A brighter view of the Arab spring
I wrote yesterday about the pessimistic views of the Arab spring prevalent among experts at a Harvard/Carnegie Endowment event. They know a whole lot more about the Middle East than I do–that’s why I go to their events and write them up. But I think they are overly pessimistic. Why?
First, because I’ve seen things come out all right. I am not just talking South Africa, where admittedly Nelson Mandela’s leadership and stature counted for a lot, as did F.W. de Klerk’s. I am not seeing any Mandelas or de Klerks in the Middle East. Nor do there seem to be any Vaclav Havels or Lech Walesas. But in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia protest leaderships that were notably lacking in vision and stature had at least temporary success and left their countries better off than they would otherwise have been.
Second, because it seems to me the protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Yemen have shown a combination of nonviolent restraint and persistence that is laudable, and likely to lead in good directions. I am less convinced of the wisdom of the demonstrators in Libya and Bahrain, where it seems to me they fell victim to the temptations of violence and recalcitrance, respectively. But the Libyan Transitional Council shows at least some signs of promise. We’ll see if the Bahrainis can do better in the next “dialogue” phase.
Third, because I have more confidence in a bottom-up process than a top-down one. Here I disagree with Marwan Muasher, who explicitly prefers to see top-down reform. I don’t really know any place where that has worked terribly well in the transition from dictatorship to democracy, though obviously there are leaders like Gorbachev (or de Klerk for that matter) who made the process easier than it might otherwise have been. But people have to want democracy and freedom–it really can’t be given to them.
Nor do I think the consequences of the Arab spring will be quite as negative for U.S. interests as many of the experts say. Middle Eastern leaders who have to be more responsive to public opinion may be more supportive of the Palestinians, but they would be foolish to take their countries to war when the people they lead are looking for prosperity. So, okay, we’ll get Egypt opening the border with Gaza, but closing it was an approach that wasn’t worth a damn anyway. Hamas is likely to need to cut its margins on smuggled goods when they can enter more freely. Maybe an open border will serve American purposes better than the closed one.
I admit that it is hard to see how Yemen comes out of this anything but a basket case, which is where it was headed under Saleh anyway. Certainly it will be a while before any future government in Sanaa gets a grip on the provinces. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula may have a field day in the meanwhile, but they don’t appear so far to have been particularly effective at exploiting the chaos.
That said, the Arab spring is not about American interests, which will have to take a back seat for a while throughout the Middle East. It is however about American values. We should be happy to see them spreading among young Arabs willing to demand their rights. Let’s see where things go before we get too pessimistic.
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How much of the difference in outcomes is attributable to the campaigns waged by the protesters, and how much to the resistance or lack of resistance offered by the regimes? There were particular features in Eastern Europe that worked in the protesters’ favor – the weakening of the Soviet Union and its ability to support foreign possessions, the fact they were foreign overlords, even in countries with no historical animosity towards Russia, in Serbia the loss of the mini-empire of Yugoslavia and part of what it claimed as its historic territory. Which is not to say that those who went out into the streets thought they were foreordained to win, or even to stay out of jail, of course. Libya is a horror, but do you actually think that more insouciance on the part of the protesters would have made a difference?
Sometimes the only way to defeat evil is force. The guy in the picture with you was finally able to take off that foulard only thanks to the rough boys and their more direct methods of persuasion, for one example. (Although the years of peaceful resistance were probably necessary to gain foreign support for their actions.) Studying the regimes that fail may be more useful than focusing on the methods used to finally tip them over.