University: Paris 8 Saint-Denis Subject: Analysis of Legitimacy Professor: Assia Boutaleb Student: Slavica Ilieska

Can We Legitimize Police Violence: the Case of the General Strike in Spain, 14th of November 2012?

Any rational person would agree that violence is not legitimate unless the consequences of such action are to eliminate a still greater evil. < Noam Chomsky1 If we have in mind Chomskys distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence, can we proclaim that police violence is legitimate in case it is used in order to prevent a greater evil? Are demonstrations considered as a basic human right to express its opinion or are the demonstrators threatening the security of other citizens? Or can we conclude without questioning that police violence is aimed at suffocating critique?2 This paper aims to question the extreme use of police violence following the latest developments during the general strike that happened on 14th of November in several countries of the Euro zone, with special focus on the events in Spain.

Questionable Media Coverage?! In order to get a clearer picture of what are the preconditions and specific causes that led to the latest events we have to briefly explain the overall situation. On 14th of November 2012 millions of workers coming from the EU countries greatly affected by the crisis joined its forces in a day of protest against austerity measures, while the Spanish and Portuguese workers went on a 24-hour general strike. In Spain the demonstrations were organized by the principle Spanish trade unions - Comisiones Obreras, Union General de Trabajadores and Union Sindical Obrera, under the slogan They leave us without a future. This was a second general strike in a year for the
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Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, et al., December 15, 1967, http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm 2 Boltanski Luc, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, page 124

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ruling Popular Party (PP) of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, in his one-year-old government. The first one happened on March 29 and it was a protest against the new labour law in Spain. Considering the numbers of demonstrators, according to the data from the syndicates they had millions of supporters on the streets and protesting with not working, and according to the Government the numbers are several hundred thousands of demonstrators and variable percentages of workers refusing to work from 10 to 30 percents. Having in mind the mentioned preconditions we will analyze the differences in the media coverage of the general strike, with a special focus on the reporting of the clashes between the police and the demonstrators, especially the extreme case of police brutality. To start with the analysis of the information from the national Spanish television RTVE3, near the end of the day 19:30h, the General Director of Interior Politics, Cristina Diaz, gives a statement for the press that 118 people have been detained (the number increases in the following hours), 74 are injured from which 43 are police officers, concluding that there is absence of bigger problems concerning the public order. The speech during the whole day coming from the authorities is that the general strike is going normal without any greater disturbances and that the support compared to the first general strike in March is dropping. If we compare the coverage of the British (Guardian 4 and Telegraph 5 ) and the Spanish (El Pais 6, La Vanguardia 7 and El Diario 8) printed media of the same event we will notice contrasting differences in the headlines. While the British media publish headlines about the violence in the streets, the clashes with the police and several cases of police brutality, the Spanish media attracts readers with speculative numbers from syndicates and Government sources about the success of the general strike and numbers of demonstrators in the streets. The contrast in coverage is also visible when we compare alternative and social media with mainstream media. While the alternative media mentions words as police brutality, mainstream media in the front news gives general stories of how the strike is going. While in the social media independent bloggers and writers talk about the most extreme cases of police brutality, mainstream media offers blogs with live coverage of the day. The most mentioned case of police violence in the mainstream media is the
3 4

http://www.rtve.es/noticias/20121114/detenidas-28-personas-12-heridas-primeras-horas-huelga-general/574680.shtml http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/nov/14/eurozone-crisis-general-strikes-protest-day-of-action 5 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/9679103/Anti-austerity-protests-violence-continues-into-the-night.html 6 http://elpais.com/tag/fecha/20121114/ 7 http://endirecto.lavanguardia.com/politica/huelga-general/20121114/54355172128/huelga-general-14n.html 8 http://www.eldiario.es/economia/directo-huelga-general_13_68723129.html#msg-122)

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case of a minor in Tarragona, who gets attacked while taking part of the demonstration together with his parents. 9 We can only assume that attack of a minor is seen as a criminal act, for condemnation, and cannot be ignored by the mainstream media as such. But that leads to marginalization of the other attacks by the mainstream media, which forwards us to a question: are they seen as normal? One other case, of an severe eye injury, especially present in the social media, provoked a campaign Ojo con tu ojo10 against the use of rubber bullets by the notorious Catalan police, Mossos d'Esquadra, which ended in several eyes losses in the last couple of years. This campaign is just one sign more that the cases of 14th of November are not isolated cases, but a series of brutalities that continue to happen in every bigger demonstration, several years in a row. Also we have to analyze the terminology that the mainstream media is using when covering the demonstrations: isolated incidents, police actions on demonstrators provocation, and outlining the number of injured policemen. Even the syndicates11 in their letter to the Government, after the general strike, dont mention the word police violence or refer to the cases of police brutality towards the demonstrators. The general public that is referring to the mainstream media as a source of information, can easily get under an impression that everything is normal, and that every person in the country has its right to express freely its opinion without any restrictions, and that their cocitizens are using theirs in the general strikes and demonstrations. To complete the story we have to mention that approximately around a month before the general strike, the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Spain announced that it is considering adopting a new normative12 to the Law of Citizens Protection, which will include a prohibition of taking photographs of police men at work and distributing them on internet, when they can threaten the persons life or are a risk to the operation that he is working on. The measure was explained as a balance of the protection of citizens rights and the rights of the security forces. What we have to ask ourselves after analyzing the case of the use of political violence in the general strike of 14th of November in Spains is: Where is the limit of the force/violence that police can use in keeping the public law and order of its citizens?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odpwc6h5Cos&feature=youtube_gdata_player http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2012/11/20/catalunya/1353441912_089638.html 11 http://www.ccoo.es/csccoo/menu.do?Informacion:Noticias:437459 12 http://www.huffingtonpost.es/2012/10/18/interior-prohibira-la-dif_n_1978475.html

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Police Violence in Political theory In order to scientifically analyze the Spanish case and the treatment of police violence in the political theory we have to go back to Weber and the followers of his Theory of Domination. Weber defines domination as: The probability that certain specific command (or all commands) will be obeyed by a given group of persons. It thus does not include very mode of exercising power or influence over other persons. Domination (authority) in this sense may be based on the most diverse motives of compliance: all the way from simple habituation to the most purely rational calculation of advantage. Hence every genuine form of domination implies a minimum of voluntary compliance, that is, an interest (based on ulterior motives of genuine acceptance) in obedience. 13 Furthermore, following Webers steps, Pierre Bourdieu deepens the theory clarifying that the state uses physical and symbolic violence to control its power. Specifically Bourdieu underlines: The state thus appears as the central bank which guarantees all certificates. One may say of the state, in the terms Leibniz used about God, that it is the "geometral locus of all perspectives." This is why one may generalize Weber's wellknown formula and see in the state the holder of the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence. 14 He explains the act whereby someone is granted a title - a socially recognized qualification as an act of giving power to the state or its representatives to do legitimate symbolic violence in its name. If we put Bourdieus thoughts in the context of the Spanish case we can say that the title that is given to the policemen and the state media as state representatives gives them a right to commit symbolic or physical violence in its name. To go one step further with Bourdieus analysis we have to find a way to clear our minds from the symbolic violence that has be done to us, undo the processes and begin to think critically. On the question of semantic and physical violence and their correlation Luc Boltanski deepens the analysis in his On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation saying: The semantic violence inflicted on the texture of language to fix its usages and stabilize its references is not sufficient to achieve conformity of conduct, so that it is always necessary (or virtually always) to combine it with physical violence, or at least the threat of it, to stabilize interpretations and hence remove the risk of an open dispute. To the violence, verbal or physical, that is said to be unleashed when a dispute escalates, the institution thus counter-poses a violence chained to the semantic and administrative systems which justify its existence: When the consciousness of the
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Weber Max, The Types of Legitimate Domination, Page 212 Bourdieu Pierre, Social Space and Symbolic Power, Sociological Theory, Vol. 7, No. 1. (Spring, 1989), pp. 14-25.

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latent presence of violence in a legal institution disappears (writes Walter Benjamin) the institution falls into decay. This violence shown by Benjamin to be, for example, inherent in law can take the form of a sort of hidden hoard, whose existence is invariably denies, for law-making or manifest itself, but justifying itself by reference to legitimacy as law-preserving15. Benjamin Walter, in his Critique of Violence, as quoted by Boltanski, precisely explains: The ignominy of such an authoritylies in the fact that in this authority the separation of law-making and law-preserving violence is suspended. If the first is required to prove its worth in victory, the second is subject to the restriction that it may not set itself new ends. Police violence is emancipated from both conditions. It is law-making, for its characteristic function is not the promulgation of laws but the assertion of legal claims for any decree, and lawpreserving because it is at the disposal of these ends. 16 Furthermore in our subject the Spanish case of police violence and its legitimacy we can use several explanations from Boltanski. He is deepening the analysis of the state and its power, confirming that one of its major roles is to preserve the reality in its ordinary way, and for that the state is reconfirming its established order through taking awat the attention of the citizens by organizing rituals, ceremonies, parades, award of decorations. In a less extreme situation as we can recognize in the Spanish case, the state is keeping its simple domination by allowing critique to a certain extent and in the same time its control because the actors never know to what extent or how far they can go. Precisely he is identifying the effects of simple domination in two kinds of situations: On the one hand, in borderline situation associated with contexts where people are partially or wholly deprived of basic liberties and where deep asymmetries are maintained or created by employing explicit violence particularly (but not exclusively) physical violence. It seems to me preferable in cases of this kind, whose paradigm is slavery, to speak of oppression. But we can also invoke oppression in numerous, less extreme scenarios, where the maintenance of an orthodoxy is obtained by means of violence, particularly police violence, aimed at suffocating critique.17 In the chapter The Effects of Simple Domination and Denial of Reality, Boltanski, once again gives answers to our questions in the specific case of police violence on demonstrators in Spain. Concretely he is explaining the usage of the critique as a form of provocation in order to reveal the domination: The way in which critique undertakes to bring out the contradictions contained in a certain state of social reality often takes the form of provocation. A gesture, which might be compared with those of madness were it not made intentionally, even strategically, is publicly performed to get spectators to react to shake them to behave in a way that is no longer within the limits of the
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Boltanski Luc, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, page 94 Benjamin Walter, Critique of Violence, page 141 17 Boltanski Luc, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, page 124

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complex grammars that manage contradictions, whose presence, blurred in the ordinary course of existence, is then unmasked. Thus, for example, provocation this time manifesting itself in acts of violence can aim to put political orders invoking democracy and human rights in contradiction with the values they claim to adhere to, by forcing them into the repressive violence that is latent in them. 18 In order to go a step further in our analysis we will use information from a public debate between Noam Chomsky and Hanna Arendt back in 1967, where Chomsky is elaborating that having in mind that the government happens to have a monopoly of terror and it is developing new techniques of control of demonstrations and crowds, it leaves us without any other choice but as citizens of the world dominant power, the world's major aggressive power -- that we use the freedoms that still exist in it to try to build up resistance to participation in war.19 Considering the answer of the demonstrators in the recent general strikes in Spain to the police violence with violence we can also find an answer in Chomskys thoughts, concerning the protests for peace and against the wars started by the USA, in the 1967 th: The second reason for non violence, I think, is that clearly violence antagonizes the uncommitted. And what we want to do is not antagonize them, but attract them to, involve them in, the resistance to the War. We want to get them to take part in active resistance to this and whatever future war the United States will attempt to conduct. Toward this end, violence carried out by peace demonstrators would be a serious "counterproductive" tactical error. 20 Conclusion To conclude in Chomsky words he said: if violence could be shown to lead to the overthrow of lasting suppression of human life that now obtains in vast parts of the world, that would be a justification for violence. But this has not been shown at all, in my view.21 Starting with this thought and having in mind that demonstrations are a basic right to express its own opinion, there is no justification of acts of violence towards peaceful protesters. At the same time the basic aim of the protest in Boltanski style, should be one and only: to critique and unmask the domination and most of all reveal its attacks to democracy and human rights.

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Boltanski Luc, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, page 112 Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag (December 15, 1967) http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm
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Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag (December 15, 1967) http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag (December 15, 1967) http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm

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Bibliography 1. Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, et al., December 15, 1967, http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm 2. Weber Max, The Types of Legitimate Domination 3. Bourdieu Pierre, Social Space and Symbolic Power, Sociological Theory 4. Boltanski Luc, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation 5. Benjamin Walter, Critique of Violence

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