsing. We should not be surprised to see external players involved in this positioning-for-power.

The Future’s Bright

It is in the very post-modern spirit of popular revolutionary branding that I close with my tongue-in-cheek predictions for future managed uprisings – real and imaginary – over the coming months and years.

• The Hoodie Uprising (as British students and other disaffected youth again take to the streets in protest at government cuts to public spending)
• The Mango Revolution (as Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier is swept into power by hungry Haitians with French support, angry at the perceived slowness of the international reconstruction effort in their country)
• The Daffodil Moment (when Wales finally loses its last remaining Liberal-Democrat Members of Parliament)
• The Papyrus Revolution (when western media outlets manage to capture footage of some angry Egyptian youths, and then regret the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood have hi-jacked the movement)
• The Salt Revolution (ditto, except in Jordan, though the protests will peter out following appeals by the philanthropic and much-loved Queen Rania, who will set up an educational foundation in honour of the victims)