Protests or institutions?

At the origin of women's rights, protest. At the origin of the right to respect biodiversity, protest. At the origin of the right to strike, the right to vote, freedom of expression, always and still protest. Democracy lives from and through protest. It fades when protests are banned, condemned, repressed. It shines when the people protest, rise up, show that they exist. Because protesting is not just saying "no"; it is also saying "yes," "yes" to another world for all. Protesting is an act of subversion of imposed habits. As is poetry. Therefore, protests must live, here and elsewhere, for democracy to live.

But political experience teaches us that if protests only take to the streets, they also run the risk of getting lost. The originality of the social movements of the last thirty years lies, in part, in the fact that they were born and developed outside the institutions that traditionally carry protests. This is what makes them strong.

First, because they can present themselves as apolitical and mobilize those who would have had difficulty following the instructions of this or that political party. Second, because this lack of organization gives protests the appearance of a permanent party; it leaves room for inventiveness, for the creativity of words, and multiplies the forms of action. One day, however, this happy life of protests encounters the words that frighten it: representation, institution, duration. Black words facing the blue words of protest. The rejection of institutions is undoubtedly understandable by the protesters' concern not to leave to others the function of translating their demands because, for them, to translate is to betray. And yet, without representation and without institutions, protest movements become exhausted, disappear into the sands and/or are taken over by groups or parties that are themselves institutionalized.

Institutions respond, in fact, to a democratic necessity for two main reasons. The first is to guarantee the autonomy and duration of the protest movement. At the base of every institution, there is a group that produces an idea and, to prevent it from being taken over by others or lost, organizes itself to keep it alive beyond the moment that produced it. Idea and duration. The second reason is to establish a place for normative deliberation. The particular purpose of a protest is to produce its own norms in social, fiscal, and ecological matters. Because these legal rules are not already there, structured public spaces of representation are necessarily required; in short, institutions where these rules, precisely, are discussed and formed. Hence the importance of institutionalizing citizens' conventions.

Supporting the democratic nature of this institutional mode of norm-building at a time when representation and institutions are suspected of being the two evils of democracy is not, a priori, obvious. And yet... Either protest movements equip themselves with institutions to say "what is the case with what is," to use Luc Boltanski's expression, or they will abandon the power to say it to others, who have their own institutions.