Mobilizations everywhere

Everywhere lately we have been seeing big, sudden and sometimes terribly violent rallies of angry people — the worst, with the deadliest consequences, in Benghazi, Cairo and other parts of the Islamic world beginning September 11, but almost simultaneously in Barcelona (also September 11), Madrid and Lisbon (both with huge rallies on September 15), Moscow and across China. Very different movements, but the fact that they are all happening now reflects the conjunction of two global phenomena: The explosion of electronic media, making it vastly easier to convoke a crowd, and deteriorating economic conditions everwhere.

About those violent assaults on U.S. embassies in Muslim countries that began on September 11, I think Ross Douthat is right about the immediate cause: it was not about a movie that, as far as we know, doesn't even exist (nobody seems to have seen any more than a 14-minute trailer) — though the video was sure convenient for the assailants.
 
It’s Not About the Video - NYTimes.com

The question remains, though: Why did such large numbers of angry people respond? Focusing on the video has got us into a useless and damaging debate about whether we should limit "blasphemy," a concept that has no place in a free society. It also encourages the notion that Muslims are generally crazed fanatics easily aroused if you push their sacred buttons. Those of us who are a little older remember when the really big political movement in Egypt and from there to other parts of the Arab world was entirely secular — Nasser and with his call for pan-Arabism could muster enormous enthusiastic crowds, even without Twitter or SMS. Religious fanaticism is not genetic or eternal, but a circumstantial response to some very dramatic circumstances.

Here, since I claim no special expertise on the region, all I want to offer is two lines of investigation to identify the forces that are inducing people to look for radical solutions. We should first look at demographics, and then who those interplay with economics, and only then do the particular doctrines of preachers, ulemas and other agitators become relevant. In the Arab world, and in almost all other Islamic countries as well, population has been growing too fast to be absorbed in a rigid, and closed, opportunity system, and the economic crisis— including in parts of the Near East, a long-lasting drought that has driven more and more people to the overcrowded cities, creating greater density of desperate folks.

There are other possible answers to the economic crisis, and other ways to mobilize mass discontent. Limiting anybody's freedom of expression, as in the proposed legislation to outlaw "blasphemy" as in Tunis, is just going to delay finding such a solution. We need the freest debate possible to find those answers.

I hope to say something about those other mobilizations (Spain, Portugal, and Catalonia among them) in future notes — not because I know the answers, but at least to clarify our questions, what is really at stake and what can we do about the really serious world problems?

Barcelona or Madrid?

Back to Spain (Madrid right now) and a familiar Spanish keyboard. We left Paris (Beauvais, the little airport an hour's busride from Porte Maillot), for Barcelona on Saturday. Our Ryanair flight to Reus (another little airport for low-cost airlines about an hour and a half from the city) was so long delayed that we were too late for the bus and had to wait 3 hours, until after midnight, for a trip to the city. Plaça de Catalunya was still hopping at 2 in the morning, mostly noisily drunk young foreigners.

We like Barcelona, and even thought of buying a little apartment there for when we need a dose of urban life. But we didn't. One reason was that the prices for what we thought were attractive spots, in the Ciutat Vella and the Born, were prohibitive, and most required long climbs up flights of narrow stairs. The other reason was that, as charming as the city is to visit, you wouldn't want to live there. Not if want to be more than a tourist, but a participant in the society. That at least was our impression, from the tone of political debates and what we could learn of cultural events. So we opted for Madrid, a much bigger city (3,256,000 pop. vs. Barcelona's 1,621,537), less charming but lots more active.

Our impression was confirmed by friends, none of them Catalan-born but all long-time residents of Barcelona (20 years or more) and fluent in Catalan. (Fortunately they were also fluent in "Spanish", i.e., Castilian, so we could communicate.) As they could tell us from their own experience, cultural and professional opportunities (a stage for your theater production, a publisher for your magazine or book, advancement in a government office or private company) are (with rare exceptions) tightly controlled by networks of old boys (and maybe some old girls) from established Catalan families. It's so bad that some of the most creative Catalan artists have chosen to make their careers in other parts of Spain and/or in that other language—most noisily, the irreverent playwright and producer Albert Boadella (that's he, sitting on the toilet). And if a Catalan artist such as Joan Manuel Serrat or writer (Javier Cercas, Ana María Matute, Carlos Ruiz-Zafón and many, many others) wants to perform/publish in Spanish (the only way to reach a far larger and international audience), he or she must be prepared to face hostility from the Barcelona intellectual elite.

As Susana points out, all cities are run by coteries of little clans or "mafias" (in Argentina we call them camadas) trying to advance only their own. But in bigger, more diverse cities, like Madrid or New York, their are too many of them for any one to hold a monopoly. Beautiful Barcelona has a lot to offer, but there's an awful lot it withholds.

Boadella photo from Don't Disturb Magazine
Catalan writers in Spanish (article in Spanish)