This week, popular protests resumed in Algeria and Yemen, simmered in Jordan and flared up in Bahrain. And that’s only part of it. In Jordan, demands for reform did not spare the queen. The Palestinian Authority is headed for pre-emptive elections, tension is not exactly subsiding in Lebanon and I won’t mention Iran.
The pundits’ favoured comparison is with the events of 1989 in eastern Europe. My own hunch, however, is that this comparison obscures more than it illuminates.
It is better, certainly, than some of the alternative characterisations. Fuad Ajami, of Johns Hopkins University, sees a civilisation in crisis.
If that phrase means anything, though, it must refer to some crisis of cultural identity. Yet, one of the striking aspects of the protests in most countries is the sheer confidence in shared identity: class, religious, sectarian and gender boundaries have been ignored in favour of national unity.
Indeed, it is such unity that,in Tunisia and Egypt, has energised a sense that the protests are leading to social renewal not just a change in the political order.
As Wael Ghoneim, the icon of the Facebook mobilisation, tearfully put it in a TV interview that moved the nation on February 7, in Tahrir Square one could see thousands of young women freely assembling without suffering harassment; people picked up their garbage without being asked; no one smashed the traffic lights in helpless bitterness.
Upon such details, a heavy burden of meaning is placed. Its explicit intention is to contradict the claim that chaos is the alternative to Hosni Mubarak and the army.
On the contrary, the claim goes, the rejection of Mr Mubarak has been accompanied by the rejection of the decadence of everyday dealings into which the country had, following its leaders, cynically sunk. (Such a sentiment might seem precariously ephemeral to an observer but it tells us something about why the events are being experienced as a true revolution, the birth of something completely new.)
Mr Ghoneim travelled for the protests from the United Arab Emirates, where he had settled into married life and a very comfortable job.
The participation of the affluent, cyber-savvy middle classes in the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings has been one of the remarkable features of the astonishing events. But calling them a Twitter Revolution is to exaggerate the feature and miss another at least as salient.
The first protests in Tunisia were sparked by the suicide of someone who was not even a high school graduate. In Egypt, the demonstrations hit their million mark after the government shut down the internet.
In both countries, the critical point was reached when workers went on strike.
And if the situation remains fluid and flammable in both countries, it is because there are radical working class demands, to do with economic rights not just civil liberties, which have yet to be met.
These demands are being made as a challenge to crony capitalism, not state socialism. Unlike eastern Europe, which underwent privatisation and liberalisation after its revolutions, across the Arab world privatisation has often preceded, and played its part in provoking, the protests.
Several Arab countries have a single, de facto ruling political party but it is unlike Communist Party rule.
Climbing up the career rungs of the latter was the path with which to acquire privilege but in places like Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria the party is the means through which already existing elites consolidate and protect their privilege.
However, the biggest discontinuity between the events of 1989 and of 2011 lies elsewhere and Europeans ignore it at their peril.
It would be an exaggeration, of course, to say the Warsaw Pact countries were homogeneous. However, they did have a lot more in common than the countries of the Arab region today. Their governments’ claims to legitimacy rested on Communist ideology whereas the legitimacy of the various Arab political orders ranges from appeals to monarchy and tradition, to republicanism and reformism, to revolution and radicalism.
The former Communist countries indeed had a collective identity resting on a regional economy and a defence pact; when the basis of that economy and defence, the USSR, began to fall apart, it was difficult for the rest not to follow. But the Arab regional system is fragmented, economically and diplomatically – indeed the latter is often cause for popular grievance.
The crucial difference, however, is that when eastern Europeans toppled their governments, they looked forward to making Atlanticist alliances. They were rejecting being a satellite state of the USSR; they looked at western Europe and the US as friends of their newfound freedom.
In the Arab world, however, Europe and the US are regarded with ambivalence. This has nothing to do with “civilisational values” or lifestyle. There are certainly more Arabs today that have lived and studied in the west than there were eastern Europeans who did so 22 years ago and cultural overlap between the west and the Arab world may be found as much in popular as in elite culture, in religious as in secular ideas.
But just as Latin America regards the US with widespread critical ambivalence, so does the Arab world regard the US and Europe – and for much the same reasons: a history of various kinds of interventions in Arab and regional politics, in pursuit of western interests at the expense of the Arabs’ own.
Europe and the US should therefore ask themselves: Can the widespread sense of Arab malaise be addressed only by internal Arab reforms? Or do reforms of the political orders in the Arab world require a reform of the same in the west?
ranierfsadni@europe.com