I recently went back to my 2008 book, The Freedom Agenda, in order to deliver a mea culpa on behalf of all of us democracy promoters who failed to foresee the People Power moment now sweeping the Arab world. I was delighted, instead, to discover the following: "How long will the next generation, primed by the Internet and satellite news, put up with repression and paralysis? … Would it really be so surprising if the Egyptian people went from stoicism to confrontation? … It may not be an act of realism but rather of naïveté to once again put all our chips on 'moderate' dictators such as Hosni Mubarak."
Yay me. But if you had asked me "OK, how long?" I would have said, "Not all that soon." At least in the short run, I assumed, democratization in the Middle East would be a matter of whatever modest openings autocratic regimes grudgingly permitted. And this assumption was widespread. In an essay in Beyond the Façade: Political Reform in the Arab World, Michele Dunne and Amr Hamzawy write, "For Egypt to move toward democracy, the ruling establishment would have to share a great deal more power and open the system up to much more competition than it has to date." And of course it wasn't likely to do that. "For the time being," Larry Diamond wrote in 2008 in The Spirit of Democracy, "the moment of democratic reform in the Arab world has passed."
COMMENTS (3)
More...
Democratization, in short, meant "reform": a process pushed from below but ultimately granted from above. And because Arab autocrats understood perfectly well that real reform would lead inevitably to demands for wholesale change they could not survive, they had learned how to open the valves just enough to let frustrated citizens blow off steam and then return to their lives of benumbed acceptance. It appeared to be a highly sustainable system. In a 2005 essay, scholar Daniel Brumberg called these states "liberal autocracies." During that brief interlude after the Tunisian people had risen up but before the Egyptians had, it was often noted that Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had lacked the Machiavellian foresight to let fake political parties bloom and keep independent media on a suitably short leash. The autocracy hadn't been liberal enough.
Why were most of us so wedded to the reform-from-the-top model? I suppose because it was familiar -- from Latin America, for example -- and because the alternative seemed so unlikely, at least in the short run. A typical demonstration in Egypt consisted of a few hundred brave activists surrounded by several thousand riot police and hired thugs. The great mass of people seemed unwilling to confront state power. Perhaps it was a matter of political culture: The Arab world had a "dignity" tradition, but not a "rights" tradition. In Pakistan, with its British heritage of constitutionalism, lawyers had taken to the streets to protest the mistreatment of judges. Equally gross violations of the rule of law had provoked nothing comparable in Egypt.
Arab citizens turned out to be more like people elsewhere than we had thought: Decades of repression and injustice had brought them to the boiling point. The farcically rigged parliamentary elections in Egypt this past December may have provided the last necessary increment of popular outrage. Modern media did the rest: both by bringing thrilling images of revolt into every household and by allowing activists to mobilize vast numbers of people without the institutions -- political parties, labor unions, professional associations -- that had been required in the past.
SUBJECTS:
(3)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE