IT’S THE REVOLUTION, IDIOTS!

A spectre is haunting Europe. And no, I do not mean the original sense of the phrase Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto. It could be, of course, but it is not.

I mean the uprisings in France, Belgium, Italy, England and Albania and, to a lesser extent, Portugal and Spain. Of everything we are witnessing, one thing stands out: the attitude of most European leaders and heads of government. At first glance, it is a political stance we might call even-handed. But, to be more precise, we could call it “soft”, “gutless” and “spineless”. In Andalusia, we would call it the familiar flojera — a lack of backbone.

“Strongly condemning the protests”, says French President Emmanuel Macron, while speaking about the right to demonstrate and the need to bring the opinions of “young people” — from Youthland, naturally — off the streets and into the proper forums, such as the French National Assembly. Assuming they do not burn down the magnificent Palais Bourbon first, I say. It has just turned 300, after all, and is due for a complete renovation, like the city hall in Limoges.

Statements like this show that Europe has a serious problem. Those who should be proposing solutions to what is happening are not doing so and, worse still, will not do so. The main reason is that they have not even properly diagnosed the problem. No European leader has realised that the uprisings share the same roots across all these countries. Every kind of street unrest — from the burning of public buildings in France and attacks on police in Belgium to clashes between citizens in England, looting of luxury shops in Italy and cutesy street encampments in Spain — has the same cause: it is a revolution.

Everything suggests that we are in the “initial phase” of a revolution, according to the diagnosis set out by Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin in his book The Sociology of Revolution. He knew what he was talking about. He lived through the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which forced him to flee Russia for the United States. There he went on to teach sociology at Harvard University and founded its Department of Sociology.

Written in 1925, the book is strikingly relevant — and that is no pun. Sorokin’s central argument is that stable societies hold together through “conditioned reflexes”: moral habits, respect for the law, religious norms and education. These reflexes act as brakes and mechanisms of social cohesion.

The initial phase of this revolutionary process — which Sorokin calls “licence or unbridled madness” — therefore focuses on destroying moral, legal, religious and educational norms. In this phase, the institutions that suffer the greatest destruction are:

1. The judicial and legal system: Courts are discredited, existing laws are abolished, and the police and security forces are stripped of their authority.

2. Property and economic institutions: Private property is attacked as the foundation of the entire economy. As Sorokin wrote in 1925: “Shops and businesses are raided, expropriated or shut down under the rhetoric of redistribution”.

3. The Church and religious institutions: As the strongest internal moral restraint in a stable society, they come under attack. Temples and churches are desecrated, religious figures are persecuted, and religious dogma and morality are ridiculed and temporarily replaced by secular cults.

4. Central government and public administration: Monarchies, parliaments and public administrations are abolished by force, Sorokin says.

5. The family and traditional bonds of affection: This includes attacks on the traditional family, as well as on customs and traditions.

All of this is done through a kind of “meta-language”, as George Orwell might have put it. Language becomes purely emotional, dogmatic and violent. Complex ideas are reduced to simplistic slogans that divide the world strictly into “good” people — the revolutionary people — and “bad” people, the enemies of the revolution.

The immediate consequence of this initial phase, Sorokin concludes, is that groups traditionally at the bottom of the social pyramid — the most disadvantaged classes, but also marginal or criminal elements — take control of the streets and the new provisional institutions. Meanwhile, the former elites are persecuted, stripped of their rights and made targets of collective hatred.

We will leave the second, or final, phase of the revolution for another time. For now, I invite the patient reader of this column to take part in a spot-the-symptoms exercise: how many of these attacks on institutions are we witnessing in Europe today?

That is the point: the revolution is already under way, and our political leaders have not realised it.