Dec. 18 (Bloomberg) -- This year has been one of vibrant
and daring social protest, closing with the tumult in Ukraine
and Thailand. Disturbances have taken place even in ultra-stable
Singapore. Protests have rumbled on intermittently in several
austerity-afflicted European countries, and during the summer
mass demonstrations in Turkey and Brazil filled the media.
Citizens across the world, it seems, are bravely taking up W.H.
Auden’s famous injunction “to undo the folded lie ... the lie
of Authority/Whose buildings grope the sky.”
The occurrence of so many protests within such a short
space of time invites the thought that a new international wave
of citizen-led democracy is upon us. Analysts have long talked
about the incipient emergence of a cosmopolitan civil society.
Many academics and activists see global civic mobilization as
the social counterpart to economic globalization: An
internationalization of protest and citizen power can, they
insist, mitigate the disenfranchising effects of financial
globalism. The protests seem to counter-balance notions of
cultural relativism, as pictures capture Brazilians, Turks,
Ukrainians, Italians, Russians, Egyptians and Thais engaged in
similar street battles. No wonder hopes are high for what might
be termed a new “democratic cosmopolitanism.”
