[Despite the carnage of contemporary Syria and Libya, and the
ruinous stalemate of Yemen, the euphoric appeal of what was once
described as the ‘Arab Spring’ continues to feed revolutionary
processes across the region.] [[link removed]]

AFTER THE SPRING   [[link removed]]

 

Toufic Haddad
January 19, 2021
Red Pepper [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Despite the carnage of contemporary Syria and Libya, and the
ruinous stalemate of Yemen, the euphoric appeal of what was once
described as the ‘Arab Spring’ continues to feed revolutionary
processes across the region. _

Tahrir Square, July 2011, Ahmed Abd El-Fatah

 

The ‘coldness’ of what some commentators now dub the ‘Arab
Winter’ is felt most chillingly in Egypt, arguably the largest and
most globally significant of the revolutionary theatres of a decade
ago. No fewer than 60,000 political prisoners have been arrested since
the July 2013 coup led by military intelligence chief Abdel Fattah
Al-Sisi, with an additional 2,700 disappeared.

Amnesty International describes the situation regarding freedom of
expression to be ‘at its worst in the country’s modern history,
reaching levels of unprecedented severity’. Critics have been
arrested for ‘absurd reasons, including satire, tweeting, supporting
football clubs, denouncing sexual harassment, editing movies [and]
giving or conducting interviews.’ There appears to be no public
recollection or outrage for the overthrow of Egypt’s only
democratically-elected president, Mohammed Morsi, let alone his
‘assisted’ death during imprisonment due to criminal medical
negligence.

Despite initially proclaiming support for protesters, western
governments and companies have casually re-established relations with
the regime – if they ever froze them to begin with. US president
Donald Trump even quipped ‘Where’s my favourite dictator?’ at a
September 2019 meeting of the G7, when al-Sisi temporarily escaped his
line of sight.

Europe acts no better. Companies such as Germany’s Siemens and
Italy’s Eni have penned billion-dollar deals with the Egyptian
regime. In the case of Eni, 30 trillion cubic meters of natural gas in
the Mediterranean’s largest gas field offers more than enough profit
to forget any residual ‘sticking points’ concerning the blood
still dripping from the military junta’s hands – even if some of
this blood comes from the tortured body of Italian graduate student
Giulio Regini. Rubbing salt in the wound is the cynical revisionist
discourse seen on the left and the right, that the revolutions
themselves were fictions to begin with, and were only conspiracies of
nefarious actors linked to the west, Islamists or both.

In a global era characterised by demoralising defeats for progressive
forces, it is no wonder that wilful amnesia or ‘gaslighting’,
getting people to doubt their own memories and perceptions of reality,
have become the operational logic of a world seemingly spinning into a
dystopian abyss.

The ‘Arab Spring’ was always a poor term for the revolutionary
processes unleashed across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011,
for reasons explained below. But it is also reactionary
anti-intellectualism to deny that the processes that unfolded beneath
this misnomer were but hiccups of history. Perhaps more problematic is
what happens when one asserts that these revolutionary processes
remain alive today beneath the ashes of their first decade. What
should be a fairly objective, empirically-based conclusion invites the
goading of cynics and informants in an era of internet trolls and
algorithmic policing. What a world we live in.

Avoiding revolutionary romanticism

But that is precisely the case. The revolutionary zeitgeist of 2011
has not been, nor ever will be, pushed to history’s footnotes.
Instead, movements continue to assert demands for the downfall of
regimes and the structural re-organisation of their societies to
accommodate ‘bread, freedom and social justice’. That movements in
Lebanon, Algeria, Sudan and Iraq have even dared to attempt a
‘second spring’ – and indeed reap significant political
achievements in doing so – attests to the fact that the ‘Arab
Spring’ is not simply a passing historical episode but relates to
entrenched dynamics and conditions fuelling these revolutions. They
also demonstrate that the revolutions have the ability to adapt and
learn from one another and are likely to do so again in the future.

What does the passing of a decade since this revolutionary wave began
tell us about the nature of these uprisings, their evolution and
outcomes? How do we know from this experience that they are destined
to re-erupt, without falling back into revolutionary romanticism?

The Arab Spring was never exclusively Arab, of course; nor was it a
passing phenomenon that could be captured by intellectually lazy
soundbites. Rather, it was an irreversible cracking of similar, yet
complex and unsustainable political orders, whose fault lines continue
to disintegrate the region’s political regimes. Understanding the
nature of these regimes and the particularities of their historical,
political, institutional, economic, demographic and denominational
composition should always have been the starting point for
understanding the revolutionary processes that emerged from them.

Equally important remains the need to recognise the commonalities and
developments within and between the revolutions, given that what we
have witnessed through the course of the past decade is neither random
nor formulaic.

From the moment in December 2010 when Mohammed Bouazizi flicked his
lighter in an act of rebellious self-immolation in the Tunisian
backwater of Sidi Bou Said, the forests of political despair were set
alight across this vast geography. The conditions of collective
disenfranchisement in Bouazizi’s Tunisia were perceived as relevant
and familiar to so many across the region. Here, examining the
structural roots of these political upheavals – and particularly
their political, economic and class dimensions – sheds light on the
character and commonalities of power relations specific to this
region.

Regimes of rent

The primarily Arabic-speaking states of the Middle East and North
Africa continue to be characterised by the world’s highest
concentration of autocratic states, with virtually all of them
embodying variations of patrimonial or neo-patrimonial regimes. These
are systems in which the state is de facto owned by a ruling family
(patrimonial), or non-hereditary (neo-patrimonial) line of elites who
occupy, preserve and benefit from the political system, its revenue
generation and its ‘security’.

These regimes categorically reject any semblance of liberal,
meritorious economic or political inclusivity, relying instead upon
police states and selective, cynical elite generation and buy-off.
Direct or indirect rent income often plays a significant role in the
political buoyancy of these regimes, be this through the flow of
petro-dollars, geo-strategic rent, such as income from passage through
the Suez Canal, or injections of international aid, financial or
military.

Because these systems prioritise the pillage of their country’s
resources in the fastest possible time from fear that the ‘party’
could end at any moment, the bulk of profits tend to flee the country
as soon as they are made. Any local investment tends to go into
speculative or ‘lazy’ sectors such as real estate. This comes at
the expense of developmental planning organised around productive
sectors such as agriculture or industry, which render longer-term
sustainable livelihoods and ‘added value’ in ways that ‘quick
money’ never does.

The resulting socio-economic orders end up being characterised by the
creation of police states with disenfranchised masses, and
particularly decadent bourgeois classes that are anathema to any
genuine liberal values, let alone those that are socially progressive
or ‘left’. Liberalism is deemed too threatening to these modes of
accumulation because it entails forms of competition that would
threaten the preferential, corrupt, rentier nature of the system
overall. With profit-making opportunities politically allocated, the
bourgeoisie controlling the major sectors of the economy fundamentally
back the regime and its security services, explaining their defence of
the regime and the latter’s violence.

It is also worth appreciating a few additional factors that
contributed to the eruption of the uprisings, their timings and
characters. Rentier patrimonial or neo-patrimonial political systems
are prone to particular challenges over time that are likely to weaken
the regime. Questions of succession in the end days of the
dictators’ lives (Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, for
example) create uncertainties about a regime’s stability, as the
next generation of potential leaders begins to jockey for power.
Economic, political and security elites become unsure of where to
place their bets, unsettling the state bureaucracy and even army.

Sustaining rent incomes and managing elite rent redistribution is a
challenge, with factors such as volatile oil prices, and the
international financial crisis of 2007-8 also lessening international
and local investment. Simultaneously, neoliberal ‘reforms’ of the
World Bank and IMF further contributed to instability by providing
vehicles to concentrate wealth in elite hands while decimating the
social welfare elements of the state and the ‘social contract’.

Finally, it is worth appreciating that all these dynamics were – and
remain – present in a region that is central to the contemporary
capitalist order and its reproduction.

The long shadow of imperial powers

The region’s oil and gas wealth and its unique geographic
positioning as the fastest nautical access route linking ‘east’
and ‘west’ has always meant that the stakes of any political
change there – let alone revolution – draw quick attention and
engagement from the ‘game’s’ biggest players, alongside more
junior scavengers. These actors manoeuvre to devise new means to
intervene in unfolding dynamics so as not to lose ground, or miss an
opportunity to gain some. Add to this the extensive technological
capacity for surveillance and repression capable in the modern age,
which further skews already exceptional asymmetric power imbalances
between the governors and the governed.

When we add to this potent cocktail the region’s ballooning
demographic trends, increasing levels of education (despite
diminishing returns for this investment), growing unemployment and
rising costs of living, it is not difficult to see why a breaking
point might eventually be reached.

And so it was. The revolutionary upheavals were a testament to what
happens when levees finally break. The ensuing decade witnessed a
spectacle of incredible bravery and brutality, as revolutionaries
squared off against centralised autocratic regimes and their backers,
domestic, regional and international, western (the US and EU) and
eastern (Russia, Iran and Turkey). Intra-regional Arab autocratic
meddling would add yet another factor contributing to revolutionary
subversion as Gulf petro-monarchies quickly entangled themselves to
back flailing dictators, or subvert more progressive revolutionary
actors.

Here it is worth bluntly acknowledging that the revolutionary actors
were woefully unprepared to meet many of the challenges before them.
Revolutionary movements too often lacked sufficient individual or
collective organisation with the kinds of robustness, inclusivity or
independence that might have allowed for the generation of
cross-sectoral strategies and tactics around specific – as opposed
to general – revolutionary demands and leadership. They also lacked
independent financial lines, making them susceptible to acceptance of
funding and support from conditional allies with ulterior agendas.

These factors have proven critical to the outcomes of the revolutions
and explain in general terms the inability to form independent,
sustainable, and coherent political movements that can withstand
inevitable repression.

Tunisia and Sudan are uniquely identified within the region’s
revolutionary upheavals by their abilities to have cohered elements of
this alternative political movement through organised constellations
of independent professional and working-class unions, as well as
student and women’s movements. The revolutions that have failed to
develop such independent organisation have ended up divided,
contained, and defeated, at least temporarily, picked off through
co-option, imprisonment or death.

French protestors in support of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose
self-immolation sparked the Tunisian revolution. Credit: Antoine
Walter
[[link removed]]

Lessons learned

Forming, consolidating or realising a set of tactics, strategy and
organisation is a formidable challenge for any political movement, let
alone those attempting to do so from such unenviable positioning. It
is this harsh reality that largely explains the mixed and often poor
outcomes of these movements, despite the fact that no fewer than six
dictators have been felled in this period – something to be
celebrated – with the toppling of Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Egypt’s
Mubarak, Yemen’s Ali Abdallah Saleh, Libya’s Qaddafi, Algeria’s
Bouteflika and Sudan’s El-Bashir.

But the revolutionaries quickly learned that the decapitation of a
regime is not the same as the dismemberment of the old order, nor the
construction of a new one. For those fortunate enough to have achieved
the first of these aims – the majority of states failed to do even
this – it is the second and third of these objectives that has
proven significantly more challenging and, oftentimes, incredibly
destructive.

In light of the complexity of the unfolding revolutionary processes of
the past decade, and a reasonable belief in their continuity, it is
appropriate to end with a few words of caution.

The uprisings of the Middle East and North Africa today stand at the
portal between hope and progress. The bruises and blood of the past
decade are a reminder that taking the moral and political high ground
is not a sufficient substitute for informed analyses, preparation,
organisation, strategy, leadership and a movement’s independence and
accountability from below.

There will be no shortcuts to making sense of and solving the
intersectional ‘clusterfucks’ at the heart of each struggle, as
the complexity of the many factors at play are hardly imaginary, but
all too material, relational, institutional and political. With that
said, the past ten years provide a valuable set of experiments in
applied revolutionary praxis, despite the undetermined and mixed
outcomes.

The task now must be for revolutionaries – locally and
internationally – to see what can be gleaned from these experiences
in the service of clarification, inclusion, organisation and
effectiveness. Here lies a particular warning for progressive
international forces in solidarity with these movements, which
represent another sorely missed source of moral, material and
political support for regional revolutionary actors.

The experiences of the past decade hold many valuable lessons for
these actors as well, not only with regard to strengthening the
effectiveness of the uprisings but also the desperate need to plan and
organise radical progressive political action within their own
contexts. Only by undertaking such a process can effective rejoinders
to the complex and demoralising political contexts we currently
inhabit take form. The time to act is now.

_TOUFIC HADDAD IS DIRECTOR OF THE KENYON INSTITUTE, THE JERUSALEM
BRANCH OF THE COUNCIL FOR BRITISH RESEARCH IN THE LEVANT._

_THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN RED PEPPER ISSUE #230, STRUGGLES FOR
TRUTH. SUBSCRIBE TODAY [[link removed]] TO
SUPPORT INDEPENDENT MEDIA AND GET YOUR ISSUE HOT OFF THE PRESS!_

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]