The Time of the Rebels: Youth Resistance Movements and 21st Century Revolutions Matthew Collin Serpent's Tail, 216pp, £12.99
Imagine that you are the government of a former Soviet republic with a history of violent civil conflict, trying to convince an armed separatist movement to put down their guns and take part in mainstream national politics. A pop concert, starring a member of the 1970s group Boney M (best known for their hits "Daddy Cool" and "Rasputin") would not be high on your list of priorities, correct? At the beginning of October, however, it was the method chosen by the government of Georgia to charm inhabitants of the breakaway region of South Ossetia.
According to a BBC report, the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, said he hoped the concert would "lure out people from their trenches" and convince them, through the power of disco dancing, that "nothing is nice as peace, nothing is nice as reconciliation". He might also have been hoping that it would bring back feel-good memories of the mass protests that brought him to power in 2003, later dubbed the "Rose revolution". As the journalist Matthew Collin recounts in The Time of the Rebels, this was part of a string of protests that swept through several former eastern bloc countries over the past decade, driven by groups of young, media-savvy activists who used popular culture as a crucial tool in non- violent campaigns to overthrow corrupt and autocratic regimes.
Collin argues that these movements, beginning in the late 1990s with the opposition to Serbia's then-president Slobodan Milosevic, followed by ones in Georgia, Ukraine and beyond, marked the birth of a new phenomenon: the 21st-century revolution. The template for this was set in Serbia, where the youth group Otpor ("Resistance") used a range of propaganda, music, and Situationist-influenced publicity stunts to build opposition to Milosevic. In defiance of increasingly violent threats from Serbian security forces, activists would stage humorous, yet pointed, protests against the regime. Otpor members in Belgrade, for example, charged passers-by money to hit a barrel that had Milosevic's face printed on the side. Stunts of this sort allowed people to publicly express their anger at a government that had dragged them into years of bloody conflict during the break-up of Yugoslavia, while simultaneously mocking its authoritarian tendencies. In this instance, the crowd fled as soon as the police arrived, leaving them with no option but to arrest the barrel.
Music, in particular, became an ideological battleground. In Serbia, folk music was used by Milosevic and his supporters to promote their narrow-minded, racist take on national identity. By contrast, Otpor soundtracked their rallies with western-style rock, a rebellious move in a country that had only recently been bombed by Nato. As one activist, Gavrilo Petrovic, tells Collin: "People in Otpor wanted Slobo out, sure. They wanted no more wars, no more death, an open state and a democratic system. But that also involves wanting to have a good band coming to play here and not having to be ashamed of this country."
As always, there is a substantial element of myth to tales of rock'n'roll rebellion. During the 2004 Ukrainian protests, the tent city that sprang up in Kiev's Maidan Square after presidential election results were falsified in favour of the prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, took on the atmosphere of a commercial rock festival to the extent that quick-thinking entrepreneurs were selling "Orange Revolution" souvenirs to the protesters themselves. Does a "21st-century revolution" mean one where its participants are reduced to the level of spectators?
Collin acknowledges that political change in any of the countries he writes about would not have happened without substantial financial and diplomatic action from outside. Crucial funding from western governments and billionaire philanthropists such as George Soros was less forthcoming in countries like Azerbaijan, where the authoritarian government of Ilham Aliyev is a strategic US ally in the "war on terror", as well as the host for a pipeline that supplies the Mediterranean with oil from the Caspian Sea.
What's more, the successful "revolutions" tended to have limited long-term effects. As later events would show, the Ukrainian upheaval was dominated by a conflict between competing oligarchs, the greatest distinction between them being whether they favoured closer ties with Russia, or with Europe and the US. The protests, which were cheered on by the western media as a conflict between "democracy" and "corruption", also masked social divisions - either between Ukrainian nationalists and the country's large Russian-speaking minority; or between the emerging middle class and workers who feared losing their jobs if the free-market capitalism championed by some members of the opposition was unleashed on the country.
But the fact remains - in Ukraine, as elsewhere - that as long as politicians continued to show utter contempt for the ballot box, ordinary people of any social stripe were excluded from having a say in their country's future. By and large, Collin avoids wider political commentary in order to portray the originality and commitment of young activists who were able to build coalitions that ranged across the political spectrum. (A feature shared by the movements is that right- and left-wingers put aside their differences in order to present a united front.) They provided an inspiration for groups around the world, ranging from the anti-Bush campaign Moveon.org in the US, to opponents of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. That groups such as Otpor, or its equivalents in Georgia and Ukraine - Kmara and Pora, respectively - melted away almost as soon as their initial objectives were achieved, is testament to their success.
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