The Arab Spring (2): why did it happen?
At the weekend, I attended the first a number of short courses that I will be attending this summer at the City Literary Institute in central London. The title was “The Arab Spring” and the lecturer was Dr James Chiriyankandath of the School of Advanced Study in the University of London. Having discussed the naming of the events of early 2011, we went on to examine why the protests happened.
The main reason was frustration at the economic situation.
Arab states have had the lowest rates of economic growth in the developing world but they have experienced some of the highest rates of population growth. The Arab world has a democratic bulge with some 60% of the population under 30 (it is less than 40% in the UK). These young people, who are often more educated than their parents, are frequently unemployed and underemployed. As our lecturer put it: “This is the dry wood of revolution”.
The situation was different in the so-called rentier states which are those that derive income not from taxes but rent such as oil revenues. Except for Bahrain, the settled population in such states has been bought off by substantial social benefits and basic incomes. In Bahrain, however, a Sunni minority dominates a Shia majority and there was substantial protest which was suppressed by forces from Saudi Arabia.
Many of these regimes are patrimonial with the state defined by the person at the apex of lower. This person – the king or the dictator – dispenses wealth through relatives and favoured persons but, if the money runs out, his basis of power is eroded. In the run up to the Arab Spring, there had been declining public investment as a result of the the global recession.
Added to these economic factors, there was the psychological humiliation felt by the populace of so many Arab states. These set backs to the Arab world include the establishment of Israel, the victories of Israel in the various wars, the failure to found a Palestinian state, and the superiority of the west in its production of consumer goods and exercise of military power. These setbacks undermined the standing of the established regimes. More particularly, the invasion of Iraq could be seen as “the kicking of the Arab ant hill”.
Then an incident can serve as the spark that ignites the dry wood because these regimes are so very repressive. It all began in Tunisia on 17 December 2010 when street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi set fire to himself after his cart was confiscated. The dictator of 24 years Ben Ali was forced to resign in a matter of weeks. The situation in Tunisia encouraged uprisings in adjacent Libya and Egypt.
Once the uprisings began, modern technology – mobile phones, the Internet and social media – enabled protesters everywhere to know more about what was happening both in their own country and in other countries and to be aware of successes and reprisals across the region. More than a third of the population had access to the Internet. Furthermore Qatar’s media outlet al Jazeera gave continuous coverage of the protests with graphic visual images. So the Internet and social media were major factors in the rapid spread of the protests.