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Is There an Arab Spring?

George Friedman makes a good case that there is no Arab Spring: But to me, this is an intellectual abstraction. There is no Arab Spring, just some demonstrations accompanied by slaughter and extraordinarily vacuous observers. While the pressures are rising, the demonstrations and risings have so far largely failed [bold mine-DL], from Egypt, where Hosni […]

George Friedman makes a good case that there is no Arab Spring:

But to me, this is an intellectual abstraction. There is no Arab Spring, just some demonstrations accompanied by slaughter and extraordinarily vacuous observers. While the pressures are rising, the demonstrations and risings have so far largely failed [bold mine-DL], from Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak was replaced by a junta, to Bahrain, where Saudi Arabia by invitation led a contingent of forces to occupy the country, to Syria, where Bashar al Assad continues to slaughter his enemies just like his father did.

This is a valuable corrective to the rhetoric that the U.S. needs to get “on the right side of history” by siding with the “Arab Spring.” I’ll admit that I have taken to using the phrase as a shorthand to refer to the protest movements in North Africa and the Near East, and I would still say that Tunisia continues to be the one country where some sort of functioning representative government might have a realistic chance of succeeding. However, on the whole the idea of the “Arab Spring” is more of an expression of what democratists hope will happen rather than a description of what is happening.

Leaving aside the problem that there is no “right side of history,” or at least not one that we can discern while still living through it, there has been the automatic assumption that to be on the “right side of history” is to align the U.S. with whatever protest movements happen to be emerging in Arab countries at the present time. If Friedman’s assessment of these movements is correct, this is an argument for backing the losing side in the present. There may be the hope that the U.S. will at least receive some credit later on, or that eventually when democratic governments are established in these countries they will remember that the U.S. lent support to their forerunner movements, but that means potentially alienating current allies in the hope of gaining new allies in the future. The Libyan war is a good example of what this means in practice. The indigenous Libyan protest movement/rebellion was too weak to succeed on its own and was on the verge of failing, and so it had to be rescued. In those places where no rescue has been forthcoming (and was never going to be), the movements have been frustrated or repressed.

Another phrase that has sometimes been used to describe the upheaval in the region has been “the Arab 1848.” This seems more accurate in that the 1848 revolutions were crushed or were soon diverted into authoritarianism. The comparison with 1848 revolutions should also make us wary of shaping U.S. policy (or even of giving the appearance of shaping U.S. policy) towards the region around what may prove to be abortive or failed uprisings.

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