The Battle for the Arab Spring

by Lin Noueihed

  Yet it would be wishful thinking to imagine that local factors alone will shape future political systems. Foreign influences will be ever-present, particularly in those countries where much more is at stake than individual states. Bahrain will not be shaped by the will of the majority, but rather by the will of its monarchy and its allies in Riyadh and Washington. The new Libya may not be moulded by popular consensus but rather by those with the strongest revolutionary legitimacy and the most guns. Syria is too central to the future of the Middle East, and of the cold war with Iran, to be ignored by competing external forces. In contrast, Tunisia stands the best chance of success because it holds the least strategic importance to the region and the wider world. If it is lucky, it may largely be left alone.

  Nor should the waning influence of the United States be exaggerated. Despite its costly floundering in Iraq and Afghanistan, that country still wields more political and military clout in the Arab world than any other international power. Despite its debt crisis, investors bought billions of dollars’ worth of US treasury bills in 2011. But the old belief that Washington could lead and control events in the Middle East, and that it was central to solving the region's biggest problems, is now defunct. The relationship between the United States and the Arab world could now become much healthier, partly as the days of large-scale Western-led military intervention in Arab countries are over. Libya was a unique case under unique circumstances – widespread regional support, no major geopolitical knock-on effects and the looming risk of a humanitarian crisis – that will not be found elsewhere. This is not to say that interventions will not take place elsewhere in the region, but they are more likely to originate from within the Middle East itself.

  The gradual fading of US power and the new regional picture holds serious implications for Israel, which has watched and waited to see what emerges from the fray. It would be unrealistic to imagine that 2011 will not affect Arab ties to the Jewish state in their midst, but those relationships will be recalibrated at a later stage. Its existing peace with Egypt and Jordan is unlikely to be threatened, though it may eventually be renegotiated. There is no reason to believe that a Muslim Brotherhood-led government in Cairo is any more likely to break the truce than Mubarak was, or have any more chance of winning a war. But Egypt's new leaders will need to reflect the popular will in their policies, which is likely to mean a much tougher stance on issues such as the blockade against Gaza, and more vocal condemnation of Israeli policies so unpopular on the Arab street.

  Much also hinges on what happens in Syria, which has been in a purgatory state of ‘no peace, no war’ with Israel since 1974. Whoever emerges to lead that country will be in no military position to fight a war with Israel, but may be more willing to negotiate a peace deal that retrieves the Golan Heights. And if Hezbollah in south Lebanon is weakened by the fall of the Assad regime, it could alter the complicated connections between Lebanon, Syria and Israel as well as recalibrating the internal dynamics of that fractured country.

  Yet it would be dangerous to make predictions on such a seemingly intractable issue, which could get worse before it gets better. What we can say is that the process of change unleashed in 2011, if it is driven more by domestic rather than international constituencies, has the potential to resolve not only the festering tensions within individual states, but also the wider regional problems such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, the status of Hezbollah within Lebanon, or even the proxy battle between Saudi Arabia and Iran. That process will take years if not decades and, as our conclusion argues, the cacophony of overlapping battles described in this book will take different countries in different directions.

  Afterword

  In early December 2011, almost a year after Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali had fled Tunisia, rival protests were taking place outside the newly-refurbished constituent assembly building in Tunis. On one side, a crowd called for the greater Islamization of state and society, decrying secularists as the voice of the minority. On the other, a group of secularists warned that the Islamists would exploit elections to monopolize political power and transform the new Tunisia into an undemocratic and intolerant Islamic state.

  Such fiery, open argument over the role of religion would have been unthinkable a year earlier, as would a democratically elected constituent assembly, but in the unfolding struggle over identity, the economic challenges that sparked the uprising had been all but forgotten. In the midst of the protesters, one man waved a baguette, his mouth taped up, holding a placard that read ‘I am with neither of you … I am in favour of jobs and dignity.‘1 In another part of the capital, demonstrators gathered outside the offices of the Gafsa Phosphates Company to complain about alleged foul play in a recent round of recruitment by the largest employer in the deprived south.2 It was the same grievance that had triggered a wave of strikes and protests in 2008, a direct precursor to the revolt of 2011.

  Much had changed in Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring and the country that had made a smoother post-uprising transition than any other, but much remained the same. Unemployment was even higher than before. Prices had risen even quicker than in 2010. Investors were even more nervous. For those in the central southern areas, the Petri dish of the protest movement, everyday life was even more difficult. Many old institutions and practices from Ben Ali's day remained embedded.

  No country in the region could claim a total overhaul of the status quo by the end of the year and in many, the Arab Spring had barely elicited a single piece of reform from unelected governments. The obliteration of the Gaddafi family had certainly created an opportunity for Libyans to construct a brand-new political and economic structure. But that opportunity had not yet been fulfilled and might never be. Egyptians had removed Hosni Mubarak and voted in a more meaningful round of elections, yet one year on, power still lay with the military. In Morocco, there had been reform but not revolution. Yemenis had forced their president to step aside, at least on paper, but faced the same disheartening litany of political, humanitarian and economic crises as they had for decades. Bashar al-Assad still occupied the presidential palace that overlooked Damascus. Bahrain's uprising had only succeeded in polarizing its society.

  ‘Rarely has revolution been more universally predicted, though not necessarily for the right countries or for the right dates,’ was how historian Eric Hobsbawm described the years prior to the 1848 revolts in Europe. To a large extent, and with the same luxury of hindsight, the same had been true of the Arab world in the years leading up to 2011. It was clear that many countries were out of kilter, their creaking political and economic structures unable to meet the expectations of youthful societies and the shifting world around them. Change was overdue, but no one knew when it would come, where it would begin or how it would play out.

  Like 1848, 2011 meant different things at different times in different places, and in some countries it meant very little at all. The fact that the events of 2011 have been variously described as uprisings, revolts, revolutions, protest movements, insurrections, rebellions, insurgencies or awakenings is partly why, for all its faults and troubling historical parallels, ‘Arab Spring’ gained traction as an umbrella term in both English and Arabic.

  The phrase also reflects the fact that the seeds of change had been growing underground long before shooting above the surface in 2011. The events of 2011 cannot be called an ‘awakening’ because the region had not been asleep. The Arab Spring capped a decade of political activism in which Arabic-language satellite television, mobile phones and the internet had already revolutionized media and communications. New media offset the lack of political freedoms, eroded the cults of personality and exposed the repression and the international conditions that had allowed unelected leaders, many of whom still remained in power one year on, to survive for so long. Authoritarian leaders and their systems of rule were unable to adapt to the social, economic and technological changes that were going on around them and the longer the decade wore on, the harder they had to work to k
eep burgeoning protest movements and labour unrest at bay.

  The course of the Arab Spring was determined not just by the different pre-existing conditions in each country, but by the various reactions of governments in 2011 itself. If Gaddafi had not used such unremittingly graphic language to threaten Benghazi, he might not have provided such a ready pretext for foreign military intervention. If Assad had dealt more forgivingly with grievances in Deraa, there might never have been a mass uprising in Syria. If King Mohamed had ordered his forces to fire on peaceful rallies in Morocco, he might have already been deposed. Just because the Al Sauds were still standing by the end of 2011 did not mean that underlying conditions in their kingdom were necessarily any better than they were in Libya or Tunisia. There was no natural selection that removed the most inept and repressive regimes in the region and left the more reform-minded and promising governments intact.

  Some parallels have been drawn between 2011 and the 1989 revolutions that brought down the Berlin Wall and spelled the end of communism in Eastern Europe, but in that case a new ideology was waiting in the wings. People voted with their feet for democracy and capitalism. Others have compared the Arab Spring to the so-called colour revolutions that took place in the former Soviet states in the 2000s. They share some attributes in the non-violent techniques used by protesters in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Bahrain and elsewhere. But the changes taking place in the Arab world, while they will disappoint many hoping for speedier, deeper and more wide-ranging transformation, are more significant.

  Others have judged the Arab Spring by the standards of the great twentieth-century revolutions of Russia, Iran, China or even the Arab world itself, and found it lacking. In those cases, the group that emerged with the reins of power possessed a new, coherent, often radical ideology that promised to transform state and society. The Bolsheviks had a clear vision of the country they wanted to forge after the demise of the Romanovs in 1917. Ayatollah Khomeini had spent years developing his concept of a theocratic Iran that could succeed the Shah. Even the Ba'athist takeover of Syria in 1963, Gamal Abdel Nasser's coup in Egypt in 1952 or Muammar Gaddafi's fateh revolution of 1969 were all based on specific and sometimes radical visions, though many would later veer off-course.

  In contrast, the Arab uprisings took place in a world where all of those ideologies, even the Western-style blueprint that had gained so much influence after the Cold War, had lost their sheen. The protesters who squared up to riot police in Athens, occupied Zucotti Park in New York or camped on the flagstones outside St Paul's Cathedral in London had no shortage of discontent and anger with the current system, but struggled to articulate a lucid or inspiring vision of how they would do things differently. In the Arab world, it seemed by the end of 2011 that Islam might offer its long-vaunted solution.

  The Arab Spring was not an Islamic Spring. That initial surge in early 2011 was not about religion but was an expression of anger over elite corruption, economic inequalities, widespread injustice and geriatric leaders who were out of touch with reality. Yet by the end of the year, Islamist parties had exploited those early revolutionary gains to emerge triumphant from elections in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco. They will play a major role in the future Syria, where they were crushed by Bashar al-Assad's father, and they are one of the most powerful forces in the new Libya. In virtually every country that has undergone significant change in 2011, Islamists have undoubtedly been the biggest winners so far.

  This should not have come as a surprise. What made the first round of protests successful – their use of social media to communicate and agitate, their absence of clear leaders and their suspicion of the political rhetoric that had so failed them in the past – carried the seeds of their later failure. Into the void leapt older, more ingrained and more powerful forces, adroitly exploiting these divisions to further their own interests.

  Of all the established groups in the region, those with Islam as their guiding tenet were the only ones who had any hope of making major gains in the first free and fair elections of the Arab Spring. They were the only ones with a long-established organizational structure and a clear programme who had not been tainted by the corruption and compromise of government. For no matter how viciously they had been crushed by successive nationalist movements or military dictators, they always had the minbar, or pulpit, to claim as their own. They also had the word of God, so appealing to the bulging ranks of the disenfranchised and the downtrodden. Islamist views on women and minorities may be unpalatable to secularists, but in a region where the vast majority of people are Muslims and where secular nationalists had brought at best mismanagement and at worst oppression, they offered a return to old-fashioned family values, and they preached justice and honesty.

  Yet it would be wrong to see the battle for the Arab Spring purely through the prism of religion. Other tensions, simmering below the surface in the 2000s, have also come to the fore. Policymakers are at odds over how best to tackle economic problems, which if left unaddressed will only trigger more revolts in the future. Old feuds have been reawakened and new battles over land and resources are breaking out.

  Amid so much turbulence and uncertainty, can successful Arab democracies really emerge? People in the region had often, it seemed, been presented with an artificial choice between chaos and dictatorship by unelected rulers who liked to highlight failures in Arab democracy to justify their own existence. The idea of an Arab exception suited them just fine. But democracies need decades to take root, and in the turmoil that accompanies their delicate nurture, powerful international forces will try to shape change to their own ends, especially because far more than just the future of individual countries is at stake.

  As the battle for the Arab Spring unfolds, prolonged instability or bouts of violence in the Gulf could heave up oil prices, and with them the global cost of food, transportation or heating. At a time of deep economic malaise in so many countries around the world, this could have disastrous consequences. The struggle for Syria could create a vortex that sucks in Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon. A change in Damascus could further isolate Iran and empower Saudi Arabia, both Islamist countries and arch rivals, and could have a profound effect on the Kurdish national struggle. The rise of former jihadis in Libya could raise questions over the wisdom of the NATO intervention and the friendly intentions of all Islamist governments in a region that produced the 9/11 hijackers.

  Nor can what happens in the Middle East be separated from the context of shifting global power. Staggering from the fog of two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that propelled its debt to stratospheric levels and undermined what moral authority it claimed in the eyes of Arabs, the United States lacks the means or the credibility to maintain its old influence in the Arab world. It will, of course, remain hugely influential, but the superpower left standing at the end of the Cold War can no longer give lessons to people tired of its support for their unpopular governments. Nor can it expect absolute loyalty from Arab rulers who have watched it abandon some of its long-standing allies. The stage is wide open for regional powers to buttress their influence and their own regimes.

  The extraordinary events of 2011 suggested the end of an era for the Middle East. The withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in December provided one bookend to 9/11. The removal of old republican leaders waved goodbye to dinosaurs from another age. The resurgence of political Islam heralded a new period of religious conservatism but also of greater democratic representation. Even Al-Jazeera, the champion of the media revolution in the 2000s, had seemingly drawn a line under the past. Waddah Khanfar, the Palestinian who had led the channel's editorial operations, resigned in September and was replaced by a Qatari royal. Khanfar, who always defended Al-Jazeera's editorial independence, denied there had been any falling-out, but his departure raised questions about future coverage.

  Yet many other factors suggested continuity. All the Arab monarchies survived and, despite feeling the ground move beneath their feet, are likely to be around for some time yet. Guantanamo
Bay, a potent symbol of Bush's war on terror, remained open. Iran and the United States were still at loggerheads. The Israel-Palestine conflict seemed further than ever from resolution. Oil continued to flow abundantly from wells in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait and sold for more than $100 a barrel. And around the region, millions of young people might now have different leaders, but many remained unemployed, impoverished or illiterate.

  Again, a comparison with the 1848 Spring of Nations is apt. Those revolts spread to some 50 countries, affecting most of Europe and even reaching Latin America. Their roots lay in widespread disaffection with existing rulers, demands for greater participation in politics, rising nationalist sentiment, crop failures and economic discontent among the urban working classes. Their ideas were distributed by the burgeoning popular press, raising expectations among people whose lives had already been improved by new technology. Conditions in each country were different and, in most cases, the coalitions that brought together diverse classes with diverse demands were defeated by a royalist counter-revolution led by powerful armies and aristocracies with vested interests to fight for.

  Yet while gains were often limited, rolled back or crushed, the spirit of 1848 brought reforms over the ensuing generations that strengthened the political and economic power of the middle classes, eroded feudalism and laid the groundwork for future European democracies. Many Arab countries may suffer the same fate in the coming years as counter-revolutionary forces play their hand, but the seeds of change have been sown. In many places, a revolution in mindset has already torn down the barrier that for decades had stood between action and inaction, between protest and silence. Unions will become more potent forces in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco. People will speak up if they are unhappy with government policies. The people once again are a key combatant in the battle for power.