By Rosemary Hollis
The suddenness and speed with which popular protests dispatched President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and toppled the regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt were breathtaking. The sense that the whole Arab world was in the grip of a revolution was exhilarating and governments everywhere scrambled to find the appropriate response.
Because the protesters who came onto the streets in Tunisia and Egypt — soon followed by others in Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco and Libya — called for liberty, dignity and democracy, it was impossible for western governments to oppose their demands. The slogans of the Arab demonstrators resonated with the very values that Europeans and Americans claim to uphold.
In Washington, London, Paris and Rome the political leaderships rallied to back the cause of reform. Much to the irritation of Saudi Arabia, Washington called on Mubarak to step down. Appalled by the bloodthirsty rhetoric of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and sons, cleared for action by the United Nations and encouraged by a nod from the Arab League, Britain and France mobilized to save the rebellious citizens of Benghazi from a massacre.
But then the momentum stalled. Saudi troops deployed to defend the embattled government of Bahrain. The Gulf monarchies also tried to intervene in Yemen, with a formula for compromise designed to avert civil war. The king of Jordan changed his cabinet and promised reforms — but not for the first time and not immediately. And western governments began to change their tune.
Washington let it be known that its commitment to the rebel cause in Libya had limits and called on the Europeans to pull their weight. But Germany had opposed the intervention there from the start and Italy responded to the prospect of a flood of refugees from North Africa by imposing new border controls, along with other EU countries.
By the time unrest spread to Syria, the western powers had developed a new formula to explain away why they could support the demise of some regimes but not others. They said each country was different and their responses should reflect this.
Talk of an Arab revolution gave way to the adoption of the term “Arab spring” to describe developments. This has echoes of the “Prague spring” and other eruptions in Eastern Europe, which did not succeed in throwing off the yolk of Soviet domination until the collapse of the USSR.
Now the sense prevails that the path to freedom and democracy in the Arab world will not be smooth and will not necessarily deliver in all countries simultaneously or in similar fashion. Talk of the desirability of stability and gradual change has resurfaced, much as it did in the 1990s and again after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
As in previous decades, the Americans and the Europeans are not defending dictatorship per se as the only viable formula for rule in the Arab world. In the 1990s, the EU initiated the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership Program, hoping to bring free trade, economic growth and jobs as well as good governance to the Arab economies around the Mediterranean.
Yet the Europeans’ primary motivation was to resolve the perceived threat to European social stability posed by inward migration. They thought job creation in North Africa would be the answer, but the jobs did not materialize. As of 2004, the EMP was embellished with the European Neighborhood Policy, supposed to bring partner countries into closer harmonization with the European internal market. The logic was to create “good neighbors” for the EU.
Washington’s “Wider Middle East Reform” initiative of recent years was also intended to promote democracy and economic development in the Arab world. Yet such strategies were developed alongside security arrangements that relied upon the cooperation of Arab regimes to combat and contain Islamist opposition movements and the forces of so-called “radicalization”.
In the context of the “war on terror”, western governments have depicted a region divided between “extremists” and “moderates” and lauded those dictators, Mubarak of Egypt and Ben Ali of Tunisia in particular, as the champions of the moderate camp.
True, the Islamists were not at the forefront of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts. Their involvement is not prominent elsewhere either. Yet the fear remains that they will capitalize on the upheavals underway. Whatever their fears and preferences, however, western governments are not in charge and have reached the limits of their capacity to intervene or direct events.
They can only react and caution, cajole and implore. They may tip the balance in favor of less — rather than more — rapid transformation. But since the age of European imperialism is over and the era of US hegemony has peaked, it is the regional players themselves, including the protesters, who will determine the course of events. What they have begun will ultimately spell a revolutionary transformation of the regional order.
Rosemary Hollis is professor of Middle East Policy Studies at City University London. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with bitterlemons-international.org.
