The Arab Spring (4): where and why did it fail?
Last 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.
Regimes fell in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen – but what about elsewhere?
In Syria, the civil war began in the spring of 2011. Since then, some 400,000 have died with many others injured and millions displaced in the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War. International pressure forced the regime to give up its chemical weapons but the west was otherwise not willing to become involved in the conflict. In this chaos, Islamic State was able to gain strength and eventually create a caliphate in eastern Syria and western Iraq. Meanwhile the Bashar al-Assad regime has been sustained in power by Hezbollah and Russia
Bahrain was the only Gulf state that had significant unrest and this was suppressed by external intervention as Saudi forces clamped down on the majority Shia population.
In Morocco, Jordan and Oman, the regimes were not as repressive and made some concessions. So Arab monarchies were seen as having more legitimacy and showing more flexibility.
In Algeria, memories of the civil war prevented major protests.
So why did the Arab Spring fail?
The diversity of the Arab world always made it unrealistic that there would be a common transition to liberal democracy. In any event, the common slogan of the protesters – “The people demand the end of the regime” – was not a cry for democracy but rather a protest against injustice and repression.
One of the reasons for the failure of the protests was the lack of an organised opposition. The exception was the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In so many Arab states, political repression was so total that there was no organised opposition ready to take over power. But the mosques were a focus for limited dissent and Islamist movements were better organised and able to offer an alternative to failed Western values.
In the one relative success story of the Arab Spring Tunisia, many of those in power had important positions in the old regime. As our lecturer put it: “You cannot start with a clean slate if you throw away the chalk as well”.