Beyond the Arab Spring

Can popular opinion, the so-called Arab Street, pave the way for a more democratic neighborhood in the most repressive region in the world?

A youth flashes a celebratory victory sign after rebel forces overrun Muammar Qaddafi’s fortified headquarters in Libya’s capital, Tripoli.
A youth flashes a celebratory victory sign after rebel forces overrun Muammar Qaddafi’s fortified headquarters in Libya’s capital, Tripoli.

On Dec. 17, 2010, in a remote town in Tunisia, a young fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, made hopeless by economic hardship and governmental harassment, protested his plight by dousing himself with gasoline and setting himself alight.

This sad episode ignited a conflagration that soon swept the entire Arab world. Popular protest exploded across the region. Within eight weeks, two deeply entrenched authoritarian rulers, Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, had been jettisoned from office. By late spring, four other regimes — Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria — appeared to be in grave jeopardy. In the wake of these events, nearly every regime in the region scrambled to concoct the “right” mix of repression and strategic state largesse, to keep a lid on political upheaval. Some succeeded. Others did not.

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Outside the Arab Spring

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These events astonished Middle East analysts and activists alike. How could this sudden flare of protest be explained? And why, despite their common genesis, had these protests taken Arab countries in such different directions?

The uprisings can be traced to several factors: long-standing grievances shared throughout the region; powerful emotional triggers that inspired ordinary citizens to take to the streets; and widespread use of social media that made mass protests less costly and more feasible, even in the face of authoritarian rule. By contrast, each country's political response hinged on state strength, religious or ethnic homogeneity, and international alliances that made concession to the protesters a necessity for some regimes but a desperate impossibility for others.

THE IMPULSE TO PROTEST

Most countries in the Arab world had long been afflicted with a triad of distress: economic hardship, repression and corruption. Although many countries in the region had experienced solid economic growth rates in recent years (thanks in no small part to the rise in world oil prices), this growth was unevenly distributed, and most countries were still burdened with serious poverty. Economic hardship was especially evident in rural areas (often neglected by development plans) as well as among the young and the educated, whose unemployment rates frequently tallied 25 to 30 percent.

Growth had not resolved this problem. If anything, it made the plight of the poor and unemployed all the more politically volatile because it exacerbated economic inequality. It is harder to endure deprivation when your nose is pressed up against the proliferating icons of middle-class consumption: shiny new malls, internationally branded fast food outlets and cafés, and fancy new cars.

Besides economic hardship, authoritarianism weighed heavily on the Arab world — long considered the most repressive region anywhere. Civil liberties are routinely violated. Political activists are harassed and arrested — if not worse. Newspapers are censored. Elections are scammed. The 1990s saw a modicum of political liberalization in the region, but many of the reforms introduced turned out to be little more than facades. Rarely did they introduce the sort of institutional change that would deliver true political freedom and accountability. If anything, analysts spoke of the development of “liberalized autocracies” in the region — the emergence of regimes that embraced distorted versions of democratic institutions, such as elections and party politics — which, paradoxically, served to prolong the survival of authoritarianism rather than foster political opening.

Corruption was also a persistent source of grievance in the Arab world. Power is the route to riches in the region, rather than the reverse, and cronyism is the norm in business-state relations. Without the institutions that make government officials accountable, such as a free press and truly competitive elections, there is little to curb their corruption. WikiLeaks’ revelations of pet tigers, expensive yachts and luxurious villas owned by the family of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali only confirmed what Tunisians had long known about the corruption of the ruling elite. And Tunisia was not the worst offender in this regard.

But just as infuriating as the corruption and conspicuous consumption of the ruling elites was the petty graft that citizens confronted in their everyday lives: the constant demand from minor bureaucrats for bribes, and the pervasive reliance on connections rather than merit in the distribution of government services and opportunities. This lowlevel sleaze posed a constant affront to citizens’ sense of fairness and dignity and fueled deep resentment against the regimes in power.