Revolutions require follow through

Michelle Kelemen had a good piece on NPR this morning focused in part on what shifts in U.S. assistance are required as autocrats fall in the Middle East.

This is a subject close to my heart, as I watched in Serbia when we abandoned Serbian civil society organizations as soon as Milosevic fell.  Even worse, we cut off Otpor, the student movement that sparked the popular protests, because it put up billboards saying “we are watching you.”  This ambiguous phrase, accompanied by a picture of a bulldozer, was meant to convey that the protesters would continue to monitor the new authorities, as well as the remnants of the old regime, to make sure that the transition was completed.  The right thing to do, but too much for U.S. Embassy Belgrade.

Net result:  reform in the Serbian security services never was completed.  Serbia is still struggling with the consequences, which include a political spectrum unable to escape the unfortunate dictates of the ethnic nationalism that kept Milosevic in power.

I fear something like this may also happen in the Middle East, where the Obama Administration is already ambivalent about how much change it really wants.  The remaining autocrats are no doubt pressing for less rather than more, and some think their influence is behind the President’s hesitation to take more decisive action in Libya.  Would anyone watching recent events in Egypt be surprised if the security services managed to come out of this without thorough vetting and reform?

To Hillary Clinton’s great credit, she is quoted in the NPR piece as saying,

When I spoke with the Egyptian officials just over the last couple of weeks they kept mentioning central and eastern Europe. They kept saying that’s how we want to turn out. We don’t want to get this derailed. We want to make this work. So we want to help them make it work.

In Central and Eastern Europe there was a strong magnetic pole in Brussels that ensured the new governments would point in the right direction.  That is not the case in the Middle East, where the Saudi and Jordanian monarchies as well as the Syrian and Yemeni secular autocrats (not to mention the Iranian theocrats) will weigh in heavily against fully democratic revolutions.  Indigenous democrats are going to have to keep the needle pointed in the right direction.

The Secretary of State and her Egyptian interlocutors have the right approach, one that will require continuing support not only to the new post-autocratic governments but also to the civil society organizations, including some of the Islamic ones, that mobilized and steered the protests.  I would shift substantial resources to them–and to support for the upcoming referenda and elections–quickly and decisively.  Revolutions require follow through.