Legitimacy of Police Violence: the case of Spain 14.11

7/29/2019 Legitimacy of Police Violence: the case of Spain 14.11

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University: Paris 8 Saint-Denis

Subject: Analysis of Legitimacy

Professor: Assia Boutaleb

Student: Slavica Ilieska

Can We Legitimize Police Violence: the Case of the General Strike in

Spain, 14th of November 2012?

Any rational person would agree that violence is not legitimate unless the

consequences of such action are to eliminate a still greater evil. < Noam

Chomsky1

If we have in mind Chomskys distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence,

can we proclaim that police violence is legitimate in case it is used in order to prevent a

greater evil? Are demonstrations considered as a basic human right to express its

opinion or are the demonstrators threatening the security of other citizens? Or can we

conclude without questioning that police violence is aimed at suffocating critique?2

This paper aims to question the extreme use of police violence following the latest

developments during the general strike that happened on 14th

of November in several

countries of the Euro zone, with special focus on the events in Spain.

Questionable Media Coverage?!

In order to get a clearer picture of what are the preconditions and specific causes that

led to the latest events we have to briefly explain the overall situation. On 14th of

November 2012 millions of workers coming from the EU countries greatly affected by

the crisis joined its forces in a day of protest against austerity measures, while the

Spanish and Portuguese workers went on a 24-hour general strike. In Spain thedemonstrations were organized by the principle Spanish trade unions - Comisiones

Obreras, Union General de Trabajadores and Union Sindical Obrera, under the slogan

They leave us without a future. This was a second general strike in a year for the

1Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, et al., December 15, 1967,

http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm2

Boltanski Luc, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, page 124


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ruling Popular Party (PP) of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, in his one-year-old

government. The first one happened on March 29 and it was a protest against the new

labour law in Spain. Considering the numbers of demonstrators, according to the data

from the syndicates they had millions of supporters on the streets and protesting with

not working, and according to the Government the numbers are several hundred

thousands of demonstrators and variable percentages of workers refusing to work from

10 to 30 percents.

Having in mind the mentioned preconditions we will analyze the differences in the

media coverage of the general strike, with a special focus on the reporting of the

clashes between the police and the demonstrators, especially the extreme case of

police brutality.

To start with the analysis of the information from the national Spanish television

RTVE

3

, near the end of the day 19:30h, the General Director of Interior Politics, CristinaDiaz, gives a statement for the press that 118 people have been detained (the number

increases in the following hours), 74 are injured from which 43 are police officers,

concluding that there is absence of bigger problems concerning the public order. The

speech during the whole day coming from the authorities is that the general strike is

going normal without any greater disturbances and that the support compared to the

first general strike in March is dropping.

If we compare the coverage of the British (Guardian 4 and Telegraph 5 ) and the

Spanish (El Pais 6, La Vanguardia 7 and El Diario 8) printed media of the same event

we will notice contrasting differences in the headlines. While the British media publishheadlines about the violence in the streets, the clashes with the police and several

cases of police brutality, the Spanish media attracts readers with speculative numbers

from syndicates and Government sources about the success of the general strike and

numbers of demonstrators in the streets.

The contrast in coverage is also visible when we compare alternative and social

media with mainstream media. While the alternative media mentions words as police

brutality, mainstream media in the front news gives general stories of how the strike is

going. While in the social media independent bloggers and writers talk about the most

extreme cases of police brutality, mainstream media offers blogs with live coverage of

the day. The most mentioned case of police violence in the mainstream media is the

3http://www.rtve.es/noticias/20121114/detenidas-28-personas-12-heridas-primeras-horas-huelga-general/574680.shtml

4http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/nov/14/eurozone-crisis-general-strikes-protest-day-of-action

5http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/9679103/Anti-austerity-protests-violence-continues-into-the-night.html

6http://elpais.com/tag/fecha/20121114/

7http://endirecto.lavanguardia.com/politica/huelga-general/20121114/54355172128/huelga-general-14n.html

8http://www.eldiario.es/economia/directo-huelga-general_13_68723129.html#msg-122)


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case of a minor in Tarragona, who gets attacked while taking part of the

demonstration together with his parents.9

We can only assume that attack of a minor is

seen as a criminal act, for condemnation, and cannot be ignored by the mainstream

media as such. But that leads to marginalization of the other attacks by the mainstream

media, which forwards us to a question: are they seen as normal? One other case, of

an severe eye injury, especially present in the social media, provoked a campaign Ojo

con tu ojo10against the use of rubber bullets by the notorious Catalan police, Mossos

d'Esquadra, which ended in several eyes losses in the last couple of years. This

campaign is just one sign more that the cases of 14th

of November are not isolated

cases, but a series of brutalities that continue to happen in every bigger demonstration,

several years in a row.

Also we have to analyze the terminology that the mainstream media is using when

covering the demonstrations: isolated incidents, police actions on demonstrators

provocation, and outlining the number of injured policemen. Even the syndicates

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intheir letter to the Government, after the general strike, dont mention the word police

violence or refer to the cases of police brutality towards the demonstrators. The general

public that is referring to the mainstream media as a source of information, can easily

get under an impression that everything is normal, and that every person in the country

has its right to express freely its opinion without any restrictions, and that their co-

citizens are using theirs in the general strikes and demonstrations.

To complete the story we have to mention that approximately around a month before

the general strike, the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Spain announced that it is

considering adopting a new normative12 to the Law of Citizens Protection, which willinclude a prohibition of taking photographs of police men at work and distributing them

on internet, when they can threaten the persons life or are a risk to the operation that

he is working on. The measure was explained as a balance of the protection of citizens

rights and the rights of the security forces.

What we have to ask ourselves after analyzing the case of the use of political violence

in the general strike of 14th

of November in Spains is: Where is the limit of the

force/violence that police can use in keeping the public law and order of its citizens?

9https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odpwc6h5Cos&feature=youtube_gdata_player

10http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2012/11/20/catalunya/1353441912_089638.html

11http://www.ccoo.es/csccoo/menu.do?Informacion:Noticias:437459

12http://www.huffingtonpost.es/2012/10/18/interior-prohibira-la-dif_n_1978475.html


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Police Violence in Political theory

In order to scientifically analyze the Spanish case and the treatment of police violence in

the political theory we have to go back to Weber and the followers of his Theory of

Domination.

Weber defines domination as: The probability that certain specific command (or all

commands) will be obeyed by a given group of persons. It thus does not include very

mode of exercising power or influence over other persons. Domination (authority) in

this sense may be based on the most diverse motives of compliance: all the way from

simple habituation to the most purely rational calculation of advantage. Hence every

genuine form of domination implies a minimum of voluntary compliance, that is, an

interest (based on ulterior motives of genuine acceptance) in obedience. 13

Furthermore, following Webers steps, Pierre Bourdieu deepens the theory clarifyingthat the state uses physical and symbolic violence to control its power. Specifically

Bourdieu underlines: The state thus appears as the central bank which guarantees all

certificates. One may say of the state, in the terms Leibniz used about God, that it is the

"geometral locus of all perspectives." This is why one may generalize Weber's well-

known formula and see in the state the holder of the monopoly of legitimate symbolic

violence.14

He explains the act whereby someone is granted a title - a socially

recognized qualification as an act of giving power to the state or its representatives to

do legitimate symbolic violence in its name. If we put Bourdieus thoughts in the context

of the Spanish case we can say that the title that is given to the policemen and the state

media as state representatives gives them a right to commit symbolic or physicalviolence in its name. To go one step further with Bourdieus analysis we have to find a

way to clear our minds from the symbolic violence that has be done to us, undo the

processes and begin to think critically.

On the question of semantic and physical violence and their correlation Luc Boltanski

deepens the analysis in his On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation saying: The

semantic violence inflicted on the texture of language to fix its usages and stabilize its

references is not sufficient to achieve conformity of conduct, so that it is always

necessary (or virtually always) to combine it with physical violence, or at least the

threat of it, to stabilize interpretations and hence remove the risk of an open dispute.

To the violence, verbal or physical, that is said to be unleashed when a dispute

escalates, the institution thus counter-poses a violence chained to the semantic and

administrative systems which justify its existence: When the consciousness of the

13Weber Max, The Types of Legitimate Domination, Page 212

14Bourdieu Pierre, Social Space and Symbolic Power, Sociological Theory, Vol. 7, No. 1. (Spring, 1989), pp. 14-25.


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latent presence of violence in a legal institution disappears (writes Walter Benjamin)

the institution falls into decay. This violence shown by Benjamin to be, for example,

inherent in law can take the form of a sort of hidden hoard, whose existence is

invariably denies, for law-making or manifest itself, but justifying itself by reference

to legitimacy as law-preserving15. Benjamin Walter, in his Critique of Violence, as

quoted by Boltanski, precisely explains: The ignominy of such an authoritylies in the

fact that in this authority the separation of law-making and law-preserving

violence is suspended. If the first is required to prove its worth in victory, the second is

subject to the restriction that it may not set itself new ends. Police violence is

emancipated from both conditions. It is law-making, for its characteristic function is not

the promulgation of laws but the assertion of legal claims for any decree, and law-

preserving because it is at the disposal of these ends.16

Furthermore in our subject the Spanish case of police violence and its legitimacy we

can use several explanations from Boltanski. He is deepening the analysis of the stateand its power, confirming that one of its major roles is to preserve the reality in its

ordinary way, and for that the state is reconfirming its established order through taking

awat the attention of the citizens by organizing rituals, ceremonies, parades, award of

decorations. In a less extreme situation as we can recognize in the Spanish case, the

state is keeping its simple domination by allowing critique to a certain extent and in the

same time its control because the actors never know to what extent or how far they can

go. Precisely he is identifying the effects of simple domination in two kinds of situations:

On the one hand, in borderline situation associated with contexts where people are

partially or wholly deprived of basic liberties and where deep asymmetries are

maintained or created by employing explicit violence particularly (but not exclusively)physical violence. It seems to me preferable in cases of this kind, whose paradigm is

slavery, to speak of oppression. But we can also invoke oppression in numerous, less

extreme scenarios, where the maintenance of an orthodoxy is obtained by means of

violence, particularly police violence, aimed at suffocating critique.17

In the chapter The Effects of Simple Domination and Denial of Reality, Boltanski, once

again gives answers to our questions in the specific case of police violence on

demonstrators in Spain. Concretely he is explaining the usage of the critique as a form

of provocation in order to reveal the domination: The way in which critique undertakes to

bring out the contradictions contained in a certain state of social reality often takes the

form ofprovocation. A gesture, which might be compared with those of madness were

it not made intentionally, even strategically, is publicly performed to get spectators to

react to shake them to behave in a way that is no longer within the limits of the

15Boltanski Luc, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, page 94

16Benjamin Walter, Critique of Violence, page 141



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complex grammars that manage contradictions, whose presence, blurred in the ordinary

course of existence, is then unmasked. Thus, for example, provocation this time

manifesting itself in acts of violence can aim to put political orders invoking

democracy and human rights in contradiction with the values they claim to

adhere to, by forcing them into the repressive violence that is latent in them. 18

In order to go a step further in our analysis we will use information from a public debate

between Noam Chomsky and Hanna Arendt back in 1967, where Chomsky is

elaborating that having in mind that the government happens to have a monopoly of

terror and it is developing new techniques of control of demonstrations and

crowds, it leaves us without any other choice but as citizens of the world dominant

power, the world's major aggressive power -- that we use the freedoms that still exist

in it to try to build up resistance to participation in war.19 Considering the answer

of the demonstrators in the recent general strikes in Spain to the police violence with

violence we can also find an answer in Chomskys thoughts, concerning the protests forpeace and against the wars started by the USA, in the 1967 th: The second reason for

non violence, I think, is that clearly violence antagonizes the uncommitted. And what

we want to do is not antagonize them, but attract them to, involve them in, the

resistance to the War. We want to get them to take part in active resistance to this and

whatever future war the United States will attempt to conduct. Toward this end,

violence carried out by peace demonstrators would be a serious

"counterproductive" tactical error. 20

Conclusion

To conclude in Chomsky words he said: if violence could be shown to lead to the

overthrow of lasting suppression of human life that now obtains in vast parts of

the world, that would be a justification for violence. But this has not been shown at

all, in my view.21

Starting with this thought and having in mind that demonstrations are a

basic right to express its own opinion, there is no justification of acts of violence towards

peaceful protesters. At the same time the basic aim of the protest in Boltanski style,

should be one and only: to critique and unmask the domination and most of all

reveal its attacks to democracy and human rights.


19Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag (December 15, 1967)


Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag (December 15, 1967)


Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag (December 15, 1967)

http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm


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Bibliography

1. Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, et al., December

15, 1967, http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm

2. Weber Max, The Types of Legitimate Domination

3. Bourdieu Pierre, Social Space and Symbolic Power, Sociological Theory

4. Boltanski Luc, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation

5. Benjamin Walter, Critique of Violence

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Legitimacy of Police Violence: the case of Spain 14.11