The politics of frustration

Ralf Dahrendorf Project Syndicate

Does extreme poverty breed violence and ultimately revolution? Many people believe that it does, and seek to explain phenomena ranging from guerrilla insurgencies to Islamist terrorism accordingly.

But Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, the two great social analysts of the nineteenth century, knew better what makes people tick, and what makes societies change. Extreme poverty breeds apathy, not rebellion. The very poor can at most be used for occasional demonstrations of anger, but they are not the stuff from which either terrorists or revolutionaries are made.

A far more critical group in any society are those who have begun to move forward to new conditions, but then find their path blocked. Their desires and ambitions are not unrealistic in the circumstances, but they are frustrated. Things do not move as fast as they want them to, or not at all, owing to conditions that they do not control. Opportunities exist, but they cannot be seized or realized.

This group, not the desperately poor and helpless, forms the great mobilizing force of violent protest, and ultimately of major change.

The politics of frustration has been particularly apparent in the postcommunist world during the last fifteen years. The heavy hand of nomenklatura rule was gone, and the vision of a new life like that in the open societies of the West seemed real. Yet, in fact, things initially got worse. The route to prosperity and freedom was not straightforward. On the contrary, it led through a valley of tears.

People reacted in a variety of ways. Those who had the chance migrated, first to their homeland's centers of economic progress, then abroad, to countries and places where the new world could be found immediately. Those who stayed behind began to vote in strange ways -- electing, for example, the successors of the old Communist parties that they had been glad to get rid of only a few years before.

The European Union, for all its weaknesses, has helped the postcommunist countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe immensely. It made the valley of tears bearable both by offering financial and other assistance and by holding out the promise of membership and economic prosperity in the near future. Equally important, had the EU not supported the creation of an administrative and social infrastructure of liberty, there might well have been a more serious communist or even fascist backlash in Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere.

While the politics of frustration was thus controlled in the postcommunist world, it broke out with a vengeance in the Islamic world. Here, too, the phenomenon was not new. With the onset of modernization, millions of people were uprooted from their traditional communities and ways of life. Young men, in particular, saw the prospect of a life more like that presented to them by Western television.

But they soon discovered that realizing this prospect would require a longer and more arduous journey than they had anticipated. In fact, it would take at least a generation, during which much of the effort of modern life would have to be made, while the fruits of this effort would remain elusive.

Earlier generations may have borne the burden of working and waiting more readily, but nowadays people want results here and now. If the benefits do not come quickly -- and for most people they do not -- they get restless. The massive migration processes that have only just begun will be the major issue of the coming decades. Particularly in Africa, migration will be almost the only quick route to modernization.

Those who do not manage to get to other countries, or who fail in the countries to which they have migrated, are in a quandary. For them, the old world of traditional ties and customs is gone, but the new world of modernity remains out of reach. They are lost in a limbo of uncertainty and disappointment.

It has been argued that this was one of the problems of "belated nations" like Germany a hundred years ago. Seductive leaders (Hitler among them) exploited the resulting sense of frustration. Whatever the value of such theories, it is evident that the frustration of young people's ambitions in modernizing countries makes them the object of preachers of hate and tempts them to leave the course of plodding progress and turn to more dramatic action.

What we call "terrorism" has many causes, and one must beware of facile explanations. However, the politics of frustration, of ambitions raised and then thwarted, is clearly one such cause.

It is thus also a challenge to those of us living in more fortunate circumstances. If we do not wish to be submerged in violence and authoritarian responses to it, international institutions must do for the modernizing world what the EU has managed to do for the postcommunist countries. For the world's democracies, there is no greater or more important task.

Ralf Dahrendorf, author of numerous acclaimed books and a former European Commissioner from Germany, is a member of the British House of Lords, a former Rector of the London School of Economics, and a former Warden of St. Antony's College, Oxford.