The world has yet to settle on an agreed term for the great events unfolding across the Middle East. I was in the depths of the French countryside — out of touch, and with a BBC World Service that could only fade in and out of hearing late at night and early morning — during their latest, awe-inspiring Egypt phase. However, I was soon persuaded that the designation that Gilles Kepel, the expert on Islamic fundamentalism, assigned them would prove as accurately encapsulating as any. He dubbed them the “Arab democratic revolution.”
It is definitely, all-encompassingly Arab. The moment one Arab country, Tunisia, lit the spark, it ignited a fire, a contagion, which all Arabs instantly hoped would spread to the whole “Arab nation.” They all recognized themselves in the aspirations of the Tunisian people, and most appeared to be seized with the belief that if one Arab people could achieve what all had long craved, so could the others.
It is self-evidently democratic. To be sure, other factors, above all the socio-economic, fueled it, but the virtual absence of other factional or ideological slogans has been striking. Indeed, so striking that, some now say, this emergence of democracy as an ideal and politically mobilizing force amounts to nothing less than a “third way” in modern Arab history.
The first was nationalism, nourished by the experience of European colonial rule and all its works, from the great carve-up of the “Arab nation” to the creation of Israel, and the West’s subsequent, continued will to dominate and shape the region. The second, which only achieved real power in non-Arab Iran, was “political Islam,” nourished by the failure of nationalism.
And it is doubly revolutionary. First, in the very conduct of the revolution itself, and the sheer novelty and creativity of the educated and widely apolitical youth who kindled it. Second, and more conventionally, in the depth, scale and suddenness of the transformation in a vast existing order that it seems manifestly bound to wreak.
Arab, yes — but not in the sense of the Arabs going their own away again. Quite the reverse. No other such geopolitical ensemble has so long boasted such a collection of dinosaurs, such inveterate survivors from an earlier, totalitarian era; no other has so completely missed out on the waves of “people’s power” that swept away the Soviet empire and despotisms in Latin America, Asia and Africa.
In rallying at last to this now universal, but essentially Western value called democracy, they are in effect rejoining the world, catching up with the history that has left them behind.
If it was in Tunis that the celebrated “Arab street” first moved, the country in which — apart from their own — Arabs everywhere immediately hoped that it would move next was Egypt. For Egypt was always a model, sometimes a great agent of change, for the whole region. It was during the nationalist era, after former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s overthrow of the monarchy in 1952, that it most spectacularly played that role.
However, in a quieter, longer-term fashion, it was also the chief progenitor, through the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, of the “political Islam” we know today, including the global jihad and al-Qaeda that were to become its deviant descendants.
However, third, and most topically, it was also the earliest and most influential exemplar of the thing that, nearly 60 years on, the Arab democratic revolution is all about. Nasser did seek the “genuine democracy” that he held to be best fitted for the goals of his revolution. However, for all its democratic trappings, it was really a military-led, though populist, autocracy from the outset; down the years it underwent vast changes of ideology, policy and reputation, but, forever retaining its basic structures, it degenerated into that deeply oppressive and immensely corrupt version of its original self over which former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak presided. With local variations, the system replicated itself in most Arab autocracies, especially the one-time revolutionary ones like his, but in the older, traditional monarchies too.
Sure enough, Egypt’s “street” did swiftly move. As a broad and manifestly authentic expression of the people’s will, it accomplished the first, crucial stage of what surely ranks as one of the most exemplary, civilized uprisings in history. The Egyptians feel reborn, the Arab world once more holds Egypt, “mother of the world,” in the highest esteem. And finally — after much artful equivocation — US President Barack Obama and others bestowed on them the unstinting official tributes of the West.
These plaudits raise the great question: If the Arabs are now rejoining the world, what does it mean for the world? Will the adoption of a fundamental Western value make it necessarily receptive to Western policies or prescriptions? Probably not. Democracy itself, let alone Arab resentment over the West’s long record of upholding the old, despotic order, will militate against that.
Practically speaking, the Arabs’ “third way” only means that democracy, a political neutral concept in itself, will henceforth serve as their gateway for the conduct of their politics. It doesn’t mean supplanting the first two ways. For the politics of those cannot but persist into the third. Islamism, the West’s great bugbear, will still be there. A democratic order will find it impossible, on its own or any else’s behalf, to execute some Muslim Brotherhood leaders and harshly suppress their followers. It is bound to accommodate them, openly and electorally ceding to them their true weight in Arab affairs, along with that of all other movements in competition with them.
Nationalism, once the other great Western bugbear, will be one of these, and given the Brotherhood’s less than glorious role in the uprising, it will regain some of the ground it seriously began losing to the Islamists after the shattering Arab defeat of 1967.
A key, perhaps the key, element in the US’ Middle East strategies has always been about the Arab-Israeli conflict. With Islamism and nationalism freely expressing themselves, an Egyptian democracy will not, cannot, continue to play the role — subservient, if not frankly treasonable, in many Arab eyes — that Mubarak did on behalf of the US and Israel. How significant this Egyptian-US divergence becomes remains to be seen. However, most Israelis already see it as a calamity in the making.
However, all this is looking ahead. For the time being, the burning questions will be about where the Arab democratic revolution strikes next. Though Europe 1989 is the obvious precedent, the kings and presidents may not fall like dominoes as the Honeckers and Ceausescus did. And, in the wake of former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Mubarak, others may not fall so easily or prettily either. That is already apparent from the two latest, and most dramatic, episodes in the almost unceasing pro-democracy turbulence that grips a good half-dozen Arab countries.
The 200-year old Bahraini monarchy may have currently retreated into an attempt at reconciliation, but this regime has already shown how tenacious and tough — and bloody — it can be. As for Libya, there could hardly ever have been much doubt that Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, cruellest and most capricious of Arab dictators, would seek to do what he has always openly proclaimed he would do to any opponent of his 42-year-old Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab State of the Masses, which is to “cut them to pieces.”
However, most regimes are candidates. Among the few likely exceptions, perhaps the most important, and certainly the most apt, is Lebanon.
Ever turbulent, ever the most exposed of Arabs to the consequences of what other Arabs do, it might logically seem destined to be among the first to go, but it isn’t — mainly because, alone in the region, it has always been a democracy of sorts.
David Hirst is a former Middle East correspondent for the Guardian and the author of several books on the region.
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