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2 SPEAKING
FREELY 'Arab Summer' turns
messy By Richard Javad
Heydarian
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to
have their say. Please
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contributing.
By any measure, the
year 2011 was a momentous juncture in the 21st
century. One by one, the world witnessed the
downfall of autocrats in Arab republics with
special characteristics: docile on foreign policy,
and submissive to the West-Israel regional
hegemony, but brutal on the domestic front.
The embattled autocrats represented
another paradox: aggressively 'liberalizing' on
the economic front, but perpetually and
increasingly 'closed' in terms of democratic
reforms. Thus, just like their Persian brethren
during the 1979 Iranian nationalist-Islamic
revolution, the Arab street is confronting a
fundamentally
unjust and unaccountable
international order, founded on an implicit modus
vivendi between 'moderate' autocrats and 'big
business', whether domestic or international.
However, as the Arab uprisings enter their
second year, while the revolutionary dust in
countries such as Tunisia and Egypt settles, the
'Arab Summer' is turning increasingly chaotic and
unpredictable. There has been neither a visible
change in the foreign policy of Arab countries,
nor has there been a fundamental shift in the
structure of their economic systems. Ominously, a
blend of political chaos and economic meltdown is
allowing reactionary forces to hijack the fruits
of the revolution.
The Arab
exceptionalism? The so-called Arab Spring
is a world historical event, because the
'democratic wave' has finally pierced through the
last major autocratic fortress: the Arab world.
For much of the 20th century, succeeding
waves of democratization swept through much of the
post-colonial world. From Latin America to East
Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, autocratic and/or
military regimes crumbled in face of 'people power
revolutions'. Then came the' big bang' in Eastern
Europe with the collapse of the Berlin Wall -
marking the end of the Cold War.
At the
dawn of the 21st century, the Arab world was the
sole major region to have withstood the wrath of
democracy. All major non-Arab countries in the
region enjoyed some form of democratic politics:
on the one hand, Israel is a self-proclaimed 'sole
democracy in the Middle East'; in 1979, the
Persians valiantly deposed the ancien regime to
supplant it with a unique form of theocratic
republicanism, precipitating successive waves of
'democratic reform movements' from the 1990s to
the present, while the Turks, on the other hand,
experienced a distinct form of 'refolution' -
revolutionizing a political system through
progressive application of consequential political
reform by peaceful means - under the auspices of
the Justice and Development Party (AKP). This left
the Arab street with one fundamental but awkward
question: when would our turn come?
Prior
to the Arab spring, every democratic election
giving rise to a progressive and/or radical
government - from the Islamist FSI in Algeria and
the 'Muslim Brotherhood' in Egypt to Hamas in
Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon - was
overturned and confronted by a combination of
domestic military-autocratic backlash and external
pressure, mainly by Western powers.
In
contrast, the largely secular and liberal nature
of the Arab spring allowed the revolutionaries to
avoid the fate of their more 'religious'
counterparts in the past, who were (rather
simplistically) portrayed as portentous and
reactionary by the global media. In the eyes of
the world audience, the Arab spring was not only
'harmless', but also "cool": it astutely utilized
latest forms of social networking - from facebook
to twitter - to circumvent the tentacles of the
'police state'. For once, in a very long time, the
Arab world found a sympathetic audience across the
Western world, with 'Tahrir Square' becoming a
global icon of revolutionary spirit and
international NGOs as well as global media
flocking in to eagerly support the democratization
process.
Concomitantly, there was a major
'rethinking' among opinion-makers and pundits, as
many begun to lament the bankruptcy of
'orientalism' in the way it has failed to see the
Arab people beyond a collection of docile people
bereft of a civic culture that is conducive to
democratic politics.
So, the Arab spring
marked the end of the so-called Arab
exceptionalism - well sort of.
The end
of autocracy? From Ben Ali in Tunisia to
Mubarak in Egypt and the El-Khalifa monarchy in
Bahrain, the motto of the ruling figures went as
the following: "We are open to investments, but
not to democratization; we will help you with
containing Iran, but let us suppress any form of
domestic opposition at home."
The strength
of these autocracies lied in their clever ability
to maintain jovial relations with Western powers,
while isolating democrats at home. Moreover, under
pressure by International Financial Institutions
(IFI) to get their fiscal house in order, they
shrewdly used economic reforms to transfers
'welfare' responsibilities to the private sector.
They also introduced a new pattern of
patronage: building political clients among the
security-military as well as the business elite by
granting them favorable trade-and-investment deals
and special treatment during major privatization
(of state-owned enterprises) schemes.
The
outcome - especially among non-oil rich countries
- was growing inequality and poverty; massive
unemployment as a result of aggressive
privatization and industrial hollowing;
over-reliance on speculative capital and services
such as tourism and real estate; and, precarious
fluctuations in the prices of basic commodities
due to the progressive neglect of agriculture and
trade liberalization. Nonetheless, the arrangement
survived for decades, because it kept all major
actors from theirs to the big business and the
military-security sectors content - crucially, it
gave all of them a stake in maintaining an
essentially autocratic structure intact.
Arab republics became so confident that
they increasingly emulated their monarchic
counterparts by instituting a hereditary,
mafia-like political system, whereby the rulers
passed down (or poised to do so) their power to
their sons and allowed their tribes and relatives
to dominate all relevant centers of power.
However, the autocrats forgot another
important actor: the people. From 2008 onwards, a
combination of rising commodity prices and a
steady decline in trade and tourism (due to the
Global Financial Crisis) severely exposed the
paucity of the reigning model of governance in the
Arab world.
Facing a closed political
system, an increasingly disquieted public found no
democratic-institutional channels to vent out its
frustrations. Worse, the autocrats resorted to
further repression when faced with legitimate
protests over lack of political freedom and/or
rapid rise in the price of basic commodities -
atop general discontent with structural maladies
of the whole economic setup.
Increasingly,
a popular revolution became inevitable. When, in
late-2010, Mohammed Bouazizi - a vendor, whose
predicament symbolized the sorry state of the Arab
street - set himself on fire, the 'information
revolution' in social networking went into full
gear. Finally, here was the spark that set fire to
the powder keg of centuries of pent-up Arab
discontent.
The downfall of autocrats
across the region represents a major democratic
upheaval in a sense that it challenges a whole
political economy based on neo-patrimonial
politics, pro-western foreign policy (with the
exception of Syria), and neo-liberal economics. It
is in this sense that the Arab spring resembles
the essence of the 1979 Iranian revolution. While
swamped in the midst of millions of Iranians
marching against the monarchy, the French
Philosopher, Michel Foucault, intelligently
observed, "It is not a revolution…it is perhaps
the first great insurrection against global
systems, the form of revolt that is the most
modern and the most insane.'
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