New Modes of Youth Political Action and Democracy in the Americas: From the Chilean Spring to the Maple Spring in Quebec

CHAPTER 19 New Modes of Youth Political Action and Democracy in the Americas: From the Chilean Spring to the Maple Spring in Quebec Ricardo Peñafiel and Marie-Christine Doran Student ProteStS in the AmericAS In the space of barely one year, the Americas experienced three major popular protest movements spearheaded by students. The first began in June 2011, in Chile, with a series of strikes and occupations at universities and secondary schools, leading into a six-month conflict, which spawned the largest social protest movement since the 1973 coup d’état (against Salvador Allende). A few months later, in February 2012, a movement that followed almost the same course as its ‘southern twin’ (Chile) erupted in Quebec (see Gallant, in this volume). Faced with the intransigence of governments refusing to R. Peñafiel (*) Department of Political Science, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada M.-C. Doran School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2018 S. Pickard, J. Bessant (eds.), Young People Re-Generating Politics in Times of Crises, Palgrave Studies in Young People and Politics, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58250-4_19 349 350 R. PEÑAFIEL AND M.-C. DORAN recognise the representation of student organisations and the legitimacy of the street as a site of popular participation, these two conflicts in Chile and Quebec broadened and deepened, expanding beyond the strictly educational framework to encompass a broad spectrum of the general public in popular movements of transgressive contention (McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001). Finally, to round off a year of student-led popular revolts, in May 2012, the “#Yosoy132” (I’m 132) movement erupted in Mexico to denounce the “mass manipulation” and collusion between politicians and giant media corporations; and to demand a “free, reasoned and informed” vote. The main protagonists of these historically large actions were young people. This contrasts markedly with the findings of certain sociological studies on the political disaffection of young people (Baril, 2012; Fernández, 2000), the alleged narcissism and individualism of the so called ‘Generation Y’ (Twenge, 2014) and claims of declining social capital (Putnam, 1995; Sander & Putnam, 2010). Far from being apathetic or depoliticised, Chilean, Quebec and Mexican young people have refused to play the part (Amossy, 2010) of individuals investing in only their own future or of consumers of ‘manufactured consent.’ Instead, they succeeded in becoming unavoidable political actors stepping into a public space from where they were excluded. As such, their political participation is all the more significant because they had to fight smear campaigns and criminalisation of their actions (Dupuis-Déri, 2014; Véjar, 2012) by governments and medias, the general public and even part of the academic community. Through a comparative analysis of the Chilean and Quebec cases with some references to the Mexican case, this chapter looks at how young people have been able to overcome the stigmas of violence, political apathy and individualism by using new information and communication technologies (NICT). Thus, they have created innovative forms of presence in the public space such as political flashmobs or spontaneous digital-based manifestations, including the use of friendly huge mascots that cuddle demonstrators to counteract the violent image of young people constructed by the media. Instead of resulting in the marginalisation of these movements, the criminalisation of students and the “disrespect” (Honneth, 2006) shown towards them by the State and media fuelled new forms of political subjectivation based on the sense of a “shared fundamental wrong” (mise en commun d’un tort fondamental) (Peñafiel, 2014; Rancière, 1995, pp. 41–68). Yet, even though these protest movements may appear to be solely reactions to neoliberal austerity measures in the midst of economic crisis, there main interest is to challenge the hegemony of restricted forms FROM THE CHILEAN SPRING TO THE MAPLE SPRING IN QUEBEC 351 of representative government, as we shall see through the compared analysis of Chile. In this chapter, we start by giving an analytical account of the Chilean and Maple Springs, in light of the ways governments and mass media have discredited student and young people’s actions and proceeded to criminalise them both by discourses and legislative measures. The chapter then establishes and explains the inventive responses of students to this accusation of violence and the innovative use of new information and communication technologies (NICT) and add the Mexican example of the student-led pro-democracy movement “I’m 132” (Yo soy 132). Next the chapter addresses the ‘struggle for democracy’s meaning’ and civil liberties at play between the students’ actions and the declarations of governments, the latter defending a clearly restrictive view of representative democracy. The last part of the chapter contends that these struggles for the meaning and the innovative actions of the students defending their freedom of expression and non-violent features of their movements present characteristics of isonomy and a desire to fully participate in democratic deliberation and decision. This leads to the effects of these movements in terms of youth politics contribution to democracy. denigrAting And criminAliSing Youth PoliticAl PArticiPAtion The Chilean Case At the beginning, it was nothing more than a very ordinary student strike. After having exhausted all possible legal recourse and redoubled their public denunciations, 6,000 students at the Central University of Chile (UCEN) declared an unlimited general strike on 4 April 2011 to denounce the takeover of their university by Norte Sur S.A. This group of private investors was profiting from education, even though such action is prohibited by the Organic Constitutional Law on Teaching (LOCE). This otherwise neoliberal law enacted under the Pinochet dictatorship to perpetuate (lock-in) the privatisation of higher education, nonetheless stipulates that private universities must remain non-profit institutions. The takeover of UCEN by private investors, in flagrant violation of the law, did not appear to disturb the Minister of Education of the time, Joaquín Lavín, who saw no more than a simple “conflict between individuals” in the situation. 352 R. PEÑAFIEL AND M.-C. DORAN This trivialisation of the violation of the law by the Minister of Education himself doubtlessly explains why this clause on the non-profit nature of educational institutions was circumvented by numerous universities—in which many left-wing and right-wing politicians have interests. Starting with this first strike at UCEN, the general slogan “no al lucro” (no to profit) rapidly spread; by mid-April, all Chilean university students were mobilising around the calls issued by the Confederation of Students of Chile (Confech).1 Instead of limiting themselves to a denunciation of the systematic violation of the LOCE, the movement broadened its demands to decry the commodification of education and to demand the democratisation of university management, increased public funding for higher education, and a series of measures aimed at fighting the “social segregation” reproduced and worsened by the education system.2 The broadening of the conflict to the entire university sector reflected the systemic nature of the problem. The Minister of Education nevertheless persisted in disregarding the students, not considering them worthy interlocutors: They don’t even have votes in ballot boxes, just cries in the street. No modern democracy debates these questions with students; these are important national debates on which we must confer in Congress. The question of education will be determined through extensive discussion in parliament. That is the place in which all visions must be brought forward and transversal agreements reached. (Joaquín Lavín, quoted in La Tercera, 28 June 2011) This denial of students’ status as counterparts and the government’s refusal to recognise the street as a legitimate space for democratic expression pushed the struggle into increasingly higher levels of ‘radicalism,’ mass organising and creativity. By blocking the channels through which demands could be delivered, the government paradoxically enabled the expression of much deeper and more general criticisms, ‘unspeakable’ in an institutional framework of pacified conflict management. Thus, on 1 June 2011, following Confech’s call to a “general strike and protest,” university students were joined by secondary students and were supported by the National Public Service Union (ANEF), the Teaching College, as well as several rectors of so-called ‘traditional’ universities (preceding the dictatorship). By 3 June, there were 17 traditional universities on strike or occupied by students, camping there day and night and provided for by the population. Four days later, there were 20, while FROM THE CHILEAN SPRING TO THE MAPLE SPRING IN QUEBEC 353 three new secondary schools joined six others who were already occupied. The following week, with more than 300 educational institutions on strike and occupied, protests surpassed 100,000 people in Santiago and 200,000 across the country (Véjar, 2012, p. 14). The number of schools and universities under occupation increased until it reached 1,556 on 28 July. The protests also grew, in numbers and frequency, mobilising hundreds of thousands of people, far beyond educational circles, on a quasiweekly basis between June and November. They achieved historic records of 400,000 on 30 June, 500,000 on 21 August, 300,000 on 25 August, and 300,000 on 19 October 2011 (Véjar, 2012). Beyond the creativity and the diversification of forms of protest, which will be analysed below, the most striking aspect of the movement was the plethora of new sectors participating. These included the Unitary Confederation of Labor (CUT), teachers, public service workers, copper workers, and workers from many other unions, parents’ associations, the mayors of some cities, pobladores3 organisations, and more. In addition to confronting the root of the crisis in Chilean education by demanding “free, quality, public education,” the movement became what Ernesto Laclau (1996) called an “empty signifier” (Peñafiel, 2012). That is, it no longer solely reflected specifically student demands but ‘signified’ or federated a series of much broader demands and aspirations: for example, “fiscal reform”; “renationalisation of copper” and “nationalisation of natural resources”4; “binding popular plebiscites”; “Popular Constituent Assembly,” recovery of memory and justice, etc. It is noteworthy that the three main claims of the movement became central themes of the 2014 campaign of President Michelle Bachelet, namely free higher education, as well as fiscal and Constitutional reform.5 Despite this tremendous popular success, the government’s refusal to recognise the Chilean student movement was compounded by intense repression, including numerous cases of torture and human rights violation by security forces and a process of criminalisation of collective action that directly attacked the legitimacy of rights otherwise officially recognised by the Chilean democracy. As we will detail later in this chapter, “criminalisation of protest is a distinct and specific form of retrenching on acknowledged civil and political rights, rendering them synonymous to criminal behaviour that must be sanctioned legally and tolerates [abusive behaviour from state agents] towards citizens that are viewed as enemies in this new configuration where the struggle for the definition of democracy lies at heart” (Doran, 2017). 354 R. PEÑAFIEL AND M.-C. DORAN While legally recognised and historically confirmed by all governments that negotiated the ends of strikes with them before this moment, student associations in Chile have been treated as irrelevant and violent. However, this situation is certainly not unique to the Chilean case, as we will now see through a brief account of Quebec’s Maple Spring, and references to Mexico’s student movement ‘Yo soy 132.’ The Quebec Case One might think that the criminalisation of collective action is unique to post-dictatorships like Chile. However, the same phenomenon occurred in one of the most stable liberal democracies in the world: Canada. It could even be argued that the repression was more massive in Quebec than in Chile. In similar conflicts, there were more than 3,500 arrests in Quebec (Lemonde, Bourbeau, Fortin, Joly, & Poisson, 2014) compared to 1,556 in Chile (Véjar, 2012). However, it would be unfair to draw such a conclusion insofar as the criminal justice systems of the two societies differ. In Chile, for example, 14,000 persons were taken in and questioned without being officially arrested. In any case, disproportionate repression was used against young people in both situations and, at least in Quebec, on an unprecedented scale. Numerous jurists and specialists believe the repression of the Maple Spring 2012 marked a turning point in the attitude of political authorities towards social mobilisation in Quebec (Lemonde et al., 2014; Commission spéciale d’examen des événements du printemps 2012, 2014; Ligue des droits et libertés et al., 2013). Political violence specialist Dupuis-Déri (2013) did not hesitate to rename the Maple Spring as the ‘Truncheon Spring’ (Printemps de la matraque). The largest wave of mass arrests prior to this took place during the October crisis (1970), when Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau imposed the War Measures Act (Legislature of Canada, 1914) in the face of armed actions by the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec). The public order forces made 497 arrests. However, in a single night, on 23 May, with no terrorist threat or state of emergency to legitimise their action, the police arrested 518 people in Montreal and 176 in Quebec City, encircling them in a kettle (souricière) (Pickard, 2014). The majority of people arrested that night were not students but citizens protesting against the Law 12 (also known as Bill 78), which prohibited gatherings of more than 50 people. As in Chile, after several months of protests—including new, playful forms of demonstrations and the use of NICT (Peñafiel, 2016)—, the FROM THE CHILEAN SPRING TO THE MAPLE SPRING IN QUEBEC 355 student strike movement broadened into a popular struggle. To adopt the slogans of the two movements: “A struggle for the entire society” (La lucha es de la sociedad entera); “Student strike, popular struggle!” (La grève est étudiante, la lutte est populaire). At the beginning, however, the Quebec Spring was also no more than a simple student strike; something that Quebec had experienced dozens of times in the past without its ever having degenerated into a crisis. Student organisations opposed the 75% tuition increase—CAD$1,625 over five years—announced by the government. In accordance with practice dating back to the first student strikes in Quebec in the 1960s (Lacoursière, 2007) and also with the Act respecting the accreditation and financing of students’ associations (Legislature of Québec, 1983), students pass strike resolutions in General Assemblies. Between 7 February and 5 March 2012, 123,000 students had a strike mandate. The more combative groups organised symbolic direct actions, such as blocking the Stock Exchange and banks, to raise public awareness about their struggle and denounce the social inequalities of the government decisions. However, the government firmly held to its refusal to negotiate, arguing that it had already taken its decision and that everyone had to pay their “fair share” for education and public finances (Richer, 2012). On 22 March 2012, with more than 302,652 students on strike (Savard & Cyr, 2014, p. 67)—representing three quarters of the post-secondary students of Quebec—, they organised one of the largest political demonstrations in the history of Quebec, bringing almost 200,000 people onto the streets of Montreal (Lachapelle, 2012). Despite the historic scale of the demonstration and number of student organisations on strike, the government still refused to negotiate. It deployed two contradictory lines of argument: the first portrayed students as “spoiled kids” refusing to pay their fair share in an “investment” which would later earn them good salaries6; and the second sought to divide the movement by refusing to negotiate with the more radical CLASSE (acronym for Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante [Coalition of the association for student union solidarity], which amassed 50% of the students on strike), by accusing them of violence and intimidation. It was not until April 2012, after 10 weeks of conflict, that the government made the first offers. These were considered insufficient by all the student organisations, which maintained their unlimited general strike. As students persisted, despite the slander and mass repression, a phenomenon of judicialization of the conflict emerged. Injunctions began 356 R. PEÑAFIEL AND M.-C. DORAN to be mass-produced, especially by the head of the Quebec Superior Court, François Rolland. These injunctions denied the right of students of association and ordered an immediate return to class. Between 30 March and 18 May 2012, almost 50 injunctions or interim/safeguard orders were issued by Quebec’s courts (Lemonde et al., 2014, p. 297). In reality, and despite the charges of contempt of court brought against some individuals, these injunctions could not be executed because of the solidarity of professors, students from other institutions, and civil society who organised pickets of hundreds of people in front of the targeted colleges and universities. However, this tactic helped increase the level of physical confrontation between the strikers and security forces and thus the image of violence, intimidation and illegality that the government sought to lend the strike. The government claimed that it was not a student strike, but an individual “boycott” which did not give participants any right to stop other students from going to their courses. On this basis, on 18 May 2012, the Quebec National Assembly passed, 68 votes for and 48 against, An Act to enable students to receive instruction from the postsecondary institutions they attend (Legislature of Quebec, 2012), better known as Law 12, the “Special Law” (la loi spéciale or Bill 78). This ‘emergency’ law restricted gatherings to 50 people and prohibited rallies within 50 metres of educational institutions for one year. It also forced teachers to give their classes independently of the number of students present. Unions and student organisations were required to take all means to ensure that their members did not contravene its requirements, on pain of having their union dues suspended from a trimester for each day of infraction and fines of CAD$25,000 to $125,000 per day per organisation. Far from dampening the movement (that had already multiplied its means of action by calling, via social networks, for daily night marches, festive and carnival actions, and diverse art projects), the adoption of the ‘Special Law’ (Law 12) generated a vast popular protest movement of ‘casseroles’ (clanging on pots). The same day the law was passed, a Facebook event started by a college professor called on the public in the following terms: Every night, at 8pm, for 15 minutes, arm yourself with a pot or any other object capable of making noise and bang on it with all the rage this special law has created in you! / When the Chilean dictatorship restricted unlawful FROM THE CHILEAN SPRING TO THE MAPLE SPRING IN QUEBEC 357 assemblies to any gathering of more than four people, the Chileans used these means to express their rage. Let’s take our inspiration from them! / If you are against this special law, make some noise! / Pots of Quebec, unite! (Bold characters are from the original). By the following day, tens of neighbourhood groups gathered spontaneously, independent of the students, summoning other neighbours with the sounds of pots. The next day, there were hundreds of those street corners spontaneous protestors banging on their pots; and the day after, processions of tens of thousands of people got under way and moved through Montreal to merge with the student night marches which had been taking place without interruption since 24 April. In a less spectacular way, ‘casserole’ protests were also held in tens of other cities in the province, as well as in Canada and the rest of the world in solidarity with the Quebec movement. In the end, the government had to cancel the winter session in order to prevent the students from striking. Elections were called in order to “settle the issue” and evicted the governing Liberal Party on behalf of the main opposition party, the Quebecois Party (Parti Québécois PQ). The newly elected PQ government proceeded to repeal the Special law 12 and replaced the initially planned increase of 75% over five years on education fees with a 3% increase per year. Yet, the student conflict did not occupy much of the political debate. Its effects were to be found elsewhere, in the questioning of the limits of democratic participation. In sum, while being officially legally recognised by all governments, student associations in Chile and Quebec have in recent years been subjected to a process of criminalisation due to the supposed violence and illegitimacy of their actions. By these means, authorities and mass media have criminalised the exercise of fundamental rights such as the right of association, expression and assembly, and denied the status of legitimate interlocutor to those wishing to participate democratically in political deliberation and decision-making. Criminalisation of collective action (Seoane, 2003; Svampa, 2009) is a distinctive and specific form of undercutting well-established or acknowledged civil and political rights, rendering them synonymous with criminal behaviour that must be sanctioned by law. By reducing democracy to a purely formal concept (free elections and pluralism) and de-legitimising all claim-based social conflict, minimalist versions and narrow approaches to democracy open the door to the state’s criminalisation of collective action and social movements. That is, they 358 R. PEÑAFIEL AND M.-C. DORAN welcome measures rendering practices—hitherto considered peaceful and legitimate—illegal and illegitimate. This process of criminalisation has been discussed a lot in the context of social protest against natural resource-based industry (Delgado Ramos, 2012, p. 78), where the civil rights of citizens are pitted against a very thriving economic system. Generally, literature on the criminalisation of social movements describes the penalisation of poor and marginalised people, which signals the emergence of the penal state as a core feature of the global expansion of neoliberalism and the urban marginality produced by the neoliberal government (Müller, 2012). Yet, these cases of student protest show that these are not the only social conflicts in which the state responds by criminalising protest. In fact, the use of criminalisation extends beyond specifically economic conflict to any kind of social protest that risks exposing the limitations placed on democracy (Doran, 2017; FIDH (Fédération internationale des ligues des droits de l’Homme), 2011). overcoming StigmAtiSAtion And APProPriAting the Public SPhere: innovAtive ActionS in chile, Quebec And mexico In spite of the major difficulties related to criminalisation, student movements in Chile and Quebec alike have succeeded in creating innovative forms of expression and public participation in which young people have challenged representations of them as violent, presenting themselves as legitimate counterparts or political agonistic adversaries (Mouffe, 2002) in the conflict with the governments and its supporters. From mass demonstrations and occupations to Facebook events, from sectorial and social strikes to flash-mobs, from temporary blockades of bridges to funas7 and caceroleos,8 (pot clanging concert demonstrations), to protest songs (cantos de protesta) and graphic art, these young people from the two edges of the Americas have much in common. They used a colourful and diversified set of tools to create a space in the public sphere for themselves, by both inventing new repertoires of collective action and revisiting old ones. Putting forward objectives that are clearly political—being taken into account and able to share their visions in the public space—these movements proceeded to subvert the commercial and recreational limits of NICT (new information and communication technologies) to express their opposition: whether opposition to their exclusion from democratic FROM THE CHILEAN SPRING TO THE MAPLE SPRING IN QUEBEC 359 deliberation or to laws that they had managed to reveal as ‘unacceptable’ when these impeded liberty of expression and manifestation. In the following section, we shall provide examples of these new communication strategies and of new repertoires of playful demonstrations used by both movements and assert their effects. As we have seen, in Chile and Quebec, the student strike movements reached a scale in 2011–2012 that was unprecedented since the 1970s, involving national demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people. To a large degree, this was due to their use of new social media (like Facebook and Twitter) to call for night marches and caceroleos as a protest against the arbitrary nature of the repression carried out by police forces. This included the sharing of videos to subvert the accusation of violence made against young people, as we can also see in the Mexican “Yo soy 132” (I’m 132) movement. This spontaneous and unprecedented movement shows a very innovative use of social media to counter-act the mass media versions of political actions taken by students. In the Mexican well-known context of media concentration (Hallin, 2000), the movement began after Enrique Peña Nieto, the mass media’s preferred presidential candidate, visited the Universidad Iberoamericana, an elite private university considered to be supportive of his candidacy. Peña Nieto, leader of the PRI ‘Institutional Revolutionary Party’ (Partido de la Revolución Institucional) and now President of Mexico, was driven out of the university by students shouting and holding banners stating that he had been responsible for the massive human rights violations perpetrated by the police and the army against a pacific demonstration of street flower merchants in the neighbouring community of Atenco. The students wanted to show that they would not be accomplices in the imposition of a president through manipulative political communication techniques trying to hide the use of State violence against citizens. After fleeing from the auditorium and hiding behind the curtains, Peña Nieto then summoned the media to claim that those who had chased him out were not students but “bullies” (porros), sympathisers of the leftist candidate AMLO (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) who had infiltrated and spoiled the meeting. In response, that same night, an event organised by students via Facebook invited everyone present to display their student registration, testifying to their presence and agreement with the expulsion of the presidential candidate. The following day, 131 video-clips appeared, in which registered students were declaring their participation in the events and the 360 R. PEÑAFIEL AND M.-C. DORAN repudiation of both Peña Nieto’s past actions and of his manipulation of the media. At this point, someone had the idea of saying that, while he had not been present, he fully shared the students’ anger against media manipulation of democracy, and that he “was” the 132nd participant. Following his example, thousands of other young people in Mexico and throughout the world joined the “I’m 132” (Yo soy 132) thus sparking the most important youth-led movements in favour of democracy since the tragic event of the Tlatelolco massacre, where several hundreds of students and young people had been killed by the Mexican police while demanding democratisation in Mexico on the eve of the 1968 Olympic Games. In Quebec, the “Someone arrest me!” (Arrêtez-moi quelqu’un!) internet initiative (http://molotov.ca/realisations/arretez-moi-quelquun) is another good example of the subversive use of social media. In this case, 5,300 photo-messages ‘applying’ to be arrested were posted, stating that if innocent students defending the freedom of expression were to be taken in, they were willing to join the movement as citizens dedicated to democracy. These messages do not refer to specific students demands, but rather convey the importance of popular legitimacy opposed to the illegitimacy of the special law and of the assembly of representatives that voted for it, as we can observe in the following examples: “Charest (Prime Minister of Quebec) disobeys democracy, I disobey Law 78”; “I consider Law 78 illegitimate”; “Liberty is non-negotiable”; “Those who brought in Law 78 are the criminals”; “If the law is against the people, people will be outlaws”; “I am free, therefore I disobey”; “total contempt, global refusal.”9 Within actions announced and organised by social media, the use of flash-mobs (Nicholson, 2005), was a very important form of social action used to subvert the stigmatisation of violence and rally support from other members of society by appearing in public spaces in unexpected and playful ways. Even though flash mobs were originally purely playful events where people gathered to have public pillow fights or other such recreational activities, the student movements in the Americas, as well as other movements soon began to use them to convey their political messages. Flash mobs aim to operate with an effect of pleasant surprise and to create in the general public an expectation for the next manifestation. Nevertheless, this playful and funny occupation of the public space states the right of students to do so and make obvious their efforts to be taken into consideration by authorities who try to exclude them by accusing them of being violent and carrying illegitimate claims. FROM THE CHILEAN SPRING TO THE MAPLE SPRING IN QUEBEC 361 The first of a long series of flash mobs was a choreographed scene from the videoclip of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, acted out by Chilean students outside the presidential palace of Chile, La Moneda, in Santiago, on the first anniversary of the singer’s death, to symbolise the “living-dead” state of Chilean education. This event attracted more than 7,000 people, in one of the largest flash-mobs since this kind of demonstration began worldwide. It was followed by a 1,800-hour relay race around La Moneda, and a series of other festive events based on a variety of famous characters such as Lady Gaga, super-heroes and Dragon Ball Z. Other collective actions included a besotón (kissing marathon), a die-in, “stripped naked for/by education,” etc. Very similar actions were used in Quebec; for example, a series of maNufestations involving people attending demonstrations naked, in order to attract attention, but also to present an image of vulnerability and demonstrate a refusal of social codes imposed through clothing.10 Numerous night marches and biking manifestations involved the presence of funny giant stuffed animals (mascots) such as the ‘Anarchopanda,’ a friendly giant panda who openly professed his political option in favour of direct and ‘assembleist’ democracy. The presence of ‘Rebel Banana’ (banane rebelle) a giant banana dispensing hugs to passers-by, was also a big hit within the communicational strategy of students. Even though the intention was to subvert negative discourses against young people by making the actions fun and entertaining, they none-the-less highlighted serious and weighty issues: refusing ‘austeritarian’11 policies and proposing new ones based on the principle of free, quality, public education, and also global concerns such as climate change, fiscal reform, constitutional change, ethics in politics, etc. The effects were quite surprising and succeeded in triggering the sympathy of otherwise disinterested sectors of the general public. In Chile, the effects went beyond that as the mass media were captivated and, rather than highlighting the supposed violence of demonstrations as was the standard practice, they were encouraged to acknowledge the goodhumoured creativity of the surprising theatrical actions in their coverage of the student movement’s flash-mobs. In summary, faced with a government strategy of framing demonstrators as violent, or potentially violent and dangerous, thereby demonising and marginalising them, the young people involved in these protests actions succeeded in finding new ways of appearing in public space, despite efforts to push them out. In this way, they were able to create a “new 362 R. PEÑAFIEL AND M.-C. DORAN public oppositional space” (Negt, 2007) where the foundations and limits of democracy were brought up to the public’s attention and eventually discussed by sectors who usually are little interested in discussions around democracy. As argued in the next section, this sparked an important struggle for the meaning (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985) of democracy, opposing surprisingly homogenous blocs in favour of purely representative and elective democracy to other views of political participation and deliberation. The core trend of the conflict was soon revolving around the idea of democracy itself. This, in turn, profoundly changed the political stage imposing new issues and new actors. AntAgoniStic concePtionS of PArticiPAtion And democrAcY The excessive repression and discrediting of these youth-led movements by presiding governments appear to be directly related to the willingness of the student movements to become political actors able to be taken into account and to participate in political deliberation and decision. The similarity of governmental discourses from Chile to Quebec reflect a common argumentative strategy to dismiss an adversary, more than the observation of specific acts of violence. In fact, what seems to have been considered “violent” is the student desire to participate politically outside prescribed institutional spaces. As former Quebec Minister of Education, Lyne Beauchamp, declared at the National Assembly of Quebec, on 26 April 2012: We have a democratic system, we have a National Assembly of Quebec, we have elected representatives of the people because democracy is a way of settling our differences without violence in our society. It is the very principle of a democratic society. And, I repeat, it would not be worthy of a National Assembly and elected representatives of the people to yield to acts of violence, yield to intimidation, yield to civil disobedience which involves violence. (quoted in Journal des débats de l’Assemblée nationale, 26 April 2012) As we saw earlier on, these declarations echo those of Chilean Minister of Education Joaquín Lavín, when he states that “No modern democracy debates these questions with students; these are important national FROM THE CHILEAN SPRING TO THE MAPLE SPRING IN QUEBEC 363 debates on which we must confer in Congress” (quoted in La Tercera, 28 June 2011). Moreover, many extracts from governmental speeches indicate clearly that the manifestations of political dissent within the student protests are to be excluded as un-democratic behaviour and considered to be violent. The case of the wearing of le carré rouge, a little red felt square worn by all supporters of the student movement, is very telling in this regard. As the most important symbol of a movement that soon rallied huge sectors of the general public, the little carré rouge was worn by many important artists and public personalities in Quebec. Without necessarily supporting the student’s claims entirely, many people in the general public began to wear it to publicly dissent with governments and courts decisions to penalise students (Labrie, 2013). When prize-winning story-teller Fred Pellerin refused to claim his prize and appeared in the media wearing the carré rouge, Quebec Minister of Culture, Christine Saint-Pierre, declared: “[…] we know what the carré rouge means, it means intimidation and violence […]” (quoted in Peñafiel, 2015b). The next day, during the Formula One Grand Prix in Montreal, all the people bearing the carré rouge were detained, searched and expelled from the event (Le Devoir, 11 June 2012). The violence herein referred to by Minister Saint-Pierre in fact consisted solely of broken storefront windows. All of the other types of students’ actions were actually perfectly legal: picket lines in front of universities that had voted the strike, temporary occupations of public offices such as the stock exchange building in Montreal, or road blockades to attract the government’s attention after more than two months without any dialogue, all of the previous are disturbing yet not illegal or violent actions according to the legislation on Quebec. Thus, the discursive transformation of these practices into condemnable, violent and even terrorist practices by government’s representatives show us how the criminalisation dynamic actually takes place. Going further, the Chilean governmental discourse warned mobilised young people that their use of social conflict could lead to the return of authoritarianism. For example, Chilean President, Sebastián Piñera, faced with the fast expanding movement of strikes and social protest declared in August 2011: I am absolutely convinced that to make Chile a freer and more just country, more prosperous and with greater solidarity, the path of stone-throwing, 364 R. PEÑAFIEL AND M.-C. DORAN violence, and Molotov cocktails must not be taken […] This path, we have known it in the past and it led us to a democratic rupture, to the loss of healthy conviviality, and many other consequences. (quoted in Emol.com, 18 August 2011) In a Chilean society where the trauma of the past dictatorship are still vivid in the minds of many, this is a damning accusation (Doran, 2016, p. 219). Moreover, on the basis of claims that students were violent and dangerous, attempts were made by both governments to pass exceptional laws that would restrict individual and civil rights related to the right to dissent and protest. The official justification was that the civil rights had to be curtailed to better defend civil liberties. For example, as we saw earlier, Quebec’s Bill 78 imposed extreme restrictions on the rights of association, expression and protest. Likewise, Montreal’s P-6 bylaw (By-law concerning the prevention of breaches of the peace, public order and safety, and the use of public property, City of Montreal, 2001 (As amended by 12-024)), subordinated the right to protest to freedom of movement, prohibited the wearing of masks, and demanded that protesters provide their itinerary to the police. Chile’s “Hinzpeter” bill (Law to Strengthen Public Order, debated in 2012), severely punishes actions like the occupation of official or private buildings, the blocking of traffic, being disrespectful towards the police, and wearing hoods or scarves covering the face. While most of these bills or laws were rejected by Parliament, repealed by successor governments, or struck down by the courts, their immediate political impact was no less deadly for freedom. They lent the exercise of fundamental rights an appearance of illegitimacy and they unleashed repressive police techniques aimed at public intimidation, such as mass arrests and excessive use of crowd containment equipment and weapons. The practice of torture against arrested protestors in Chilean police stations was also documented by different organisations (Comisión de Observadores de Derechos Humanos, Casa de Memoria José Domingo Cañas, 2013; Human Rights Center of the Universidad Diego Portales’ Faculty of Law, 2014). Representing the public expression of positions contrary to the ‘decisions’ of elected officials as violence, these statements by Chilean and Quebec government officials assert a kind of decisionist legitimacy (Habermas, 1978): government decisions are legitimate, independently of their contents or the reaction of a large part of the public, as long as the government was elected and governs according to formal procedures. FROM THE CHILEAN SPRING TO THE MAPLE SPRING IN QUEBEC 365 Consequently, civil rights—such as freedom of expression, association and protest—may be limited, and even abolished or suspended, if part of the public takes it upon itself to pass judgement on the validity of a law (isonomy) or of a decision by elected representatives, while it has “no title to govern” (sans titre à gouverner) (Rancière, 2005). However, the student movements succeeded in establishing themselves as interlocutors in the public arena, despite this denial of rights and this criminalisation. They did so through a process of political subjectivation that can be observed, in a striking parallel, in Chile between June and December 2011 and in Quebec between February and July 2012. In the face of government intransigence in refusing to recognise the representation of student organisations and the legitimacy of the strike and the street as a mode of popular participation, these two student conflicts, at opposite ends of the Americas, expanded beyond their strictly educational frameworks to transform into immense transgressive protest movements, which were ‘radically’ (at the roots) questioning the social and political order. While the relative success of the two movements differs—in Quebec, support for the student movement never surpassed 50% in the polls; while in Chile, support rose from 37% before the conflict to 80% at the end—they both share the capacity to mobilise and defeat attempts to de-legitimise and exclude them from public space. It is important to analyse this capacity, in order to understand the impact and nature of youth political participation in times of austerity. concluSion Due to the State’s exercise of “illegitimate,” excessive, or arbitrary violence, partial struggles (such as student struggles)12 are met with solidarity from wider audience one of the points of convergence being the defence of the right to dissent. The struggle waged by this new political force tends to form around the democratic principles underlying the frustrated sectorial demand, rather than around the demand as such (Corten, Huart, & Peñafiel, 2012). This demand becomes accessory or secondary and tends to be replaced by a series of other claims, no longer addressed to the state—which in any case, does not recognise them—but to all of society. For example, the “someone arrest me campaign” or the initiatives of the “Yo soy 132—I’m 132” movement in Mexico do not directly address the specific interests or demands of students. Rather, they contend the plea for an “authentic democracy.” In the specific case of the 366 R. PEÑAFIEL AND M.-C. DORAN Mexican movement, its first public statements and actions denounced the “duopoly” of the two main television chains which, in collusion with political elites (especially of PAN and PRI),13 manipulate public opinion and over-determine election results. In this case, as in the cases of the Chilean and Maple Springs examined in this chapter, a political subjectivation formed, born of an assertion of the principle of equality, which can certainly appear ephemeral and disappear after the effervescence of protests, but is no less enduring and fundamental in its principle; which reawakens and asserts itself through each of these Plebeian Experiences (Breaugh, 2013). The student movements of the Americas succeeded in marking public space in the affected societies and in transforming charges of violence and political apathy levelled against young people through original strategies of communication. In doing this, these movements successfully exposed the impermeability of political systems and constructed spaces of expression, not only for students but for all citizens who wished to join in the democratic discussion. In a context of economic and political crisis, marked by three decades of neoliberal policies in which many sectors are battling to save fragments of a social state in a permanent process of dismantlement, university students (and secondary students in Chile) showed that it was possible to resist a market concept of society and become political actors in and through conflict. In this regard, there are many differences between the Chilean and Quebec Springs. For example, while the student movement in Chile confronted a neoliberal system in place since the dictatorship, in Quebec the students were responding to austerity measures legitimised by the 2008 economic crisis and the public financial crisis generated by the ensuing recession. However, the two movements were practically identical in terms of the denial of recognition (Honneth, 2000) faced by student organisations. They came to be the favourite targets of government discourses of stigmatisation: as violent, as privileged, as spoiled kids refusing their “fair” share, and more. As such, their capacity to form movements allowing diverse sectors to converge must be measured against the specific difficulties that youth face in a world unwilling to accept them as legitimate speakers in public space (Joignant, 2007; Peñafiel, 2008). By challenging the criminalisation of collective action, the transgressive forms of public participation used by students in the cases studied here also show the limits of a strictly delegative form of FROM THE CHILEAN SPRING TO THE MAPLE SPRING IN QUEBEC 367 democracy (O’Donnell, 1994), which reduces participation to the periodic exercise of universal suffrage. The impact of these movements, which lasted well beyond the enactment of legislative changes responding to specific demands, can be assessed by the capacity they had to mobilise the support of societies invested in the defence of democratic principles, including the freedoms of expression, association and protest and, more broadly, the right to dissent These democratic principles were re-appropriated by all those who recognised themselves in the interpellation (Althusser, 1976) made by youth. Beyond sectorial demands, protest movements emerging from young people’s initiatives cease to address the State—which in any case does not recognise them—and ‘exercise’ directly a ‘full democracy’ in which those excluded from public space can finally appear and express themselves. These movements thus lend society a reflexive insight on itself and on the very foundations of democracy. To paraphrase Rancière (1995), the moment when outcasts break into public space from which they have been excluded is the moment when the political breaks out, the social ceases to reproduce itself on its own naturalised bases and a reflexive and democratic debate on the foundations of the-being-together can be undertaken collectively. noteS 1. Bringing together students from 25 so-called ‘traditional’ universities (preceding the dictatorship). 2. For the details of these demands, see the document Convocatoria Movilización y Paro Nacional (Call to mobilise and to a national strike) by Confech: http://movimientoestudiantil.cl/wp-content/uploads/2015/ 12/2011-05-CONVOCATORIA12MAYO.pdf. For independent analyses of the segregational nature of the Chilean educational model, see: Bellei, Contreras, and Valenzuela (2010), Berner and Bellei (2011), OECD (2011), and Pinedo Henriquez (2011). 3. Residents of working-class neighbourhoods and shantytowns. 4. Especially around the HidroAysen conflict, a protest movement against the construction of five hydroelectric stations in the south of Chile. This conflict, which began before the student strike movement began, continued and was strengthened when this space of pluri-sectorial protest opened. 5. However, the actual reforms enacted by President Bachelet diverge from the original intentions of the student movement: free education has been transformed into a grant reserved for the poorest students in an unchanged 368 R. PEÑAFIEL AND M.-C. DORAN 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. private education system where profit is still a main trend. The fiscal reforms have been deemed much too modest and Constitutional reforms controlled by the Congress have been used by the government to try to deflect society’s claim for popular constituent assemblies. For example, then Minister of Education, Lyne Beauchamp, claimed in a television interview on Radio Canada, the state media, “The students want us to talk about their contribution by saying, ‘I don’t want my bill, send it to someone else.’ To us, this will never be a good basis for discussion. University students must pay their fair share” (Radio Canada, 5 April 2012). Chilean and Argentinian funas are direct actions, invented by organisations of the children of disappeared or tortured detainees. They are aimed at condemning the impunity of soldiers and collaborators with the Chilean and Argentinian dictatorial regimes. In Chile, the adoption of this practice by students might seem paradoxical insofar as it is used to denounce actions and declarations of public officials. However, this funa is no less significant, because it condemns as unacceptable attitudes presented as legal or legitimate. Caceroleos are a form of displaying popular discontent (also called cacerolazos in Argentina and elsewhere), which simply consists of banging on pots. Similar to Europe’s charivari or England’s “rough music” (Thompson, 1972), this form of popular public expression was first used by the Chilean right-wing against Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government. A decade later, the pots changed allegiance and served to repudiate the military regime. In August 2011, after many weeks of student conflict, the caceroleos reappeared, recalling the time of the Protestas (national protest movement) against the dictatorship. For a more detailed analysis, see Peñafiel (2015a). Feminist author Martine Delvaux sees a relation to FEMEN’s types of action and expands on this in “Les MaNUfestantes,” Revue À Bâbord, 46, 2012, p. 27. In French, the expression ‘politiques austéritaires’ is used to describe both austerity politics and the authoritarian practices of repression and criminalisation that accompanied them in many cases. These could very well be those of indigenous people, labourers, teachers, residents of a city threatened by a mega-project, citizens of a state outraged by a government decision, etc. For a socio-historic analysis of this type of spontaneous direct action, see Corten, Huart, and Peñafiel (2012). Respectively, the National Action Party and the Institutional Revolutionary Party. 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Retrieved January 14, 2017, from http://educacionparatodos.cl/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/InformeRADDE-2013.pdf Ricardo Peñafiel is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science of the University of Quebec in Montreal and researcher in GRIPAL (Research Group on Political Imaginaries in Latin America). His current work focuses on populism, and the criminalisation of social movements, as a communicational phenomenon and an ideological struggle around democracy and violence. Marie-Christine Doran is Associate Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Canada, and Researcher at the International Panel on Exiting Violence (IPEV, Paris) and GRIPAL. Her current work focuses on criminalisation of protest, political violence, religion and politics, as well as human rights from below and her latest book features the Chilean case.