A decade later, in 1930, in his most famous and dramatic campaign—the salt satyagraha—Gandhi again used mass protest to make visible the illegitimacy of British rule. This time the tool was mass civil disobedience. Gandhi asked Indians to defy the salt tax, the government monopoly on the production and sale of salt. Disobeying this tax was too innocuous to justify violent state repression. But when undertaken on a mass scale it also proved impossible to ignore. Moreover, the salt tax disproportionately burdened the poor and became an evocative symbol of British disregard for Indian lives and interests.

Gandhi began the salt satyagraha by leading a group of his closest associates in a thrilling 25-day, 240-mile march. Each day the suspense around Gandhi’s imminent arrest and popular unrest excited public attention. The campaign culminated in nationwide boycotts and demonstrations with thousands upon thousands of arrests. Moreover, graphic accounts of the brutal beating of unarmed protestors circulated in the global media, turning public opinion against the British and bringing Gandhi and satyagraha to the world’s attention.

In the century since, satyagraha has become better known as nonviolent direct action or simply nonviolence, and it has spread globally, establishing itself as a potent force in the U.S. civil rights movement, the anti-authoritarian struggles of the 1980s and 1990s such as the “people power” movement in the Philippines and Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution,” and the Arab Spring of 2011. And yet, for all its success, what exactly nonviolent action is, and how it works, has become less and less clear, an ambiguity that could hamper its usefulness in a landscape increasingly characterized by intense economic and political polarization.

Rev. Ralph Abernathy, left, and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., right, are taken by a policeman as they led a line of demonstrators into the business section of Birmingham, Ala., on April 12, 1963. Courtesy of Associated Press.

When we picture nonviolent protest today, we tend to imagine vast crowds occupying public spaces, marching, waving signs, chanting slogans, confronting state authority. For Gandhi, however, nonviolent protest required something more than the peaceful mobilization of large numbers of people. Its aim was not just to pressure the state but to move political opponents to rethink their positions and commitments. And to do that, Gandhi believed that protestors had to display and demonstrate disciplined fearlessness and a willingness to sacrifice. It was this kind of commitment that would work to persuade a political opponent by “opening his ears, which are otherwise shut, to the voice of reason.”

But is such a process of political persuasion truly possible? Ironically, nonviolence’s global popularity has increased alongside a decline of conviction in the power of nonviolent persuasion. Both the meaning of the word “nonviolence” and the concept of nonviolence itself have become ambiguous in the years since Gandhi’s great successes.

Nowhere is this clearer than India, where nonviolence is so closely associated with Gandhi himself that it’s difficult to ask serious questions about it. For the left, nonviolence is associated with Gandhi’s Hindu-nationalism and his gradualistic approach to caste and economic reforms. In this context, nonviolence seems conservative, even reactionary. From the right, nonviolence is seen as weak, emasculated nationalism. And even Gandhians themselves insist that nonviolence is a way of life that would be disfigured by treating it as a political tactic. Thus, the wider argument about what Gandhi represents in India has obscured questions about the value and meaning of nonviolence there.

Globally, nonviolence has become defined as a set of universal and portable political techniques, but its goals have changed significantly over time. The first generation of activists shaped the nonviolence of the civil rights movement in the U.S. and the anti-nuclear protests in the U.K. They successfully built up a repertoire of protest techniques that captured and developed core elements of Gandhi’s original project. Successful nonviolent direct action came to be defined by two key aspects: disruption and discipline.

Disruption on a mass scale is without doubt the most celebrated feature of nonviolent resistance. Non-cooperation and large-scale civil disobedience, by using tactics like the mass boycott, can draw attention to unjust laws. Consider the bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement, which so effectively exposed the indignities of segregation. In both cases, the symbolic elements were tied closely to practical experiments in interrupting day-to-day activities.

In this iconic image published in The New York Times on May 4, 1963, a 17-year-old high school student is attacked by a police dog in Birmingham, Ala.
Photo by Bill Hudson/Associated Press.

Over time, we have learned that nonviolence can draw participation from large numbers of people more effectively and efficiently than armed movements ever could. By either withdrawing participation and popular consent or criticizing and defying specific institutions and laws deemed unjust, successful nonviolent campaigns can puncture the legitimacy and authority of the state as such.

For protests to be nonviolent, however, disruption itself has to be disciplined. Protestors have to show restraint, often through a willingness to sacrifice and suffer. This includes everything from the discipline of walking and marching for weeks to stoically resisting the provocation and violence of police and vigilante groups. Instilling this kind of discipline and restraint were the main focus of the nonviolent training sessions and the codes of conduct that both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. insisted upon when they embarked on large-scale campaigns. The need for discipline also informed the preference for silence, prayer, and song over fiery speeches and the shouting of slogans in nonviolent protests.

In Gandhi and King’s view, disciplined action would dramatize injustice and awaken moral conscience. For Gandhi discipline showed self-mastery; for King it showed dignity. For both men these moral ideals were key to the political and strategic success of the protests, which could force a recalcitrant opponent or public to stop and look critically at themselves, to ask whether their commitments and practices match their ideals. While confrontation, intimidation, or coercion might force opponents to reckon with protesters, only nonviolence had the potential to convert opponents.

The more confrontational the tactic—when the threat of provoking violence was at hand—the more crucial it was for nonviolent protest to maintain discipline. This unique combination would confuse and off-balance state responses to insurgent protest, as was powerfully demonstrated during Gandhi’s salt satyagraha and King’s Birmingham campaign.

Nonviolence entered a new era after King’s assassination, when radical social movements gained traction, and the importance of discipline and restraint dramatically declined in the late 1960s. To my mind, this has been the most fundamental but overlooked shift in the theory and practice of nonviolence. Partly out of confidence, partly out of impatience, radical protest instead celebrated what were considered to be more confrontational, transgressive, and authentic expressions of dissent and opposition. The nonviolence of Gandhi and King, with its emphasis on restraint, suffering, sacrifice, and persuasion, was increasingly characterized as a principled commitment to nonviolence but not a strategically successful one.

Nonviolent theorists and activists, including the influential Gene Sharp, today advocate for a more narrowly conceived “strategic” nonviolence. They celebrate the disruptive, confrontational, militant aspects of the history of nonviolence. And in so doing, what counts as nonviolence has expanded, most often in the direction of more elastic definitions, to the point where anything short of armed rebellion seems to count as nonviolent.

Clearly, collective programs of disruption have proven especially effective at undermining state legitimacy and toppling authoritarian regimes. This was the core lesson of the successive protest strategies of the velvet revolutions from Eastern Europe to Tahrir Square. And extreme or confrontational tactics, like those pioneered by AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in the 1980s and ’90s, can draw attention to injustice and build solidarity within a movement.

But in turbulent political times, when the primary goal of protest might well be to overcome polarization by reaching out to and persuading fellow citizens, disruption may prove much less useful. In India today, for example, Gandhian-style nonviolent marches still take place but they’re paradoxically used by political parties to intimidate and provoke. Whether these are genuinely nonviolent is rarely discussed. Even Anna Hazare’s famous fast against corruption broke most of Gandhi’s explicit rules because it was coercive.

In a time of escalating inequalities and resentments, we need to find a politics that enables us to relate to fellow citizens with dignity. To do this we should recover the lost traits of nonviolent discipline and restraint, remembering that nonviolence cannot simply be a symbolic or rhetorical gesture. The details of the organization and enactment of protests create a space for the difficult work of persuasion to take place, creating potential for a shared democratic political life. At its best, this disciplined nonviolent action can incite a reluctant populace to engage in acts of moral re-evaluation, repairing some of our divisions.

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Four years ago, in Germany’s newspaper for intellectuals, Die Zeit, the prominent author Gero von Randow called for Tunisia to be granted membership in the European Union. Today, we Europeans should be scratching our heads about why we haven’t already asked.

Yes, Tunisia is in North Africa, not far across the Mediterranean from Italy. But as a German who has done democracy work in Tunisia, I’ve learned there are three strong and rational reasons for making Tunisia an EU member, as well as an emotional one, which might be more important.

But first, the rational reasons. There is the strategic argument that, at a time when millions of migrants are flooding into EU countries from Arab regions, the EU would be wise to have its own beachhead on Arab soil.

After all, the integration of our new Arab citizens who have already arrived in Europe will require great efforts. A European Tunisia might well mitigate some immigration pressure to Europe, by offering an Arab option. (Tunisia today already shelters more than 300,000 refugees, mainly from neighboring Libya.) And it would be a wise parallel. Just as European communities learn through integrating people into their cities and towns, the whole of Europe would learn by working to integrate a new country.

The billions in development aid that would flow to Tunisia, a nation of 11 million with a per capita income that is less than half of the EU’s poorest members today, would pay off in the long term, since success in Tunisia could bring about a change for the entire Maghreb, where people are watching the struggling democracy closely. EU membership for Tunisia would be akin to a Marshall Plan for the region.

Then there’s the argument that Tunisia has been building a deliberative and democratic society that we should encourage and honor. There is no greater effort to form an enlightened Islamic society, as the Nobel Peace Prize committee recently acknowledged in giving its award to Tunisia’s leading civil society group. And Europe, by embracing Tunisia’s commitment to democracy, would offer a contrast to Turkey, a would-be European Union member which is descending into illiberal Islamist nationalism. The moderate Tunisian Islamists, the Ennahda Movement, have no equal in the world, and Ennahda leader Rachid al-Ghannouchi was rightly applauded for willingly stepping down from power 2013 to make way for democracy and the rule of law.

Then there’s the fairness argument. Tunisia launched the Arab Spring, and its push for democracy, but the spring is now drowning in Arab blood. The West, with its disastrous collaboration with iron-fisted rulers in the region, bears responsibility for this. Many people in the Maghreb—the region that includes Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco—are already drawing the depressing conclusion that the West doesn’t really believe in democracy, so why should they? On a recent visit to Tunisia, students from the University of Carthage asked me pointedly why they couldn’t travel freely and go on student exchanges like their counterparts in Europe.

Offering Tunisia membership in the EU would counter this narrative—by rewarding democracy. And it would be fair—an acknowledgment Tunisians’ sacrifice, through violence and terrorism and economic struggle, to keep their democratic revolution alive.

Finally, there’s the emotional reality that Tunisia feels European. It’s a wonderful country, a pearl of the Mediterranean that resembles Sicily. It now grows more olives than the whole of Italy. Its multilingual population is very familiar with the French and deeply connected to the Italians. It’s in the heart of a region that has been deeply tied to Europe for thousands of years.

Those who have spent enough time in Tunisia know that this is where East meets West; that Tunisia is a European bridge.

Of course, the Tunisians may balk. The country was a French protectorate until 1956, and maybe Tunisia wouldn’t want to feel again like a European colony. But it would be the right thing to ask. And it surely is the right time.

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Californians know this well. We feel such an obligation to live up to our reputation as “The Great Exception” among U.S. states, as the writer Carey McWilliams famously called us, that we routinely embrace novel schemes that other American places run from, like a $70 billion high-speed rail project.

People in Tunisia, where I spent last week, know the pressures of exceptionalism too. The North African country of 11 million is where the Arab Spring began four years ago with the toppling of a four-decade-old dictatorship, and it’s the only Arab Spring country that has made the transition to democracy. It’s also blessed with an economy that is open to the outside world, an army that doesn’t aspire to rule the country, a strong civil society, and a tradition of women’s equality.

I went to Tunisia for California reasons, and not just because both places have similar weather and grow a lot of olives and almonds. Writing about our state and how it has been shaped by direct democracy, too often for ill, made me curious how initiatives and referenda work elsewhere. In recent years, I’ve helped build a global network of journalists and scholars interested in how citizens engage directly in the lawmaking process in our respective societies. In the process, I’ve learned that California’s initiative process is a global outlier. Direct democracy is practiced in more than 100 countries, but none of them has initiatives so inflexible to later amendment and so dominated by money. My travel to other places practicing direct democracy usually gives me fresh ideas for how to improve our process.

Tunisia’s new democracy is the latest to leap into direct democracy, and the stakes couldn’t be higher, as the country builds a new democratic culture atop its authoritarian heritage (prior to its homegrown dictatorship, Tunisia was a French colony). Last year Tunisians ratified a new constitution, and elected a new national parliament and president. Picture America’s fledgling democracy circa 1790.

Now, Tunisia’s new constitution requires the establishment of a new system of regional and local government, since the overthrown dictator had centralized virtually all power in his office to make it much, much easier to steal. The constitution also establishes that direct democracy be part of the new set-up.

In all these ways, the Tunisian case is relevant to California. Our own governance has also been highly centralized. The culprits here have been not dictators but voters who for decades have passed ballot measures that, under various guises, take power away from local governments and give it to Sacramento.

I’ve written two books, and too many articles to count, making the case for reversing this centralization. My argument is that we need a total redesign of our state and local governance structure, one that includes remaking our initiative process so it can’t be so easily commandeered by a handful of powerful people.

So Tunisia appeared to offer a potential answer to a question I’ve often wished we could pose to ourselves in California: What would happen if a place had to design from scratch a whole new system of state and local government, one reliant on direct democracy?

The answer, as I learned over four days of an international direct democracy forum I helped organize at the University of Carthage, was sobering. Such a task is enormously difficult. And it’s even harder if—like Tunisians—you feel the weight of living up to your reputation as an exceptional place.

The Tunisians I met seemed almost paralyzed by the size of the opportunity, and the need to design something that won’t just work for their country, but could be a model for others. I was peppered with questions about other places (one Tunisian, who is involved in a participatory budgeting experiment in four cities here, asked me about Vallejo, Calif.’s experience with such budgeting).

At the same time, Tunisia’s processes will need to fit its own traditions and faith. In the most striking speech of the forum, the co-founder of the moderate Islamist party Ennahda, Rached Ghannouchi, made a powerful case that Islam is itself a form of direct democracy. He argued that the concept of shura, or consultation, mirrors direct democracy in that both require that people in power listen and learn, especially to those most affected, before making decisions.

Tunisians in the audience were split on whether this argument went too far. And, even then, the nature of direct democracy was not as divisive a question as how to build a new and decentralized governing system.

Our forum convened the first public debate on the subject, with eight participants, representing the government, the major political parties, and the powerful association of trade unions. The scene would have been familiar to Californians. Tunisians, like Californians, like to say that local governments need more power. But the details of how to do that cause endless debate.

Before the forum, some Tunisian officials had indicated they planned to hold the first municipal elections later this year and complete the decentralization process in a matter of months. But the government official who has been organizing the effort predicted decentralization would take a decade, and perhaps longer before any new local government structure had “balance” and “stability.”

Other debaters pointed out all the things to think about. How would you provide services? What kind of financial controls would be placed on new cities that were suddenly dealing with lots of money? And yes, how could such a process prevent major fights over taxes? One member of the audience shouted the timeless municipal question: Who will pick up the trash?

In the face of such a big task, delay began to look attractive. The debater from the social democratic party Ettakatol said the country needed a “road map” for the process—a plan for how to put together the plan.

The debate was supposed to last an hour, but the participants kept talking, with the kind of dogmatic passion you only get in California at Santa Monica City Council meetings. At 90 minutes, the translators, exhausted, quit, but the debate continued on. At the two-hour mark, international audience members left, since we couldn’t understand the Arabic. The debate continued.

Tunisians have done so much hard work—toppling a dictatorship, adopting a new constitution, electing a new government—but building state and local governments democratically may be harder than all of those things combined. The next morning, still thinking about the debate, I took a short ride to the Mediterranean, dipped my toes in the water, and felt overwhelmed by the vastness of the sea.

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