Hope from below: composing the commons in Iceland

Never before has a ‘peacetime’ state constitution been drafted by an Assembly of ordinary citizens.  Never before has a constitution’s fundamental values framework been ‘crowd-sourced’.  Never before has a constitution been produced under the intense gaze of a population, scrutinising each draft as it is uploaded onto a website, watching meetings beamed live on the internet, with publics relaying feedback for improvement in real time.  Never before has so much been at stake in the peacetime re-drafting of a constitution in such circumstances, and never before have citizens had such a stake in the process of its creation.  Never again can the world be told by the custodians of the old that the people cannot be relied upon to write the contract between citizens and government, and write it well. ..


In January 2008, as the magnitude of the crisis was becoming apparent, a loneHörður Torfason began to sing protest songs outside the Icelandic parliament, day-in-day-out.  Persistently, insistently, during the dark days of the Icelandic wintertime, he struck a rhythm in harmony with mainstream, hitherto (on-the-whole) silent, opinion, and contributed to drawing-out the profound disharmony between the population at large and the corrosive politics that had ruled elite Icelandic affairs, particularly since around 1991.  Post-Soviet states have a term - ‘political technology’ - to refer to its similar widespread, intricate gaming of politics; Iceland has the less vast but similarly corrosive ‘Octopus’.  Those responsible for the crisis number little more than thirty.  But each weekend, as more and more people assembled outside parliament, the musician who would play protest songs became one among a multitude involved in the composition of a whole movement for change. 

For the first time in living memory, Icelanders assembled en masse, each Saturday, with ever more disregard for elites, ever-intensifying anger, and ever-solidifying determination to force those responsible for the present out of command of their collective future.  For the first time in post-independence history too, citizen discontent met elite dissatisfaction head on; the citizens whose day job was to occasionally perform as riot police, were commanded to restore ‘order’ by pepper spraying the protesters into retreat.  The ethical order that had proven its failure, and now, with the turn to violence, complete absence of authority, came under unprecedented popular pressure. The government was forced to resign.  The ‘Pots and Pans Revolution’, as it has become known in the media, is not a revolution strictly defined, but it did achieve the only government to be forced out by popular revolt owing directly to the ‘financial’ crisis (other governments such as Greece and Italy have been forced-out too, but overwhelmingly by finance industry pressures), and this in no small way contributed to the constitutional change of today that has inspired movements around the globe...

http://www.opendemocracy.net/richard-bater/hope-from-below-composing-commons-in-iceland