16th October 2012
I will explain what I hope to do this evening. I want to try and make an assessment of what has been happening throughout the Arab world over the past two years to get some sense of where we are what the implications might be and where we might anticipate where things will go.
It is almost two years since the Arab spring began. Let me open a parenthesis here. I know that in the Arab world the idea of the Arab spring is not popular and people would much rather we referred to the Arab awakening and I fully understand the reasons for this. One should perhaps remember that the term the Arab spring is part of a long line of events of a similar kind going back to 1968 beginning with the Prague spring. It anticipated the collapse of communism in eastern Europe.
Then we move on to the Berber spring in Algeria in 1980 so it is part of a very honourable traditional to use that term . I am not going to apologise for using it. I hope you understand why in the European context it has a slightly different resonance from the resonance it has inside the Middle East itself.
I suppose that bearing in mind that the Arab spring began in December 2010 we need to ask a question after two years to try and work out what actually has happened and that is what I want to address.
There are two possibilities: one is that it has realized the objectives of the wig concept of history – an idea put forward but Hubert Butterfield in the 1930s – the sense that history is part of a progression towards continued improvement in human circumstances.
There is an alternative which I would like to pose is Spanglarian. It fits in with the view of Oswald Spangler towards the idea of the sense of history as a cyclic process, moving from success and growth, spring to summer to autumn than the beginning of winter when the decline is setting in.
So the question is do those two represent what has happened in the Arab spring. My answer is that neither of those two paradigms are appropriate. It seems to me that in fact something quite different has occurred. It is a paradigm shift in the Kunian sense and that means that in a way we are beginning a new era. Quite where its going to go we don’t know. We only know that is very different from the past. That seems to me to be intrinsically hopeful.
Indeed it is not surprising that this should be so. It is not surprising that we are not able to say for the whole of the Arab world that we know what this means. After all the Arab world is not just a single unit. It is a whole series of units: countries, states and nations. Each of those has its own specificities. It has its own history, its own politics and its own political systems. And those specificities live alongside the idea of the commonalities of the region – commonalities of language, culture and belief. And therefore necessarily we would expect that the outcomes would differ from country to country.
What I want to do is to try and see what those differences might be and to see what explanation we might give for them and what that then implies in terms of what the outcome itself is going to be.
Let us begin with the commonalities. There are shared experiences which are common to the whole region. The first one that strikes me is that the events that occurred were roughly simultaneous. They all began within a very narrow period: December 2010 up to perhaps March 2011 which is when the crisis in Syria began.
In a sense that is not surprising and one reason for this (a point which is today unwisely overlooked) is that the crisis began not over politics. It began over economics. It was caused by a sudden rise in food and energy prices, at the end of 2010. Just consider some figures. Oil prices rose from $71 a barrel in July 2010 up towards $110 towards the end of the year. That is a massive increase over a very short period of time. Food reached the highest level since records began in 1990 of 231 times. That sudden increase in food prices was caused by a number of factors: climate change, the problem of the energy intensity of agriculture even in developing countries, problems of switching from food production to energy production particularly in the United States. There were also harvest failures in Russia, Canada and Australia.
All these factors contributed to an increase in food prices. If you are sitting in England this is inconvenient. But if you are sitting in the Middle East it was absolutely critical. We seem to forget that despite a period of something like 20 – 30 years of constant reform and constant pressure from international organizations the actual economic situation in the Middle East has not improved at all.
In 2012 throughout the region between 20 and 40 percent of people were living on the poverty line or below it. That is a level of $2 a day of earnings or the equivalent. That should not have been . It was supposed to have been cured by the economic reforms foisted on the region by the IMF, the World Bank, Europe and the United States. Beyond that the gini coefficient, which is measure of development and growth, has actually worsened over the whole of that period. It should have got better. Income distribution has worsened to. The top ten percent of the population in 2010 controlled much more than it had done ten years before.
All these things are attributable not necessarily to the failure of Arab economies in themselves but to the kinds of patterns of development they were forced to follow. So in a sense the region had become a victim and as a victim it faced colossal increases in what were essential goods and commodities with which the majority of people could not cope.
So the demonstrations that occurred in 2010 were a quite understandable and reasonable response to an intolerable situation created by global assumptions about patterns of development. That is crucial because the development failure was attributable not to the policies adopted by Arab governments but indeed to the policies forced upon them by outside powers.
The question then is why did this suddenly transform into a political demonstration of unparalleled magnitude. The answer is that nobody can predict what actually sets off a revolution. There is always a catalyst of some kind. And the catalyst in this case was the self immolation of Mohammed Bu azizi in the town of city Sidi Bouzeid in southern Tunisia.
This event and I don’t mean in any way to minimise its significance was banal. Self immolations have been typical in North Africa in the past and ever since. There were ten before him in Tunisia alone and since his death there have been at least 60 in Tunisia and Algeria. This gives you an indication that these people were acting out of desperation and their desperation became symbolic of the frustrations at a much wider level of the populations of the region. That catalyst transformed the economic crisis into a political crisis as well.
There is a second general feature and it is that all these crisis, all these political demonstrations and calls for change began as peaceful demonstrations. That is immensely significant. Nobody anticipated that in the Arab world of all places, mass demonstrations could be peaceful and yet they were. This is a tremendous tribute to those who were engaged they tried despite tremendous odds to maintain that fact that they would be peaceful demonstrations.
In Syria the demonstrations continued to be peaceful for five months before they began to turn violent. Five months of confronting the Syrian army and the Syrian security services. I think this is a remarkable tribute that that was possible.
Beyond the fact that they were peaceful it is worth looking at what the people were actually demanding. That is interesting to because the demands were not those that most people in Europe and the United States would have anticipated, demands for radical changes in political structures, demands for the introduction of religion into political life. They were not about that at all. They were demands directly linked to social justice.
It was not that the people just wanted an end to regimes. What they wanted was also an end to tyranny and they wanted an end to the contempt shown by the rulers for the people over whom they ruled. They wanted political participation. Those were the dominant themes of all the demonstrations. The important thing about this is that there was nothing exceptional about this. It is what you would have expected if you looked at 1989 in Europe, if you looked at the transformations in Indonesia in the 1990s or the situation anywhere in South East Asia where there has been revolutionary change of one kind or another. The Arab world has been part of a much wider movement demanding social justice. That is extremely significant.
The third point which is common to all of them is that all these demonstrations were popular. That is to say that there wasn’t a movement, a political party or a charismatic leader who was in some way organizing them, giving them structure, articulating their demands. The people themselves could do it. Of course there was some kind of leadership but it was very informal. Some of it came from the youth, some came from other organizations inside the countries concerned – trade unions, civil rights groups and so on. But actually it was a popular response and a popular set of demands that emerged from popular interests and concerns about the way in which the people were being forced to live.
What is notable is that political Islam as such, however you care to define that term, the idea that Islam has a direct role to play inside political life, did not feature at all. That is not to say that the people who were convinced of the principles of political Islam did not take part – of course they did. But they did not do so as organized movements. There was no evidence in any of the demonstrations, certainly at the beginning, that they were Islamist in character.
That again is surprising. It runs counter to what was assumed by most Europeans. Don’t forget the French government distinguished itself by trying to support the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia precisely because it feared there would be an outcome that did not eventuate.
The final commonality is that after the demonstrations, after the regimes disappeared in the process of construction of new governments Islam played a very important part. We will need to look to see what that actually means.
If those are the commonalities that defined the events in 2011 we need to ask ourselves what were the differences and how we can categorize the events that did occur and I think we can put them into a series of groups. Every one of those experiences was national and therefore different despite the commonalities both over timing and over content with neighbouring states.
We can define four groups of reactions that occurred. There was the question of regime removal and there I think of Libya and of course probably Syria but we don’t know yet. Those situations where regimes were removed and eradicated did involve violence, violence imposed by the regimes themselves trying to guarantee their own continuance. They also involved a removal of the structure of the state and were much more radical in their consequences than may have been true elsewhere. That occurred where the regimes themselves were incapable of considering compromise. That is one group.
Then there is a second group. The second group is a question of regime change. Here I am thinking of Tunisia, Egypt and possibly Yemen. And there the state continues in a recognizable form even though the actual regime itself has disappeared.
A third group was a question of regime adjustment. Here we have the example of Morocco, Jordan and even perhaps Algeria where concessions were made and the regimes continued without a discernible change of personnel or fundamental policy.
And then there was a fourth category where regimes preserved themselves. That was the Gulf. It was quite remarkable that the Gulf maintained a situation of apparently uneasy calm apart from the situation inside Bahrain. And there are very good reasons for that, not least the fact that the Gulf is under the hegemonic control of Saudi Arabia. And again I will come back to that point too.
If those are the categories that we can find we need to look at the processes by which the outcomes I have implied in those categories can be explained. We need to understand that the distinctions I have just outlined arise because of the nature of the regimes themselves. In other words regimes inside the Middle East, contrary to a common view held certainly in Europe, were not all of the same kind. They differed. And it was on the basis of the differences between them that the outcomes could be as different as they were.
Syria and Libya were absolutist autocracies. They could only respond with violence to any challenge that might exist and the crises that began with demonstrations necessarily generated a violent response. In the case of Libya in particular that was because of the assumption of the perfection of the Jamahiriya – the state of the masses that Colonel Gaddafi had created and because it was perfect it could not be questioned. So you have the irony of what was said to be a perfect example of democracy being the most intolerant of all the regimes inside the region. The crisis that emerged and the collapse of the regime was the only solution. There was no other solution that could have been considered.
In the case of Syria it is a much more complex picture and we are still seeing this playing out today. We do not know how long it will take before fundamental change takes place there. In Syria I would argue that the Baathist regime survived and survives today on the basis of the fact that it depends on minority support. It is the minorities in Syria that give the regime the vitality to continue. And the minorities the Druzes, the Alawites, the Christians and of course the Syrian middle class find themselves confronted with a Sunni majority which they fear because they remember what happened in Hama in 1982 – in fact between 1979 and 1982 when there was an attempted Sunni uprising against the state. So on the basis of that and support from minorities the Syrian regime is able to continue but it will eventually be overtaken simply because it cannot compromise in any sense and yet survive as the regime is today.
All the other regimes that were affected by the events of 2011 were not absolutist autocracies. They had the peculiarity of being what Daniel Bloomberg has called liberalizing autocracies. Now this seems like a contradiction in terms but it is a necessary one and the concept that he was trying to put forward is a very useful one.
In the 1980s European states and the United States had brought declamatory pressure on most of the regimes in the region to show some signs of democratization. The very nature of an autocracy means that it is not going to democratize and it will do whatever it can to avoid doing so. These autocracies found a very clever way of doing it. They realized that if they allowed marginal liberalization, an autonomous civil society sector but one that was very carefully and very directly controlled they would placate western demands and at the same time they would guarantee their own continuation.
You had bizarre images in certain countries where people found that they were all of a sudden allowed to voice certain points of view but there were red lines you could not cross. If you were in Algeria there appeared to be a democratic political process but it was so devoid of democratic content that it was known by Algerians as being a façade democracy. That process of providing an arena in which civil society movements, very carefully controlled, could act out their concerns appeared to be an ideal solution that would allow the regimes concerned to survive without making fundamental concessions of any kind.
The point about it here is that because of that process when indeed the regimes lost credibility as they did in Tunisia at the beginning of 2011 and as followed in Egypt in January and early February 2011 suddenly those autonomous sectors provided the dynamo and the drive by which organization against the regime became possible.
Think of Egypt where four movements were involved in organizing the demonstrations together with the social media as well which became their dominant means of communication. The Ahrad movement and the Khifiya movement are both of them middle class movements dating back to the mid years of the last decade. The April 6th is a trade union movement based on events in 2008 in the Egyptian delta. Remember the Khalid Saeed Movement was created only in 2010 to commemorate a young blogger who had been brutally murdered by Egyptian security personnel in Alexandria.
Those four movements were able to provide the network, engagement and mobilization that led to the vast demonstrations from January 28th onwards that eventually forced the Mubarak regime to collapse. But here we have to enter a parenthesis because the Mubarak regime was quite strong enough to remain in power if it really was committed to doing so. The same is true of the Tunisian regime as well.
So we really have to ask the question why was it that these regimes nevertheless did collapse and the answer is that the regimes as embodied in the figure heads who ran and represented them collapsed because the real core of power inside the state in Egypt and in Tunisia and to some extent in Yemen too, was determined to abandon the symbols of the regime for the sake of their own preservation.
So you find in the case of Tunisia that it is the RCD the movement was a single party over which Ben Ali thought he ruled demanded that he should leave so that they could then grab control if they could of the state and preserve their interests. In the case of Egypt it was the Egyptian army, it was the SCAF that actually told Mubarak his time had come. It was not because of the demonstrations in Tahrir Square directly but it was the army that took the initiative in removing the figure head of the regime.
In Yemen, where the situation is much more complicated: it was the General Peoples Congress the basic single party there, that in the end persuaded Ali Abdullah Saleh to leave because they could then preserve their interest too despite the viciparious nature of the Yemeni political scene.
So you are looking at a much more complicated process than just simply a revolution removing a hated regime, because the regime has endured. Now of course over time the endurance was maintained. In Tunisia the demonstrations continued after Ben Ali disappeared until the time when the RCD itself was removed from office. It was banned and it was dissolved.
In Egypt it took almost a year before the SCAF, the vehicle that had got rid of Mubarak, was forced to accept the idea of elections and the implications of the outcomes of those elections provided. This shows considerable tenacity on the part of the regime itself. In Yemen it took well over a year before Ali Abdullah Saleh left the political scene and some would argue he still controls it today at a distance.
So those are revolutions that were not complete except in the case of Tunisia. They have been partially carried through and they still have quite a long way to go and how that is going to be achieved we do not know.
Among the liberalizing autocracies there was another group as well and that was the group that was prepared to make concessions and they are worth looking at. Three countries: Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria certainly adjusted to the crises they faced.
In the case of Morocco the king very quickly realized what was happening. He co-opted the demands of the 20th February Movement, made constitutional concessions and after winning a referendum for their approval marginalized the movement itself. He was therefore able to control the way in which liberalization should occur as indeed the monarchy in Morocco has done ever since 1990.
In the case of Jordan, the monarchy has been less adapt. It has been able to play off by promises of governmental change and now finally constitutional change for the interested groups and therefore preserve a degree of political peace.
In the case of Algeria the regime very quickly made economic concessions. It could well afford to do so. It is an oil-rich state. But it made sure that it avoided any real political concessions and it was able to do that because you could always remind the Algerians of what happened last time round in the 1990s with the seven-year long civil war that resulted in 200,000 people dying – more than in Syria today and more than in Iraq under the American occupation. So Algerians were not prepared to push the issue because they knew the implications of what would happen if they did.
Another group that is worth looking at is the Gulf. And what I find interesting about the Gulf is that solutions were achieved in a way that is time honoured. The opposition was bought off and where it couldn’t be bought off it was repressed. So in Saudi Arabia King Abdullah was able to find an odd $36bn that he could then offer for further economic improvements to the country and concessions to the population.
In Kuwait and in Qatar distributions of funding were made to the population at large. Three thousand dinars in Kuwait. And in that way through this kind of personal subsidy the old bargain of providing wealth against political loyalty could be reasserted. Not fully of course because Kuwait had had since 1961 an assembly and the assembly has learned over time how to exploit its position to discipline the ruling group. Nonetheless by and large peace could be maintained.
Only in Bahrain did the crisis really arise in ways that were unanticipated and difficult to control. There it is remarkable that what began as a series of demonstrations over economic issues was transformed by the regime more quickly than one would have expected into a sectarian struggle. That is a tragedy because it will make any solution far more difficult to achieve. And even if we understand that that was because of an internal split inside the ruling family that does not help in solving the crisis that is going to arise.
The problem for the Gulf is that stasis is not a solution. All that has happened is that the crisis has been postponed and it will come over economic and political issues. Think simply of the problem of employment in Saudi Arabia simply because of demographic growth and the educational system. All that has really happened is that those problems have been delayed and in some countries because the populations are very small they can be delayed probably indefinitely but eventually they are going to have to be confronted. There is a problem down the line which we are going to have to consider.
Having said that perhaps I need to make some comments about what the outcomes have been and what the implications for the future might be. The analysis I have just given of what happened does help us to understand what the implications and what the outcomes might actually be. But there are some other general issues that we also need to consider.
One is the question of political Islam. Why did it become in the wake of the initial revolutions a dominant theme in at least three countries: Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. Morocco has a government that is headed by an Islamist Party the PJD. In Tunisia, Al Nahda did very well in the elections and dominates inside the government coalition. And in Egypt of course, despite the fact that the supreme court annulled the legislative elections there is a president elected who himself stems from the Muslim Brotherhood.
And therefore we have to at least ask the question why was it that this should be the dominant theme in the electoral process. The reasons do not have very much to do with religion. They have a lot to do with other issues and it is in those other issues that we will find the implications for the future.
There is a question of cultural authenticity. After all political Islam represents the kind of culture and vision that many people in the region share. There was also a second consideration. The secular elites that often led the revolution themselves were out of touch with majority opinion. They did not understand it and therefore they did not understand how it could be that the gift of secular democracy they thought they were bringing should be so briskly rejected by the populations at large.
And then there was another consideration to. Of all the movements that existed – don’t forget that in countries like Tunisia there were other political parties apart from the dominant single political parties, only the Islamic parties were the ones that were not in some way besmirched by co-operation with the previous regimes. So they could offer the promise of a new beginning. What that beginning was going to be no one might know but nonetheless they were at least spared the contamination of the previous regimes.
The only country where that was not completely true was Morocco where the PDG had participated in the elections and as a result did not do so well. So the idea of lack of contamination is clearly an important one in that context. If that is the case we need to ask what actually did the elections really mean. They didn’t mean and they don’t mean a universal caliphate. It is interesting to note that the elections took place on a national basis with national objectives. They were the issues of the campaign however they were expressed.
And there is a second implication to. Don’t forget that Islamic parties previously had been in opposition. They had not had to confront the realities of political power, the compromises that you have to make and the ways in which you have to adjust to a pluralistic political arena. And all of them on coming to power have espoused democratic principles. Not inside the Islamic state perhaps but inside the civic state which is basically the idea of pluralism inside an Islamic context.
The problem of having to face the challenge of power and elections and don’t forget that elections are coming up again very soon in all the countries concerned is that your objectives become diminished. You have to deal with realities not with principles. In that process of dealing with realities it seems to be that Islamic political parties have been trapped by the very system they wished to dominate. They have no way now of escaping from that embrace. They are not going to be secularized fully but forced to accept and reflect and engage with the secular vision that the democratic principles necessarily imply.
Quite apart from that they all face other challenges that did not exist before because to their right there are now salafist parties and they also will challenge for power. There is an extraordinary irony in this and one of the reasons I think it was not anticipated. By definition scientific salafism is a movement which rejected political engagement and yet here are movements that are ostensibly non political engaging in political action. That is a real challenge and that too is going to domesticate the political scene to a very large extent.
So even though the future may be very uncertain I am convinced that in the end there is going to be some kind of democratic outcome inside states where governments have to respond to popular demands. And that is a very good outcome whatever the hiccups may be along the way, whatever the difficulties might be in achieving it. In some countries those challenges can be very great indeed.
The second issue that needs to be addressed is the old European and American argument of Arab exceptionalism: the idea that the Arab world simply was not capable of democracy – that is why these regimes have been able to endure. That is in many respects a profoundly hypocritical argument. It is hypocritical because it was Western states that actually maintained those regimes in power and retained them in power for quite specific reasons of national self interest. Had the West not engaged in supporting those states maybe change would have occurred much earlier. We know what those issues were particularly in the last decade. The idea of the war on terror and the use of regimes such as those which existed in the Arab world to maintain a kind of uneasy stability in which political Islam, in whatever form, should not be allowed to flourish or threaten
Western interests. Well it didn’t work and now there is the use of drones to maintain order in countries like Yemen.
But the issues of complicity and not only over the question of war on terror is really important. Western states and statesman and most commentators are not aware of it and therefore do not recognize what impact they may have had.
The Arab spring in itself demonstrated that those assumptions were wrong. Western states have not accepted that. They find it very difficult to see that what has been happening in the Arab world as anything that they could take some comfort from or that they could engage in the hope of improving the outcomes.
And there is something else. It did not happen in 2011. It actually begins much earlier. I would argue that the precise date of the beginning of the Arab spring can be dated back to 1980 in Algeria. Most people are not aware of what has occurred in Algeria. Algeria is quite a remarkable country in this respect. It began out of a revolutionary war, a crucible which was extremely painful for Algerians to experience which made promises to the Algerian population which were not kept.
And these came home to roost first in 1980 during the Berber Spring when cultural demands soon translated into political demands too for liberalization. And then again when those were crushed by the regime they reemerged in 1988 in a series of country-wide riots that produced a sudden change in the political system in Algeria. The introduction almost overnight of a pluralistic democratic system that lasted for three years and because of its suppression led to the civil war.
So it is quite clear that populations in the Middle East and North Africa are well aware of what they wanted and certainly in the case of Algeria if not elsewhere because of much more effective regime control.
The kinds of demands that people make – what has occurred during the past two years is no different from the kinds of demands that were made in 1989 in Europe – the same demands for political participation, the same demands for respect, the same demands for the removal of autocratic, repressive political systems.
Having said that I don’t want to leave the impression that the Arab spring is merely a replica of Europe in 1989. It is not. It is much to varied and the outcomes are much to uncertain. If you are looking for a parallel in European history it will be closer to 1848 than to 1989.
My final question is to ask where do we go, what happens now, what can we expect to be the outcome. I first have to say that is going to be very uncertain. We do not know, we cannot predict what will happen, partly because it is too early.
You remember Choi En Lai when asked about the implications of the French revolution is supposed to have said it is too early to say. It is believed that he was thinking that his questioner was really referring to the revolutions in eastern Europe in 1968. The point is that it is certainly far too early to say as far as the Arab world is concerned. There is nothing to say that the outcomes are going to be positive even if I may believe that they will be. Things could still go wrong, new dictators could still emerge. Look at the situation in Iraq.
The second point is that one needs to remember that this enormous change that has taken place in the Arab world has taken place without external support. Western states have not made any real move and I include the question of Libya and NATO’s intervention to in some way help the process of transition. The European Union has given a total of $31m to help the transitional process. That is trivial and it is really quite amazing that Europe which sits next door to the Arab world is not prepared to do more despite its own crisis.
There was a cartoon in an Algerian paper just after the European Union had been awarded the Nobel Peace prize that showed the flag of Europe. You remember the circle of stars and the blue flag. And walking over it was a chicken relieving itself. That probably represents the way in which many people in the Arab world feel about European engagement in the process.
And there is another dimension to this too. There is the enormous skepticism in Europe, you can see it in the papers every day, and in the United States too about what has happened in the Arab world in the last two years. This is unjustified but it is simply reinforcing comforting paradigms the Europeans and the Americans have about the nature of the Arab world itself. And those things have added to the uncertainty because we cannot escape the fact that the Arab world is intimately connected with the wider European and American world.
Energy is one example. Trade in the Mediterranean is another. And therefore outside powers have a responsibility to help this transition process and they are not doing so. Nonetheless having said that there is one final point I would like to make.
What has occurred is a paradigm shift and I mean that in the Kunian sense. A situation has been created where old rules, principles and analyses no longer apply. There is a completely new world emerging inside the Arab world. We may not know where it is going to go but we know that it is new and that means we have to watch, try to understand and support where we can.
We know that the public voice will not be suppressed again. People will feel that they have a right to express their demands and to see responses to them. That is a colossal change and it is something that Western powers will need to listen to because the region is not only one that may be dependent on its relations with the West. Europe in particular is very dependent on the Middle East. Oil. Trade. Don’t forget the Middle East stands across the world’s greatest trade routes and beyond that migration, the one thing Europe lives in fear of and the one consequence of economic failure.
Western states, particularly European states, are being very unwise not to take seriously this enormous change on Europe’s own borders and it is perhaps with that thought that I would like to leave you. Thank you very much.
