Alberto Melucci

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Lista de referencias Melucci A. The voice of the roots ethno-national mobilizations .. Innovation (10128050) [serial online]. September 1990;3(3):351. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed June 5, 2012. 
The Voice of the Roots Ethno-National Mobilizations in a Global World The planetarization of the world system has called into question a restricted view of democracy simply based on a competition for governmental resources and has revealed the inadequacy of political institutions facing the dramatic challenges of our time. Social movements have strongly contributed to this awareness and their action has enlightened the new potential for democracy in the contemporary world, together with new powers and new risks. 1. Making Ends Visible Complex systems are characterized by uncertainty, exposed as they are to change and differentiation. Decision-making is a crucial part of their government because a plurality of interests can confront each other within an accepted framework of rules. Selection and risk allow choice between alternatives, and the narrowing of uncertainty. Selection therefore is the price to be paid for reducing uncertainty, but it is also the least transparent part of the process, where power relations are concentrated and hidden. Contemporary forms of collective action act as revealers, exposing that which is hidden or excluded by the decision-making process. Collective protest and mobilization bring to light the silent, obscure or arbitrary elements that frequently arise in complex systems decisions. Decisions may present themselves as mere procedures, based on a consensus and guaranteed by rules. In the decisionmaking process power tends to be masked behind procedures: the greater and the more continuous the need for decisions, and the more these depend upon a growing mass of technical data, the less visible power becomes. It seems to disappear behind a neutral mask of rational measures to achieve the given goal, of technical evidence provided by available facts. Collective mobilization forces power into the open and exposes the interests behind the apparent neutrality of its rationality. Decisions also present themselves as a series of means, of operations and techniques the effectiveness of which must be maximized. As the range of options broadens and the value of
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problem-solving techniques grows, the decision-making process tends to avoid the question of ends altogether, concentrating instead on the choice and optimization of means alone. Collective mobilization and protest opens the discussion of ends revealing non-negotiable needs and creating an area of debate in which the presumed neutrality of means is thrown into question. 2. Invisible Dilemmas Decisions are essential in governing any large or complex system, but they mask important dilemmas. The first consists in the necessity of constant change while at the same time maintaining a stable normative and prescriptive nucleus. In complex systems, it is necessary, on the one hand, to take into account changeable interests, a wide distribution of social actors and the variability of their aggregated interests while, on the other hand, guaranteeing systems of rules and prescriptions which ensure a certain predictability of behaviour and procedures. Second, in complex systems there is an increase in the number of groups capable of organizing themselves, representing their interests and extracting advantages from processes of political exchange; there is also a fragmentation of political decision-making structures, giving rise to numerous partial governments that are difficult to co-ordinate. At the same time, there is a consolidation of uncontrolled and invisible decision-making centres within which decisions about ends are made. Hence the second dilemma: while all too many decisions are made, it becomes increasingly difficult to openly decide about ends. The extension of citizenship and participation, together with an increasing need for the planning of society as a whole by means of bureaucratic administrative organizations gives rise to a third dilemma. The extension of the sphere of individual and collective rights necessitates planning, in order to coordinate the plurality of interests and decisions and to protect the corresponding rights of representation and decision-making. But each planning intervention necessitates a technocratic decision-making power, which inevitably curtails participation and effective rights. These dilemmas are linked to profound transformations of complex social systems. These systems are forced to mobilize and control individual resources in order to enable their high-density and highly differentiated organizational, informational and decision-making networks to function. At the same time, however, individual action acquires an elective character, because individuals are attributed an increasing possibility of controlling and defining the conditions of their personal and social experience. The process of individualization - the possibility for potentially every individual to act as an individual - is thus two-edged: while there is an extension of social control by means of an increase of socializing pressures on individuals motivational and cognitive structures, there is also a demand for the appropriation of the meaning of social action by these same individuals who are provided with broader possibilities of being individuals. The paradoxes of post-industrial democracy are linked to both the pressures for integration and the needs for identity-building. The dilemmas mentioned above, variability and predictability, fragmentation and concentration, participation and planning represent, the political sphere, two sides of a more general systemic problem. 3. Democracy and Civil Society To believe that the essence of democracy still consists in securing the competition of interests and the rules that make their representation possible is to fail to appreciate the scope of the transformations that are taking place within the complex systems. The conception of democracy as a process of mere competition for government recourses corresponded to a capitalist system
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founded on the separation of the state from civil society, a system in which the state simply translated the private interests formed in civil society into the terms of public institutions. Today this distinction between the state and civil society upon which the political experience of capitalism was based is fading. As a unitary agent of intervention and action, the state has dissolved. It has been replaced, from above, by a tightly interdependent system of transnational relationships, as well as subdivided, from below, into a multiplicity of partial governments which are defined both by their own systems of representation and decisionmaking, and by the ensemble of interwoven organizations which inextricably combine the public and private. Even civil society, at least as it was defined by the early modern tradition, appears to have lost its substance. The private interests once belonging to it no longer have the permanence and visibility of stable social groups sharing a definite position in the hierarchy of power and influence. The former unity (and homogeneity) of social interests has exploded. From above they assume the form of general cultural and symbolic orientations which cannot be attributed to specific social groups; from below, these interests are subdivided into a multiplicity of primary needs, including those which were once considered to be natural. The simple distinction between state and civil society is replaced by a more complex situation. Processes of differentiation and secularization of mass parties have transformed them increasingly into catch-all parties which are institutionally incorporated into the structures of government; at the same time, the parliamentary system tends to accentuate both its selective processing of demands and its merely formal decision-making functions. On another plane, there is an evident multiplication and increasing autonomy of systems of representation and decision-making; this process results in the pluralization of decision-making centres, but also carries with it the undoubted advantages associated with the diffusion of decision-making instances. Finally, on a further plane, there is an evident formation of collective demand and conflicts which assume the form of social movements aiming at the reappropriation of the motivation and sense of action in everyday life. Under these conditions, it would be illusory to think that democracy consists merely in the competition for access to governmental rsources. Democracy in complex societies requires conditions which enable individuals and social groups to affirm themselves and to be recognized for what they are or wish to be. That is, it requires conditions for enhancing the recognition and autonomy of individual and collective signifying processes in everyday life. The formation, maintenance and alteration through time of a self-reflexive identity requires social spaces free from control or repression. 4. Public Spaces A necessary condition of such a democracy are public spaces independent of the institutions of government, the party system and state structures. These spaces assume the form of an articulated system of decision-making, negotiation and representation, in which the signifying practices developed in everyday life can be expressed and heard independently of formal political institutions. Public spaces of this kind should include some guarantees that individual and collective identities are able to exist; soft institutionalized systems favouring the appropriation of knowledge and the production of symbolic resources; and open systems in which information can be circulated and controlled. Public spaces are characterized by a great fluidity, and their size may increase or diminish according to the independence they are accorded: they are by definition a mobile system of instances kept open only by creative confrontation between collective action and institutions.
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Inasmuch as public spaces are intermediate between the levels of political power and decisionmaking and networks of everyday life, they are structurally ambivalent: they express the double meaning of the terms representation and participation. Representation means the possibility of presenting interests and demands; but it also means remaining different and never being heard entirely. Participation also has a double meaning. It means both taking part, that is, acting so as to promote the interests and the needs of an actor, as well as belonging to a system, identifying with the general interests of the community. The main function of public spaces is that of rendering visible and collective the questions raised by the movements. They enable the movements to avoid being institutionalized as such and, conversely, ensure that society as a whole is able to assume responsibility for (i.e. institutionally process) the issues, demands and conflicts concerning the goals and meaning of social action raised by the movements. In this sense, the consolidation of independent public spaces is a vital condition of maintaining open - without seeking to falsely resolve - the paradoxical dimension of post-industrial democracy. For when society assumes responsibility for its own issues, demands and conflicts, it subjects them openly to negotiation and to decisions, and transforms them into possibilities of change. It thereby makes possible a democracy of everyday life, without either annulling the specificity and the independence of the movements or concealing the use of power behind allegedly neutral decision-making procedures. 5. Social Movements and Political Systems Political relationships have never been as important as in complex systems. Never before has it been so necessary to regulate complexity by means of decisions, choices and policies, the frequency and diffusion of which must be ensured if the uncertainty of systems subject to exceptionally rapid change is to be reduced. Complexity and change produce the need for decisions, and create a plurality of variable interests which cannot be compared to situations of the past; the multiplicity and changeability of interests results in a multiplicity and changeability of problems to be solved. Hence the need for decisions, and for decisions which are continually subject to verification and are exposed to the limitations and risks of consensus in conditions of rapid change. In complex societies we are in fact witnessing a process of multiplication and diffusion of political instances. In different areas of social life, and within institutions and organizations of many kinds, there is taking place a process of transformation of authoritarian regulations into political relationships. This process of politicization is linked to the complexity of the information systems, the need to cope with a changeable environment and the multiplication of requirement of balance within the system itself. The problem of decision-making processes, which function by means of representation, was underestimated or ignored by the Marxist tradition, which reduced representation to its bourgeois forms and in doing so annulled the problem of how to mediate and represent a plurality of interests. The problem of representation is tied to complexity and it therefore cannot be annulled, whatever model of political organization is envisaged. Representation involves an inevitable difference between representatives and those whom they represent, between the interests of each and between their concurrent or divergent logic of action. Any process of democratic transformation must necessarily take into account this difference between the structures of representation and the demands or interests of the represented. Change in complex societies becomes discontinuous, articulated and differentiated. These systems
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never change at the same time, and in the same way at their various levels. The political system, by means of decisions, can reduce the uncertainty and increase the transformation potential produced by conflicts. But this involves a separation of the agents of change from those who manage the transformation. The actors who produce the change and those who manage, i.e., institutionalize the transformation are not the same. Social movements can prevent the system from closing in upon itself by obliging the ruling groups to innovate, to permit changes among elites, to admit what was previously excluded from the decision-making arena, and to expose the shadowy zones of invisible power and silence which a system and its dominant interests inevitably tend to create. By their action they are already contributing to make visible the planetary challenges and to establish a new transnational political arena in which people and governments can take responsibility for the dramatic choices human beings are facing for the first time. 1. Industrial capitalism maintained a high degree of congruence between the position occupied within productive relations and the cultures of the various social groups. In this context the subordinate classes and the marginal areas within the national state paradoxically enjoyed a certain autonomy, i.e. they were able to work out practices and forms of communication qualitatively different from those of the dominant culture. The modernization of "advanced" societies has had a direct influence on these social enclaves, throwing them into the great machine of mass culture. The multiplication of contacts and the constant flow of messages destroys the homogeneity of the individual cultures: the media transmit standardized models, while migration and mass tourism encourage the extinction of cultural practices bound up with specific territorial or social circumstances. The growing differentiation of roles breaks up the unity of individual groups and forces their members into networks of functional and atomized relations. Basic social functions are entrusted to huge bureaucratic organizations that intervene in the definition and regulation of social behaviour. But the highly differentiated relations typical of complex societies are unable to provide forms of membership and identification to meet the needs of individuals for self-realization, communicative interaction or recognition. The bureaucratic and impersonal nature of complex organizations makes them ill suited to these tasks. On the other hand the safeguarding or reactivation of declining traditional ties may offer new channels of solidarity and identification. Ethnic and linguistic identity is one of these. A revival of ethnicity is not, then, necessarily related to open discrimination; it is the response to a need for collective identity that goes beyond the status of the group. Individuals are called upon to act in a growing plurality of social roles, none of which is sufficiently able to offer him a stable indentity. Selective mechanisms of de-differentiation thus come into being to provide identity via a return of primary memberships. Ethnicity, particularly when it is referred to a real territory, to a "home country", is revived as a source of identity because it responds to a collective need in contemporary information societies. 2. Information has today become a central resource and contemporary systems depend on it for their survival and development. Over the last 30 years the capability of collecting, processing, transferring information has been developed to a degree which is not comparable to that of the whole history of mankind. That increases the artificial, "built" characteristics of social life. A large amount of our everyday
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experiences occur in a socially produced environment. Media represent and reflect our actions; individuals incorporate and reproduce these messages in a sort of self-growing spiral. Where are "nature" and "reality" outside the cultural representations and images we receive from and produce for our social world? Social system acquires a planetary dimension and the events are not important in themselves or not only for the place and the people where they occur, but for their symbolic impact on the world system. Informational societies develop a cultural production not directly connected to the needs for survival or for reproduction: in that they are "post-material" societies and they produce a "cultural surplus". Control over informational production, accumulation and circulation depends on codes which organize and make information understandable. In complex societies power consists more and more of operational codes, formal rules, knowledge organizers. In the operational logic information is not a shared resource accessible to everybody, but an empty sign, the key to which is only controlled by few people. The access to knowledge becomes a field of a new kind of power and conflict. At the same time the transnational nature of contemporary problems and conflicts, and the global interdependence of the planetary system are becoming more and more clear. The world system is formally a set of relations among sovereign states, but in fact is dominated by the blocks logic and by the imbalances between North and South. The exhaustion of the nation-state system is perhaps the fundamental trend of the globalization process, even if there are still a good deal of "national" questions unsolved. But, paradoxically, through the problems raised by ethno-national conflicts, one can hear an appeal to give society the power of deciding and controlling its own existence, in a new set of relations among its elements (groups, interests, cultures, "nations"). A new inter-societal order is a great aspiration of our planetary situation where the nation-states are extinguishing themselves because they lose their authority: from above, a planetary, multinational political and economic interdependence moves the center of actual decision-making elsewhere; from below multiplication of autonomous centers of decision gives "civil societies" a power they never had during the development of modern states. 3. Theories of "ethnic dislocation" which see the ethnic revival as a reappearance of a type of solidarity "dislocated" from that of class by industrialization processes tend to ignore this fundamental change. Ethno-national problems are rooted in the past and testify to the continuity of historical questions and ancient solidarities. But within this legacy they also introduce some quite discontinuous elements, associated with the transformation of complex societies. Without such roots the ethno-national consciousness would lose all social foundation and evaporate into mere symbolic demands. But without the new content introduced by emergent needs it would be reduced to a resistance of archaicism and utopian regression. The ethno-national question must be seen therefore as containing a plurality of meanings that cannot be reduced to a single core: ethnic identity as a revenge against old and recent forms of discrimination; as an instrument of pressure in the political market; as a response to needs for collective identity in highly complex societies. Many ethno-national questions develop on cultural grounds, to ensure the protection of group culture and renew its vitality. Such an appeal can assume a regressive and strongly conservative
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aspect, or else it may form the basis for grafting the requirements of a changing society onto an historic patrimony. Reference to cultural traditions is valuable in creating new symbolic systems in which past codes and languages are used to express demands and conflicts unique to complex societies: the need for autonomous self-identification free of social control finds a highly fertile soil in ethnic cultures . The ethno-national question also affects the distribution of resources and social opportunities, revealing old inequalities and new ones: those crystallized by historical conflicts and those resulting from processes of modernization and the related development. On the political level two problems central to complex societies are brought to light: that of new rights for all members of the community, in particular the right to be different; and the right to autonomy, i.e. control of a specific Living space (which in this case is also a territory). In terms of political action this means opening new channels of representation, access for excluded interests, reform of the decision-making processes and the rules of the political game. Rapidly accelerating processes of development have accentuated differentiation and multiplied communications. Even peripheral areas find themselves exposed to "central" models; meanwhile statutory constraints are weakened and traditional social structures are no longer able to ensure the groups' cohesion. The ethno-national identity as a cultural choice can offer a response of these processes. While the other criteria of membership weaken or recede ethnic solidarity responds to a need for identity of an eminently symbolic nature. It offers roots that have the consistency of a language, a culture and an ancient history, to demands and conflictual pressures that go beyond the specific condition of the ethnic group. The "innovative" component of ethno-national identity goes beyond the revenge against discrimination and a demand for political rights; it has a prevalently cultural character. The ethnic appeal launches its challenge to complex society on fundamental questions like the orientation of change, the production of identity and meaning. Rooted in a patrimony or social relations and symbols and in the living lymph of a language, the difference becomes a voice and speaks to the whole of society of one of its basic dilemmas: how to save the meaning of human action and the richness of diversity in a global world. 4. Ethnic and linguistic conflicts reveal the contractual nature of social life in complex systems: the survival and development of our world depends on the capability of negotiating ends and differences. Too often the discussion on ends disappears from the scene of collective debates, nullified by the operational criteria of efficacity or by the pure consumption of Signs. The acceptance of the contractual nature of a global society means to recognize that the difference of interests and a certain amount of conflict cannot be eliminated in complex systems; to recognize the necessity of limits, i.e., rules of the game, which can be established and changed by negotiation; to recognize that power is one of these limits and its negotiability depends on its visibility; to recognize the risk, i.e., the openness and temporariness of every political arrangement reducing uncertainty. Risk, which in ethical terms means responsibility and freedom, is an irreversible component of a global world. The nuclear threat and the other possibilities of destruction (biological, chemical, ecological), related to the increasing intervention of society on itself, point out definitely that the destiny of human beings has been put into their hands. Even if they are confined to a particular space and sometimes are backward-oriented, ethno-
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national conflicts have fundamental transnational effects: their action, also located in a specific local context, has effects at the planetary level and on the system of international relations. They act as symbolic multipliers: what they propose to the world consciousness is that survival of societies and of cultural differences, such as individual life, are not assured any more by a meta- social order or by necessary historical laws. They depend on decisions, negotiations, actions. That is, on shared responsibility. Selected References Alberoni F., (1977) Movimento e istituzione, Bologna: Il Mulino. Bendix R., (1964) Nation-Building and Citizenship, New York: J. Wiley. (1978) Kings or People, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cohen J.L., (1985) "Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements", Social Research, 52,4. Gamson W.A., (1990) The Strategy of Social Protest, Belmont (Ca.): Wadsworth, 2nd ed. Gamson W.A./Fireman B./Rytina S., (1982) Encounters with Unjust Authorities, Homewood (Ill.): Dorsey Press. Gamson W.A./Modigliani A., (1989) "Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach", American Journal of Sociology, 95, July. Giddens A., (1984) The Constitution of Society, Berkeley: University of California Press. Habermas J., (1984) Theory of Communicative Action, Boston: Beacon Press. Jenkins J.C., (1983) "Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements", Annual Review of Sociology, 9. Keane J. (Ed.), Civil Society and the State, London: Verso 1988. Klandermans B./Kriesi H./Tarrow S. (Eds.), (1988) From Structure to Action, New York: JAI Press. McCarthy J.D./Zald M.N., (1977) "Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory", American Journal of Sociology, 86, 6. (1981) Social Movements in Organizational Society, New Brunswick: Transaction Books. Melucci A. (1984) Altri Codici, Balogna: II Mulino. (1989) Nomads of the Present, London: Hutchinson; Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Moscovici S., (1981) L'age des foules, Paris: Fayard. Tarrow S., (1989) Democracy and Disorder, Oxford: Clarendon. Tilly C., (1978) From Mobilization to Revolution, Chicago: Addison-Wesley. (1986) The Contentious French, Cambridge (Ma.): Harvard University Press.
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Touraine A., (1974) La production de la societe, Paris: Seuil. (1978) La voix et le regard,Paris: Seuil. (1984) Le retour de l'acteur, Paris: Fayard. Turner R.H./Killian L.M., (1987) Collective Behavior, Englewood Cliffs (NJ.): Prentice Hall, 3rd ed. ~~~~~~~~ By Alberto Melucci University of Trento Copyright of Innovation (10128050) is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
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