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Mediterranean Politics
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The Unbearable Lightness of
Authoritarianism: Lessons from the
Arab Uprisings
a
Andrea Teti & Gennaro Gervasio
b
a
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of
Aberdeen, Scotland
b
Department of Modern History, Politics and International
Relations, Macquarie University, Australia
Available online: 22 Jul 2011
To cite this article: Andrea Teti & Gennaro Gervasio (2011): The Unbearable Lightness of
Authoritarianism: Lessons from the Arab Uprisings, Mediterranean Politics, 16:2, 321-327
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Mediterranean Politics,
Vol. 16, No. 2, 321–327, July 2011
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PROFILE
The Unbearable Lightness of
Authoritarianism: Lessons from the
Arab Uprisings
ANDREA TETI* & GENNARO GERVASIO**
*Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Aberdeen, Scotland; **Department of
Modern History, Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University, Australia
On 17 December 2010, Mohamad Bouazizi set himself on fire in desperation in the
small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, sparking what became a revolution which in
barely 28 days toppled one of the most notorious autocrats in the Middle East and
North Africa. The upheaval that followed, however, surprised even keen observers,
not only successfully removing Zine el-Abidine Ben ‘Ali from what seemed like a
seat of unchallengeable power, but sparking revolts against other autocrats across
the region, most famously in Egypt, but also in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and latterly
Syria, with significant protests also in Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and
the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Today, as protesters in Tunisia and Egypt
struggle to consolidate their gains and others hope to emulate their successes, it is far
from clear what enduring results these uprisings will yield. Some have called the
last few months an ‘Arab 1989’, while others have drawn analogies with Europe’s
doomed revolutions of 1848. Although the outcome of these unprecedented
uprisings and the precise nature of the changes currently taking place in Egypt and
across the region will only become apparent in the fullness of time, some important
lessons on their roots and significance can already be drawn.
The Frailty of Autocracy
The first lesson is that authoritarianism is often fragile. After the fall of the USSR,
there was considerable optimism that global transitions to (liberal) democracy were
simply a matter of time. As the decade progressed, however, some eastern European
countries ‘backslid’ and democratization’s ‘third wave’ failed to spread to the
Middle East. In both regions, autocracies increasingly spoke the language of
Correspondence Address: Andrea Teti, Department of Politics and International Relations University of
Aberdeen, Edward Wright Building, Aberdeen AB24 3QY. Email: [email protected]
1362-9395 Print/1743-9418 Online/11/020321-7 q 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13629395.2011.583758
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A. Teti & G. Gervasio
liberalism, while only enacting changes that were either cosmetic or easily
reversible. Explanations for this newfound authoritarian resilience offered by
‘mainstream’ scholarship often originate in culturalist claims about Islam and Arab
culture to the tools of patronage and coercion that keep regional autocrats in power.
Others emphasized the novelty of this new form of governance, which
paradoxically dressed up repression and citizens’ exclusion from decision making in
the language of democracy: while granting democratic rights in principle, enacting
legislation – especially ‘vigorous’ security legislation, draconian restrictions on
independent press and civil society, and the emasculation of parliaments of any
legislative or oversight functions – would make it impossible in practice. So strong
did authoritarianism’s grip on local politics appear to be, that some scholars even
recently called for a shift away from studying ‘democratization’ to ‘postdemocratization’.
And yet, while the combination of co-option and coercion destroyed much
‘official’ opposition in the Arab world, making regime ‘stability’ appear convincing,
stability and calm ought not to be conflated. Although most observers of Middle
Eastern affairs were well aware of the lack of legitimacy most regimes suffered
from, this did not translate into scepticism about their solidity. In this sense, the
events of the last few months are an indictment of the profession not, as some have
alleged, because they were not predicted – very few expected the sheer scale of
events, including protesters themselves – but because ferocity and strength were so
easily conflated.
Roots of Radicalization
The second lesson is that there are concrete limits to the speed and extent of neoliberal reforms. The 25 January protests happened barely two days after the IMF
called for further cuts in subsidies on essential goods in Egypt,1 demonstrating
singularly bad political timing, and poor judgement of – or possibly little regard
for – the impact that such reforms would have on most Egyptians. As in the cases of
Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen and Jordan, debates about the roots of protest in Egypt
quickly split between those who pointed to economic factors and those who thought
protest was primarily driven by political dissatisfaction. But the two are inextricably
linked. In the (gun)fire and fury, it is easy to forget that just as in Egypt’s first
January intifada, in 1977, today’s protests are the direct result of neo-liberal reforms,
both political and economic. Politically, liberalization without democratization
simply marginalizes those it avowedly empowers: their increasing frustration cannot
come as a surprise.
Economically, when liberalization leads to the emergence of monopolistic or
oligopolistic market forces, with little regard for a more even wealth distribution,
such reforms increase citizens’ sense of alienation from the state, further
undermining the regime’s residual legitimacy. The economic impasse the region’s
‘post-populist’ regimes faced was plain enough. Most macroeconomic indicators
would lead one to believe that Egypt and Tunisia were rather success stories. In
Egypt, for example, GDP growth nearly doubled over the decade, public debt was
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Lessons from the Arab Uprisings
323
down by nearly a quarter, and the current account balance was healthy. Other
indicators, however, paint a more worrying picture: inflation has nearly doubled,
wages have been sluggish, and unemployment has risen, as has population. As a
result, nearly 40 per cent of Egyptians – over 32 million people – now live on or
under $2 per day. To put that into perspective, that is less than half the price of a
cappuccino in Cairo’s upmarket Zamalek district.
But increases in the cost of living hit the middle classes as well as the poor. The
hardest hit were the young, left without money, jobs, prospects or even the option of
emigrating, thanks to increasingly stringent EU immigration laws. The fabulous
wealth of new oligarchs such as Ahmad Ezz or the Trabelsi family only increased
frustration of those outside ever-narrower elites. Indeed, it was no coincidence that
the period of accelerated liberalization driven by Ahmad Nazif’s government saw
increasing labour unrest in Egypt, with more strikes in 2010 than in the whole of the
previous five years. As in Egypt, across the Arab world privatizations, labour market
de-regulation (e.g. in Qualified Industrial Zones), continued reduction of subsidies
on essential items, combined with rising inflation – particularly food prices – led
not only to increased labour mobilization, but also to increasing disaffection by
newly-pauperized middle class groups such as teachers and doctors.
Protesters themselves have confirmed the explosiveness of this mix of economic
and political factors in their slogans and the anger they vented to anyone willing to
listen. In Egypt, the key slogans of the revolution were ‘bread’ (‘aish), ‘freedom’
(hurriyya) and ‘human dignity’ (karama insaniyya). In brief, democracy and social
justice. Virtually in the same breath, most protesters complained about the dire
economic situation, the corruption of their supposedly democratic representatives,
and about the heavy-handed everyday bullying they were subjected to by police and
security services. As one woman said: ‘we’re tired, we just want to work, we just
want to eat!’ People asked for their human rights and their dignity. It was the system
that was the object of their protest.
Economic reforms being demanded by both global investors and local elites could
not afford the use of political liberalization as a ‘safety valve’, as had happened in
the past with several regimes, including Algeria, Morocco and Jordan as well as
Egypt and Tunisia. In some regimes, such as Egypt or Yemen, this dissent could be
hinted at in independent parts of the press and civil society – even manifest itself
in movements such as Egypt’s Kefaya or increasingly vocal independent trade
unions – while in other systems, such as Bahrain, Syria or Libya, this was much
harder, but all across the region opposition was swiftly crushed, leaving ordinary
citizens voiceless. Perhaps the paradoxical epitome of this marginalization came
barely weeks before Egypt’s second January uprising, during Egypt’s parliamentary
elections: having gained over 95 per cent of seats in the first round, the ruling
National Democratic Party (NDP) actually rigged results in some constituencies in
favour of the opposition to bring its share ‘down’ to 93 per cent.
In short, having sacrificed remnants of its populist revolutionary legitimacy on
the altar of its narrower self-interest, and alienating increasingly large swathes of
the population in the process, the ruling elite found it impossible to compensate
politically for its economic choices.
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Rather than a process of overt politicization, it was this level of combined political
and economic marginalization that produced a turnout for and an intensity in
protests which even organizers failed to anticipate. This gap between expectation
and turnout has been so massive, and the support for the protesters’ core demands so
consistent, that it led many to call this a ‘leaderless opposition’. Certainly, none of
the organizations involved could claim support even remotely close to the protests’
unprecedented turnouts. But with dissatisfaction simmering beneath the surface, it is
no wonder that ordinary people did not need parties or movements, El Baradei or
Ghannouchi, NGOs or the Muslim Brotherhood to tell them why or against whom to
protest. Events such as the torture and assassination of the young militant Khaled
Sa‘id in Alexandria last June, Mohamad Bouazizi’s self-immolation in December
and especially Tunisia’s successful uprising simply provided an additional spark in a
tinderbox that had been smoking for years.
Is Islam the (Only) Solution?
The third point was unwittingly made by the Muslim Brotherhood itself on the eve
of Egypt’s first protests. Responding to accusations that the Brotherhood was behind
the demonstration, the spokesman and leader of its reformist wing Essam El-‘Arian
insisted that the Brotherhood ‘did not send anyone [to the streets]’. The absence of a
clear religious imprint in the uprisings across most of the Arab world, and the lack of
leadership by established religious groups, particularly in Tunisia and Egypt, is
significant.
In Tunisia, the Nahda party benefited from but did not lead the revolution, with
Rachid Ghannouchi returning from exile to a hero’s welcome, but only after Ben Ali
had left. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership was notable for its absence.
Despite its lightning volte-face once the scale of protests became clear, the
credibility of the Brotherhood’s conservative leadership was badly damaged, which
partly explains their eagerness to achieve tangible results for the revolution,
however minimal. Some Islamists did take part in early protests, but many of these
are currently leading internal dissent against the conservative leadership. Damaged
by its willingness to negotiate and compromise first with Mubarak and then the
military junta, this leadership had already failed to present a clear and credible
alternative to the regime before the January uprisings, unwilling or unable to protest
at the rigging of recent parliamentary elections or to put forward a more equitable
economic policy than the NDP’s ‘oligarchic’ liberalization.
Throughout the uprising, the Ikhwan – just like the Azhar and Coptic leaderships,
who also called for boycotting protests – was playing catch-up with smaller liberal
parties, with left-wing movements like April 6, and with independent unions, which
seemed much closer to the pulse of the average Egyptian’s frustration. Certainly,
most of the protest’s popular mots d’ordre – horreya, karama, thawra etc. – were not
those of the Brotherhood. For most protesters, Islam was not the solution. Indeed,
the attempt to mobilize sectarian differences has been a strategy common to most
regimes faced with uprisings, from Egypt to Bahrain, Yemen to Syria – a strategy
which largely failed, or which at best impacted upon post-revolutionary divisions.
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Lessons from the Arab Uprisings
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The notable absence of a clear religious dimension to issues at the root of protests
throughout much of the Arab world provides a timely reminder that it is far from
obvious that religious politics should dominate the region in future, just as it did not in
a not-so-distant past. This past traction which various forms of nationalism and
socialism have had in the region – both closely linked to the demand for social,
economic and political justice, just as today’s protests are – suggests that a more
balanced political spectrum is possible if nascent democratic movements were able to
make significant inroads into post-revolutionary politics. This is not to say that Islamist
movements are now irrelevant. On the contrary, despite internal rifts the Egyptian
Muslim Brotherhood remains the best-organized political force in Egypt, and the
Nahda party is likely to gain considerable consensus in post-revolutionary Tunisia.
Likewise, it is likely that Islamist forces will play a significant role in Yemen
and Jordan, should a transition take place. But the fact that for protesters during
the uprisings ‘bread, freedom and dignity’ trumped religion provides a glimpse of
political possibility which both local political actors and international counterparts
ought to take note of. Particularly for western governments assessing the
significance of uprisings across the Arab world, the largely non-partisan nature of
the protests provides the opportunity to shed once and for all the a priori notion that
the menu of liberalizing political change involves a necessary dichotomy between
popular but anti-democratic Islamist per se and small and isolated secular parties.
Democracy on a Knife’s Edge: Regional and Global Implications
The fourth key aspect of the Arab uprisings lies in local and regional implications of
its key goal: democracy. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions obtained results
relatively quickly. Since their most obvious successes in toppling their regimes’
leaderships, there has been a degree of predictable in-fighting as different forces
attempt to position themselves in the post-uprising scenario. These divisions have
also facilitated the retrenchment of parts of the regime – be it apparatchiks of the
decapitated regimes or the military – in what some already call a counter-revolution
(al-thawra al-mudadda). Some successes have been exacted, notably the abolition
of hated internal security bodies, but other questions remain, not least the identity
of those security services which replace the old, and legislation which both the
Egyptian and Tunisian interim governments and their military masters have pushed
through which, particularly in the Egyptian case, make life harder particularly for
the non-Islamist opposition which had been at the forefront of the uprising.
Other uprisings across the region – whether more violent and high-profile as in
the cases of Bahrain and Libya, Yemen and now Syria, or smouldering as in Algeria,
Morocco or Jordan – are ongoing and appear to be much more protracted affairs.
If they are successful in either toppling regimes or extracting significant concessions
from them, a similar problem of guarding against the erosion of those gains will
be crucial to any post-uprising scenario. In Libya, for example, the Transitional
National Council (TNC) in Benghazi is already stacked with members of the former
regime, not least the body’s current leader and former justice minister, Mustafa
Abdul Jalil. In Libya and particularly in Yemen, any transitional scenario raises
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serious questions about non-democratic forces, whether tribes, radical and wellarmed Islamists, or former elements of the regimes attempting to undermine postauthoritarian governments.
The window of democracy in the Middle East is therefore a small one and the
implications of its closure cannot be underestimated. The current phase is one in
which there is a broad consensus on the principle of democracy if for no other reason
than that it stands for representation and for empowerment, from both political
repression and economic disenfranchisement. But crucial to this consensus is the fact
that the anti-authoritarian uprisings are home-grown, not imposed from abroad, even
from within the region, and that for many of those impoverished by ‘liberalization’
they hold the hope of better living conditions. If these key expectations are not met,
particularly in those countries where revolution or substantive reform take place, it
will not be simply the revolutions which will be discredited, but the very concept of
democracy. There are two obvious dangers: first, that western governments attempt
to ‘guide’ the uprisings towards their vision of liberal democracy, whether directly or
indirectly through leverage afforded by debt and aid; and second, that protesters’
demand for economic as well as political reform are ignored.
Both possibilities present significant risks. Already during the early stages of the
Libyan and Bahraini uprisings it was clear that a division existed within the US
administration between those who favoured backing ‘transitions’ and those who fell
back onto the so-called Realpolitik of backing authoritarian regimes. The latter, like
secretary of defence Robert Gates, appear to be increasingly carrying the argument.
The result is that, like the EU, while the US easily condemns Gadhafi or Bashar
al-Assad, its protests against the al-Khalifas’ bloody repression of internal dissent –
not least with the contribution of Saudi Arabia – are barely murmured. This
undermines the credibility of western governments as defenders of democracy in the
eyes of Arab audiences.
At an economic level also, the credibility of western powers is shaky. The EU’s
External Action Service notably published a document outlining the EU’s ‘new’
stance on democracy,2 the vast majority of which contained re-hashed or barely
‘accelerated’ versions of precisely those policies which were so badly received by
Arab populations, and which were widely perceived as having favoured only
kleptocratic elites. Several EU and US representatives and officials have visited
countries like Egypt in recent weeks, but there is little sign to date of any significant
change in economic policies towards the region’s impoverished working and middle
classes.
For the US in particular, democratic uprisings pose a dilemma. On the one hand,
supporting them would potentially cost dearly in the Gulf. On the other hand,
positioning itself as a friend of new regional democracies would afford leverage on
the Palestinian issue, where a more ‘proactive’ government particularly in Egypt
might exercise sufficient pressure on Israel to make a negotiated solution more
likely. It would also provide political ammunition against Russia and China, both
of which have awkwardly clothed their opposition to support for democratic and
popular self-determination in the language of anti-imperialism, revealing the full
extent of their political vulnerability to genuinely democratic movements.
Lessons from the Arab Uprisings
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Conclusion
As in 1848, whether successful or not, the Arab uprisings of 2011 are likely to have
an enduring effect on the region. What this effect is will depend on whether key
economic and political demands are met, not least because it will affect the extent to
which the post-revolutionary re-writing of history – which is already well under
way – succeeds in redefining the uprisings as Islamist, foreign-sponsored, sectarian
or simply destabilizing. What is clear now is that these uprisings resulted from a
combination of economic and political disenfranchisement which revealed the full
extent of local autocracies’ frailty; that they found both regimes and ‘official’
oppositions badly wanting; that the much-feared conservative Islamists in particular
were wrong-footed by an ‘old-fashioned’ agenda consisting of democracy and social
justice; and that the combination of all these factors presents both local and
international forces with significant but short-lived opportunities to transform a
regional political landscape scarred by authoritarianism.
Notes
1
2
http://arabia.msn.com/news/MiddleEast/General/2011/january/egy94.aspx (accessed 3 June 2011)
European Commission, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, A
Partnership For Democracy and Shared Prosperity with the Southern Mediterranean, COM(2011) 200
final, available at http://eeas.europa.eu/euromed/docs/com2011_200_en.pdf#page=2 (accessed 8
March 2011); and ibid., A New Response to a Changing Neighbourhood”, 25 May 2011, available at
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/11/342&format=HTML&aged
=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en (accessed 3 June 2011).