REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTIONS IN TUNISIA AND EGYPT
This is above all a moment of new possibilities in the Arab world, and indeed in the entire Middle East. We have not witnessed such a turning point for a very long time. Suddenly, once insuperable obstacles seem surmountable. Despotic regimes that have been entrenched across the Arab world for two full generations are suddenly vulnerable. Two of the most formidable among them — in Tunis and Cairo — have crumbled before our eyes in a matter of a few weeks. Another in Tripoli, one of the most brutal and repressive, is tottering at this moment.
The old men who dominate so many of these countries suddenly look their age, and the distance between the rulers and the vast majorities of their populations born 40 or 50 or 60 years after them has never been greater. An apparently frozen political and social situation has melted almost overnight in the heat of the popular upsurge that took over the towns and cities first of Tunisia and then of Egypt, and which is now spreading to other Arab countries. We are privileged to be experiencing what may well be a world historical moment, when what once seemed to be fixed verities vanish and new potentials and forces emerge.
The same mainstream Western media that habitually conveys a picture of a region peopled almost exclusively by enraged, bearded terrorist fanatics who “hate our freedom” has begun to show images of ordinary people peacefully making eminently reasonable demands for freedom, dignity, social justice, accountability, the rule of law, and democracy. Arab youth at the end of the day have been shown to have hopes and ideals not that different from those of the young people who helped bring about democratic transitions in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and South, Southeast, and East Asia.
These young voices have been a revelation only to those deluded by this media’s obsessive focus on Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism whenever it turns its attention to the Middle East. This is thus a supremely important moment not only in the Arab world, but also for how Arabs are perceived by others. A people that has been systematically and habitually maligned — probably more than any other in recent decades — are for the first time being shown in a new, and largely positive, light.
The most difficult tasks are yet to come. It was not easy to overthrow an out-of-touch tyrant and his greedy family, whether in Tunis or Cairo, and it is proving very hard in Tripoli. Building a working democratic system will be much harder. It will be harder still to ensure that a democratic system, if one can be established, is not dominated by the plutocrats who abound in the Arab world and by entrenched, powerful interests like the military. Finally, it will be a daunting task for any new popular democratic regime to achieve the social justice and the rapid economic growth that will be necessary to provide good jobs, decent housing, quality education, much-needed infrastructure, and equal opportunity. These are the very things that the old regimes failed to provide and whose absence triggered the youth revolution now sweeping the region.
Failure at any of these daunting tasks could well lead to an attempted comeback for the forces of reaction and repression. It could also unleash those extreme, violent, minority trends that prosper in circumstances of chaos and disorder, such as were created by the American invasion and occupation of Iraq and the attendant destruction of the Iraqi state. And we must never forget that this is the Middle East, which is the most coveted region of the world and the most penetrated by foreign interests. It is thus vulnerable, as it has been throughout its history, to external intervention that could easily divert or distort outcomes.
Nevertheless, what has happened in Tunisia and Cairo has opened up horizons that have long been closed. The energy, dynamism, and intelligence of the younger generation in the Arab world have been unleashed after being dammed up by a system that treated the younger generation and its aspirations with contempt and that concentrated power mainly in the hands of a much older generation. Seemingly out of nowhere, young people in the Arab world have gained a confidence, an assurance, and a courage which have made fearsome police-state regimes that once looked invincible tremble and lose their nerve. Watching young Tunisians and Egyptians speak on Arab satellite TV stations was a revelation to many in the West.
These young people were articulate, they were smart, and they were determined. Al Jazeera took much of the credit for relaying news about events to the Arab world and beyond, especially in Tunisia, where it was way ahead of other media in perceiving the importance of what was happening, but also in Egypt and now Libya, among others. However, other Arab TV stations played a major role, including Egyptian stations, once the fear of repression had ebbed and the spirit of revolution had spread.
All of Egypt, and much of the rest of the world, were transfixed by the interview on Dream TV with Wael Ghonim immediately after his release from 12 days of captivity, especially given his mix of clarity and rationality on the one hand, with profound emotion on the other. And the fact that he was a Google executive obviously played especially well with Westerners. But other young Egyptians that few people outside Egypt have ever heard of have been even more impressive, like the blogger Asmaa Mahfouz, a leader of the new revolutionary movement whose persuasive and forceful video blog helped incite the Jan. 25 protest, or Nawara Negm, a journalist, activist, and leader of the movement (and daughter of one of Egypt’s most revered popular poets of the 1960s and 1970s, Ahmed Fouad Negm, and the renowned feminist Safinaz Kazim). A Dream TV interview with Negm gave a clear sense of the strategic clarity of the leaders of the protests — although she protested that she was not a leader, saying: “We do not need leaders. We do not need zaims [strong men]. That stage in our history is over.” Responding to a question about what the movement would do if the military did not keep its promises, she responded matter-of-factly and utterly convincingly: “We know the way back to the [Tahrir] Square.”
These young women, and hundreds of other women and men like them, in 18 days managed to produce a movement that toppled a pharaoh who had been in power for 30 years.
It once looked as if the Arab countries would continue indefinitely to be an exception to the wave of liberation from authoritarianism which has swept other regions of the world over the past few decades. Suddenly, the younger generations of Arabs have proven that they are no different than anyone else. They have shown that they have been following events elsewhere and watching carefully the examples of others outside their region. They have learned amply from the mistakes of their elders, and they are far more technologically savvy than the police state with its unlimited resources, top-of-the-line equipment, and extensive training in the best facilities the United States and Europe could provide.
This last point raises embarrassing questions. Why were American tear gas canisters used copiously against peaceful protesters in Tunis and Cairo, as they have been systematically used for years against Palestinians and a few Israeli and foreign activists demonstrating at villages like Bil’in in the occupied West Bank? Why were the goons and thugs of Ben ‘Ali and Mubarak on such good terms with the intelligence services of the United States, France and other European countries? Why was support for “stability” (which really meant support for repression, corruption, the frustration of popular demands, and the subversion of democracy) in practice the main, and indeed the only, policy of the United States and the European Union in most parts of the Arab world?
These may be questions which policymakers prefer not to answer in Washington, Paris, London and Bonn. But they are on the minds of smart young people all over the Arab world who follow the Western and other international media, and are aware of what is happening in the rest of the world — much more aware than those who have repressed them for so long. Like people in the non-Western world going back to the eras of Lord Palmerston and Woodrow Wilson, this generation of young Arabs has also become aware of the long-standing gap between the proclaimed ideals of the great Western democracies and their cynical realpolitik policies.
Because of the existence of this awareness, it would be a welcome change if American and European officials would refrain from preaching either to those in Tunisia and Egypt who have already engineered striking revolutionary change, or to others in the Arab world who are trying to do the same. Clearly, these young revolutionaries know better what they need to do to achieve democracy and social justice than those who until literally a couple of weeks ago were the closest friends of dictators in Tunis and Cairo, and are still intimately linked to the rest of the Arab despots.
The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions raise many questions. After liberation from Western colonialism, failed experiments with radical populism, Arab nationalism and state-led economic development in the 1950s and 1960s gave way to the stagnation and repression of dictatorships and absolute monarchies. During the decades since the 1960s, sclerotic authoritarian regimes have controlled every Arab country, with the (partial) exceptions of Lebanon and Kuwait. This has been a night seemingly without end, going back as long as most Arabs, born in the 1970s and afterward, can remember. Most people in this very young population, over two-thirds of whom are under 30, know no time when they were not governed by either aging ex-military officers or absolute hereditary rulers, or by their chosen heirs.
To read rest of the article, see Foreign Policy, where this article was first published on February 24, 2011.