The so-called Burmese Spring that achieved free elections took its name from the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring began more than a year earlier with the self-immolation of a harassed and exploited Tunisian fruit vendor in December 2010 and subsequently turned into an eighteen-day uprising in February 2011 that toppled the nearly thirty-year-long army rule of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. The President of Tunisia was driven out in mid-January, the President of Yemen in June, and Muammar Gaddafi fell and was killed in October 2011 after a NATO-supported rebellion in Libya.
Although many of these movements were responses to widespread repression, inequalities, and the absence of the possibilities for advancement of the most highly educated sectors of the population, they all promoted hope for the creation of new democratic societies. Like democratic movements that had emerged in 1848, these new uprisings simply wanted to remove repressive authorities and put a more diverse group of people in power. In fact, Janos Kovacs, a Hungarian dissident in the 1980s, may have expressed the views of 1848 and 2011 to 2012 most clearly when he was asked how he became a proponent of democracy. He cryptically responded that he had seen a lot of American movies that took place in junior high school. Asked to clarify what he meant, he explained that you do not need a well-developed political program to realize that there has to be something better than that.17 Most of the democratic movements that followed the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, the United States, Chile, and Canada—to name just a few—demanded increased popular participation in governing their countries or changes in neoliberal economic policies that sought to reduce government spending in the public sector. In many of these countries, cuts in the pensions of public workers, privatization of public schools and universities, mortgage foreclosures as workers in all sectors were laid off, and increased dependency of adult children on the pensions of aged family members marked disastrous changes for a large portion of the population.
Initially, as in Egypt, the chief protagonists of the uprisings seemed to be young people fueled by outrage over political repression and the absence of jobs. Equipped with the technology of social media, they expanded their venues and reached out beyond local and national borders to attack repressive governments and corruption. By placing the needs of the many above the profits of a few, and by creating direct democratic practices, all of the self-proclaimed democratic movements hoped to transform their societies in more egalitarian directions. But, unlike late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century uprisings, the early twenty-first century movements refused to promote any specific party or concentrate their energy on advancing one specific political strategy over another. Instead of working in local, regional, or national elections, they mostly participated in popular assemblies or factory seizures in which strategies and goals were worked out in public and implemented through direct action rather than through any representative political institutions.18 Many of their movements have been crushed. Some have succeeded to a lesser degree and in different ways than they had hoped. Many find themselves continuing to fight for rights they thought they had won in the past. And yet, the mobilizations, assemblies, and efforts to coordinate demonstrations across states and nations in the name of democracy indicated, to the optimistic, the idea that eternal springs might some day lead to new awakenings and renewed possibilities for democracy.
Chronology
1750 bce
Creation of the Hammurabi Code, the oldest known complete legal system
7th—4th centuries bce
Direct and participatory democracy flourishes throughout the Greek city-state of Athens
100-800 ad
The agricultural civilization of the Moche people in Peru creates autonomous and self-governed polities based on mutual cooperation and interdependence around water
1155
The Cortes of Leon meets for the first time
1215
Known as an early precursor to the rule of constitutional law, the Magna Carta is imposed upon the King of England in an attempt to limit his powers and protect the rights of feudal barons
1520-21
The communero revolt pits the cities of Castile against Charles V over taxation and urban rights
1653
The Dutch arrive in South Africa, initiating what would become three centuries of Afrikaner and British subjugation of Africans and Indian immigrants
JULY 3, 1776
Declaration of Independence signed, launching the American Revolution
1781-1804
A slave Revolution results in the Haitian war of independence. In 1804 the
French are defeated, all slaves are freed, and the victors form the Republic of Haiti
july 14, 1789
Start of the French Revolution raises questions of nationalism and seeks to expand human rights throughout France
1848
British Chartists attempt to win universal male suffrage, but are defeated; the Taiping Rebellion leads to social changes for millions of women as well as men under the rule of the Heavenly Kingdom; democratic revolutions break out all over Europe and its colonies. Elizabeth Cady Stanton writes the "Declaration of Sentiments," a declaration of independence for women as citizens
1893
In New Zealand, the first group of women in history gain full suffrage rights.
1910-20
Emiliano Zapata and his soldiers from Morelos join the many groups fighting in the Mexican Revolution and claim their rights to land and freedom
1917
The February and October Revolutions succeed in overthowing the tsar of Russia and set the stage for other world revolutions. Mexico passes what is considered to be the first modern constitution by addressing social as well as political rights
1944
The Serviceman's Readjustment Act, also known as the G.I. Bill, is passed in the United States expanding access to
education and training to a generation of veterans returning from the Second World War.
NOVEMBER 20, 1945-OCTOBER 1, 1946 The Nuremburg Trials indict and convict several Nazis perpetrators of the Holocaust for "crimes against humanity"
OcToBER 24, 1946
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the United Nations is established to promote cooperation among nations using a democratic framework among member states
JUNE 3, 1947
After decades of struggle and a successful nonviolent campaign of civil-disobedience led by Mahatma Ghandi, India wins its independence from Britain
1952 to 1956
Defiance Campaign that first challenged Apartheid through mass action took place in South Africa between 1952 and 1953; Montgomery Bus Boycott began in Montgomery, Alabama, launched by Rosa Parks in December 1955 and led by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Improvement Association