Google Inc. executive Wael Ghonim addresses a mass crowd inside Tahrir Square in Cairo February 8, 2011. Ghonim was held for almost two weeks, during which he said state security kept him blindfolded. Activists say that Ghonim was behind a Facebook group that helped to inspire the protests.
Dylan Martinez/Reuters
Year in Review
Reshaping history: Crucial players in 2011's revolutions
john allemang
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published
Last updated
2011 was a year of living history, a period when dormant forces were awakened out of a deep sleep and random glimpses of disorder coalesced into a global movement of democratic desire. These seven thought leaders helped shape the year's key revolutions
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Supporters of Andreas Baum of the Pirate Party react after first exit polls for the city-state election in Berlin September 18, 2011.— Thomas Peter/Reuters
The Pirate Party
As ossified political parties have proved unable to accommodate their passions and desires, young people have turned away, ensuring that government is even more out-of-touch and unresponsive. Democracy abhors a vacuum, but who would have predicted that the gap would be filled by a punkish skull-and-crossbones crusade that began in Sweden with a platform focused on free filesharing? Yet it's that very element of unpredictability that has attracted young voters to an organization that flaunts its unwillingness to play along.
The Pirate Party has figured out how to expand its rebellious range without losing its subversive strain of theatricality since it first proposed the reform of patent laws and the strengthening of privacy legislation in 2006, stressing open government and providing services to Wikileaks. Having already won two Swedish seats in the European Parliament, the Pirates made a surprise breakthrough in Germany in September by winning 15 seats in the city-state of Berlin's parliament (under a voting system of proportional representation). The party is now active in over 40 countries, including Canada.
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Calgary's Mayor Naheed Nenshi is pictured after attending a Luncheon hosted by The Economic Club of Canada, in Toronto on Wednesday September 21, 2011.— Chris Young for The Globe and Mail
Naheed Nenshi
Old-style politics leaves people cold, the young most of all. Where time-serving cynicism abounds, creativity is silenced and hopefulness scorned. The sudden and joyful arrival of 39-year-old Naheed Nenshi as mayor of Calgary drastically altered that dreary template and supplied a powerful shock of delight to a moribund political system. There's a place for talent, real talent, in politics, and you don't have to park your brains or exuberance at the door.
Mr. Nenshi is an Ismaili Muslim with a Harvard pedigree, an urbanist policy wonk who refused to accept that people like him and his energized supporters didn't fit the old Cowtown model. In a drab era where politicians have retreated into a safety-first survival mode, his optimistic devotion to new ideas is refreshingly heterodox.
He's both a fighter and a reconciler, an inspirational civic booster who's willing to point out what's wrong in plain speech that refuses to prevaricate. Honesty and openness is exciting in a public figure, and also unifying: Mr. Nenshi channels a spirit of street-level humanity that makes politics seem personal rather than somebody else's business.
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Indian social activist Anna Hazare breaks his fast with a glass of juice offered by a child at the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) recreation ground in Mumbai on December 28, 2011. The anti-corruption activist called off his latest hunger strike December 28 but signalled he would step up his political efforts to turn voters against the ruling party and government. Mr. Hazare began his fast December 27 to demand that the government pass a strong new anti-graft law that would create a powerful ombudsman tasked with identifying and prosecuting corrupt public officials.— Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images
Anna Hazare
Corruption is endemic in India's booming economy, where the impediments of an old-style imperial bureaucracy can always be expedited by new money. But in a democracy as vibrant and noisy as India's, even greedy politicians may be forced to feel shame, if only someone is brave enough to call them out and stay the course when the guilty fight back. Anna Hazare, a 74-year-old rural activist and retired soldier, has been spending his later years opposing powerful interests and getting his way through public hunger strikes – a tactic of self-sacrificing desperation that marshals India's best protest traditions to counter the slippery habits of self-aggrandizing politicians.
In April, he led a public fast in Delhi to campaign for strengthened anti-corruption laws, winning concessions from the government within days. When it appeared that the legislation would be watered down, he renewed his protest and mobilized a class-crossing swathe of disenchanted countrymen against the complacent status quo.
Refusing to accept the way things always have been, Mr. Hazare shook up a fatalistic citizenry and showed Occupiers worldwide that idealism needs to be pushy and specific to realize its dreams.
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Google Inc. executive Wael Ghonim addresses a mass crowd inside Tahrir Square in Cairo February 8, 2011. Ghonim was held for almost two weeks, during which he said state security kept him blindfolded. Activists say that Ghonim was behind a Facebook group that helped to inspire the protests.— Dylan Martinez/Reuters
Wael Ghonim
A self-described dreamer, the 31-year-old Google marketing executive helped dash the cruel reality of Hosni Mubarak's Egypt by creating a Facebook page to honour a blogger killed by police. This simple act of social-media solidarity, called “We are all Khaleed Sayed,” amplified the idealistic opposition spirit that had been quietly building for years behind the scenes, leading to the well-organized protests that swiftly toppled a government indifferent to the youthful longing for a better world.
Mr. Ghonim himself spent 12 days in blindfolded internment while his Tahrir preparation came to fruition. An unlikely revolutionary, like so many of his generation who overcame fear to press change on their long-intimidated countrymen, he has remained an optimistic voice for transformation.
While the military is still entrenched and defiant against the possibility of rapid change, he's drawing on his marketing savvy to rewrite history and dismantle a tired old-guard regime through the high-energy hopes of the young.
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Anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny speaks from a stage during a protest against recent parliamentary election results in Moscow December 24, 2011. Tens of thousands of flag-waving and chanting protesters called on Saturday for a disputed parliamentary election to be rerun, increasing pressure on Vladimir Putin as he seeks a new term as Russian president.— Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
Alexey Navalny
The burgeoning Russian middle class has been treated as apolitical and passive by Vladimir Putin, content just to ride the economic wave and let the country's all-controlling leadership do as it pleased. That orthodoxy has now been shattered by a charismatic 35-year-old lawyer/blogger who emerged first as an anti-corruption agitator and has now turned his social-media talents against Mr. Putin's United Russia party – “the party of crooks and thieves” as it's known to Mr. Navalny's adoring followers.
Although his selectively nationalist rhetoric makes some democracy crusaders nervous, Mr. Navalny's courage is not in doubt. His allegations of fraud in December's disputed parliamentary elections brought tens of thousands of his supporters into the streets and led to his arrest. Unintimidated, he emerged from jail and straightaway picked up on his theme that the Russian president must be prevented from retaining power.
“We are the majority,” he proclaims, reawakening Russia's dormant populist spirit – and then backs up his assertion by crafting the largest public protests ever witnessed in the quiescent Putin era.
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Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei walks out of his studio in Beijing November 15, 2011. Mr. Ai's secretive 81-day detention this year sparked worldwide attention.— David Gray/Reuters
Ai Weiwei
He has been ordered to keep silent, but the puckish Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei can't help himself. Having endured the disappearance, confinement and maltreatment that Chinese authorities inflict on prominent activists, he's recovered the spirit of outspokenness that made him a vital symbol for his pro-democracy compatriots.
His global fame (based in part on his contribution to Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium) was once thought to have rendered him immune from retribution as an artistic icon and social-media chatterbox who successfully represented a new spirit of Chinese modernization. But his independent insouciance proved too much for the government's authoritarians as the Arab Spring spun off into the Chinese activists' Jasmine Revolution. Locked up on trumped-up accusations of tax evasion for three months, he was repeatedly interrogated about his pro-democracy outbursts and then set free on the short leash of perpetual surveillance.
He could quickly disappear again, like his imprisoned fellow activist Liu Xiaobo, but that looming threat hasn't persuaded him to do as he's been told. In a country where Tahrir-style crowds of protesters officially don't exist, one free-speaking man has become the grinning face of change.
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Kalle Lasn and his colleagues at Adbusters magazine called for an occupation of Wall Street in June, launching a social movement that spread worldwide.
Kalle Lasn
If anger were a brand, Kalle Lasn would be its image consultant. The 69-year-old Adbusters magazine founder may disdain the ad agencies whose sales pitches he guys so stylishly, but he's a master of their dark arts. Anyone could have, and should have, tapped into the mounting frustrations of those who felt victimized by an age of corporate triumphalism. But when even a hamstrung Barack Obama was seen as part of the problem, it fell to B.C.-based Mr. Lasn and his colleagues to find new methods of rousing the dormant dissatisfaction of the abandoned left.
In June, they crafted the now-iconic image of the dancer on Wall Street's charging bull, fronting a crowd of tear-gassed protesters, and linked it to a new Twitter hashtag, #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. The Occupy movement rapidly took shape and found common cause from that single pictorial idea, validating Mr. Lasn's belief in the power of aesthetics to shape public imagination.
He disclaims any leadership role and can't be held responsible for the shapeless self-indulgence of some of his campaign's many progeny. If he'd had his way, Occupy's demands would have been much more focused, Wall Street would now be busted and Washington would be a new and better place.
