The speed, drama, and unexpectedness of events in the Arab world have wrong-footed analysts and autocrats alike. Quite simply, no one had predicted that unrest could erupt so suddenly and ripple through the region so fast, with consequences everyone is now scrambling to discern.
Amid much uncertainty, one thing stands out: Arab patience has finally snapped. For years resentment of the lack of jobs and rights and dignity in the region has been suppressed, as if in a pressure cooker. It has now finally exploded. The trigger of the unrest might, in other circumstances, have been a purely local affair: the self-immolation of a desperate young man in a provincial Tunisian town. But the image of his suicide had immense power which - via Facebook and Al-Jazeera - rippled across the Arab world. Especially in the poorer countries (Egypt, Jordan, Yemen), it was easy to identify with the mix of problems - unemployment, corruption, the abuse of power - that had led Mohammed Bouazizi to take his life. And even in the oil-rich states of North Africa and the Gulf, his story resonated because of its stark and simple message: a kind of morality tale for a region that had lost faith in itself.
Also noteworthy has been the character of the dissent in so many parts of the region. While governments - not least in Egypt - have been quick to pin the blame on Islamists, there is little to justify the charge. On the contrary, the protests in Egypt and Tunisia and elsewhere seem to have been spontaneous and to have involved a cross-section of society - young and old, workers and professionals, the more secular and the more religious. Strikingly, some of those who have taken to the streets say they have never done so before. In Tunisia the protests have been essentially leaderless.
So the starting-point of any assessment of the crisis must be that the protests are genuine, not manipulated, and are rooted in secular-nationalist demands that are as much political as economic. To echo a slogan heard in Poland in the heyday of the Solidarity movement, this is about ‘Bread and Lies’. It is, to be sure, about economic hardship; but it is also about something less tangible - the progressive humiliation of societies by rulers who, in large ways and small, sought to infantilise their citizens.
In such a volatile situation, speculation is especially hazardous. But I offer the following thoughts on the nature of the crisis and in particular the dilemmas it poses for outside powers. First, while the role of the Internet and Twitter and Facebook and even WikiLeaks has been striking, we should not overestimate the significance of these phenomena. They are part of the mood music - not determining factors behind the unrest. Talk of a ‘Wiki-coup’ in Tunisia is absurd. Second, this may prove to be an Arab Winter rather than an Arab Spring. Regimes will not fall like dominoes, nor will democracy break out across the region. Far more likely is that the malaise will spread, producing hope for change among disgruntled populations – panic among the region’s ageing autocrats - a good deal of chaos - and consequences at least some of which will be surprising. (Particularly difficult to read, for example, are the implications for Libya, which is close to the Tunisian drama, which suffers from a familiar mix of political and socio-economic problems, and whose ruler Muammar Qaddafi is behaving as quixotically as ever.)
For the outside world, and especially Europe and the United States, the crisis presents painful dilemmas. For over two decades, the Europeans treated Ben Ali’s Tunisia as a favourite child, to be spoilt and coddled and held up as an example to be emulated. Above all, it was seen as stable - as a place where a once-strong Islamist opposition had been stamped out with singular efficiency - and whose well-known human-rights abuses could therefore be passed over in virtual silence. Only now that the dictator has fled is there a palpable sense of embarrassment and even shame.
For the Obama administration in Washington, much further away from the scene, the dilemmas are of a rather different kind. For much of its first two years in power, it has been criticised for saying and doing too little to promote democracy, good governance, and respect for human rights in the Middle East. More recently it has begun to speak out - most strikingly in the speech Hillary Clinton delivered in Doha at the end of a tour of the Gulf, in which she warned the region that it was in danger of sinking into the sand and castigated corruption in unprecedentedly harsh tones. That was on the eve of the Tunisian dictator’s abrupt departure. Now that he is gone, and with the unrest continuing, the administration is caught: it feels it has to speak out in support of ‘people power’ in Tunisia (which is not significant in terms of American interests) but is reluctant to do so in the case of Egypt (which is).
Whether or not regimes change, the mood certainly has. A return to a bankrupt status quo is difficult to imagine.
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