Historians examining our era will marvel at the proliferation of street protests around the world. Blessed with hindsight, they will probably not struggle as much as we do to grasp their broader meaning — one that goes beyond specific provocations in each case (an increase in bus fares in Brazil, or the destruction of a landmark in Turkey).
On the face of it, protests against the creeping authoritarianism of Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have next to nothing in common with demonstrations in India, where a quasi-Gandhian activist proclaimed a "second freedom struggle," or Egypt's Tahrir Square, site of a "second revolution" against the elected government of Mohammed Morsi.
The Turks appear to have even less in common with the tens of thousands of Israelis calling for "social justice" in Tel Aviv's Habima Square, or the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who, after the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima, turned out, in their country's biggest demonstrations since the late 1960s, to protest against an incompetent and mendacious government.