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The Myth of the Arab Spring
April 28, 2017 In 2010, a fruit vendor put Tunisia on the world’s stage when he lit himself on
fire.
By Jacob L. Shapiro
Tunisia is being rocked by protests. On Thursday, the country’s prime minister was booed off
stage at a town hall in the southern city of Tataouine, where a general strike was taking place.
The protests are about unemployment (which is over 15 percent in the country and much higher
among youth) and have been ongoing for weeks. Another general strike was held earlier this
month, along with a ministerial visit that failed to quell public discontent. Tunisia is a small North
African country with a population of 11 million people. Before December 2010, it was best
known for three things: It was the capital of ancient Carthage, it had a charismatic president
named Habib Bourguiba during the heyday of Arab nationalism, and Star Wars was filmed there.
In December 2010, a fruit vendor put Tunisia on the world’s stage when he lit himself on fire to
protest his harsh treatment at the hands of a female Tunisian police officer and his overall lack
of economic prospects. This triggered massive protests that eventually forced President Zine El
Abidine Ben Ali to flee with his family to Saudi Arabia, where he remains today. At the time, no
one (including those of us working with George Friedman at Stratfor in December 2010)
predicted that the Arab world was about to have an epileptic fit, or that an act of protest in
Tunisia would have the potential to spread across the Arab world. But spread it did and with
disastrous consequences.
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Tunisian protesters gather during a visit by Prime Minister Youssef Chahed to the town of Tataouine on April 27, 2017. Chahed
was booed off stage as he addressed a town hall in a southeastern region rocked by protests and a general strike. FETHI
BELAID/AFP/Getty Images
The media called it the Arab Spring. (The first use of “Arab Spring” I can find was in Foreign
Policy on Jan. 6, 2011.) The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama declared that a great
“new chapter in history” was emerging in the Arab world. The narrative that developed was of
young, liberal, technologically savvy Arabs engaging in mass protests that were going to sweep
away decades of dictatorship and bring liberal democracy to the Middle East. The Egyptian
military’s removal of President Hosni Mubarak from power was interpreted as a victory for liberal
protesters. The first demonstrations against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were greeted with
hope that a liberal revolution also was coming to Syria. The Libyan rising against Moammar
Gadhafi and the West’s participation in toppling his regime was portrayed as justice being
served.
The Western world’s wishful thinking quickly proved to be just that. In Egypt, regime change
never happened. The Egyptian military was – and remains – the country’s dominant force. Egypt
briefly experimented with democracy but abandoned that experiment when it led to a Muslim
Brotherhood member being elected president. He was removed in a coup d’etat, and now a
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general is president – or at least he plays one on TV. Tunisia doesn’t have a similar tradition of
military leadership, but its power centers remain the same. Power flows from the Interior
Ministry, unions and old party structures that have been given new names and slogans. The
current president is about to become a nonagenarian and was Bourguiba’s foreign minister. Not
much of a revolution.
Where there was regime change, there was disaster. Libya and Syria can hardly be described as
countries anymore. Their borders on the map are obsolete and denote areas of factional fighting
based on tribes, sects or ideology. Yemen has been in a state of civil war since serious protests
emerged there, which has allowed al-Qaida, the Islamic State and Iranian-backed Shiite proxies
to operate within the country’s old borders and across from Saudi Arabia. Iraq developed along a
somewhat different course than the rest of the Arab world due to the U.S. invasion in 2003. But
IS’ rise in Iraq was related to economic hardships and power vacuums created by some of the
nearby uprisings underway at the time. IS’ original name, after all, was Islamic State in Iraq.
The one part of the Arab world that has managed to maintain stability is the monarchies.
Protests in Bahrain, where the ruling class is Sunni but the majority of the population is Shiite,
were put down by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council, which marched troops across
the causeway connecting the two countries. Jordan, which should have been overwhelmed
already by a massive influx of Syrian refugees, has so far managed to remain above the fray.
Morocco experienced early protests but passed a few reforms. It now remains inert, without
serious incentive or reason to change. Perhaps monarchies were better suited for the challenge
because they operate on the absolute supremacy of the monarch. The king says do something,
and it is done. Secular Arab nationalist dictators relied on ideology for their legitimacy, but that
ideology was hostile to Islam. When these governments failed, they bankrupted the ideology
and the people fell back on Islam rather than loyalty to nation-states.
This is the detail that was most misunderstood in 2011 as protests spread across the Arab world.
Idealists and liberals were among the protesters, but the critical mass came from other parts of
society. Those elements did not necessarily identify with artificial and relatively young nationstates, but rather with Islam. This does not mean that Muslims cannot be liberals, or that liberal
democracy cannot coexist with Islam. In theory, it is possible. In practice, a liberal democracy
has never existed in the Arab world. Western principles that undergird the notion of liberal
democracy are foreign to the Arab world and the entire Middle East. Where democracy has
emerged in the Middle East, it is because of European influence. Zionism was a European
nationalist movement, and Turkey is as much a European country as a Middle Eastern one.
Islam is the only thing that has united the Arab world under one banner. Secular Arab nationalist
dictators all cracked down on political Islamist movements because they were afraid of the
potential challenges these movements posed. The dictators were right to be afraid. Former
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by a precursor to al-Qaida called the Egyptian
Islamic Jihad. IS has ruined Tunisia’s tourism industry by attacking its beaches. The signs of
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Islam’s violent reaction to being kept under wraps in the Arab world for most of the 20th century
already were emerging in the 1980s. But no one in the West knew what to make of them. The
best analyst of the time may have been Osama bin Laden, whose main goal for al-Qaida was
popular disillusionment with the secular dictatorships that he felt had bled the Muslim world dry.
Bin Laden did not achieve his goal, but he did turn out to be right in his analysis of the Arab
world.
Tunisia was the country that gave hope to the Arab Spring optimists. These optimists see fallout
from the Arab Spring and claim that all liberal democratic revolutions have been bloody and
violent. It is the birth pangs of a new order – ugly in its development. But so were the French
Revolution, the American Civil War and other myriad conflicts fought across Europe for
centuries, they say. It took years, but Tunisia passed a new constitution, held elections,
peacefully transferred power and convinced an Islamist party to work within the structure of the
government. But Tunisia remains an economic basket case and a target for IS and other Islamist
militants. It is not a model of how the Arab Spring succeeded, but rather its best-case scenario.
And it’s not a very good case.
There never was an Arab Spring. It’s a phrase the world should stop using. What happened in
late 2010 and early 2011 was an Islamist Awakening. It was followed in short succession by a
Muslim civil war that continues to rage today. The war is being fought on multiple fronts,
including Syria, Iraq, Yemen, the Sinai Peninsula, Libya and the Tunisian-Algerian border. It is
between multiple factions, including Shiite and Sunni, secular and religious, ethnic and tribal.
And it is a war in which the Arabs are already – and will continue to be – used as pawns by
outside powers. Tunisia was where this started. Let it be Tunisia that reminds us exactly what
was started and how much further there is to go.
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