When the Arab Spring blossomed last January, Entelis says, Algeria's opposition -- human rights activists, Islamists, Trotskyites -- seemed ready to overcome the deep mutual suspicions that had long separated them, and had been exacerbated by the civil war. He thought, and Algerian activists hoped, that 2011 might be the fulfillment of 1992. Last January, in between the protests in Tunisia and Egypt, riots in Algiers over food prices and unemployment led to the death of five protesters and the wounding of 800. Demonstrations spread to major cities across the country.
Bouteflika responded with force, but also with conciliation. In February, the regime lifted the emergency law that had been imposed in 1992. In April, Bouteflika went on the air to announce constitutional reforms designed to "strengthen democracy," including a new electoral law. In May, the government announced that it would boost subsidies on flour, milk, cooking oil, and sugar -- on top of a 34 percent increase in the salaries of civil servants announced earlier in the year. Algeria, it turned out, belonged to a category of its very own -- more flexible than neighbors like Libya or Egypt, but also wealthy enough that, like the Gulf sheikdoms, it could use payoffs to blunt social anger. Instead of gathering force, as happened elsewhere, the mass protests in Algeria subsided.
Algerians remembered their own past all too well. Despots like Syria's Bashar al-Assad warned that protest will unleash extremism -- and then consciously provoked precisely the violent response they had warned of. But in Algeria, political dissent had boiled over into fratricide in very recent memory. A relatively moderate form of Islam had degenerated into terrorism; indeed, one remnant of the FIS ultimately signed on with al Qaeda in the Maghreb and remains a threat to the state, if a distant one. And so while Algeria's tradition of protest permitted a degree of activism forbidden elsewhere, the fear that it would boil over, leading the military to respond with murderous force, acted as a check on public resentment.
The Bouteflika regime is itself engaged in a battle for supremacy with le pouvoir, as Algerians call the security and intelligence apparatus, with the ultimate prize being control over Algeria's oil and gas revenues. Entelis argues that the reactionary forces within le pouvoir have recently gained the upper hand. Meanwhile, Algeria's ruling elite seems more divorced than ever from Algeria's restive public. Deeply fearful of the domino effect of the Arab Spring, the regime sided with Muammar al-Qaddafi during the Libyan civil war, and was the last country in the region to recognize Libya's National Transition Council, rendering its "revolutionary" credentials yet more threadbare. Secular and Islamist opponents have called on Bouteflika to replace his current prime minister in advance of parliamentary elections this May. But Entelis says that he doesn't expect either evolutionary or revolutionary change. Algeria has tried both, and both failed.
Algeria's story reminds us of the danger of looking at events categorically. Because the same grievances have given rise to protest across the Arab world, and because that protest has taken a very similar form from one country to the next, we tend to expect the outcomes to resemble each other as well. But they won't, because different histories have shaped different political cultures in each of these places. Algeria also forces us to recognize the weight of the past. History is not destiny: Had the military chosen not to step in, Algeria might well have groped its way to democracy. Turkey went one way, Algeria another. But history shapes expectations and fears, conditions the response to new events. All of us, whether we know it or not, carry our past within ourselves.
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