“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” wrote William Wordsworth about the early days of the French Revolution, “but to be young was very heaven.” He recalled the thrilling sense of “the meagre, stale forbidding ways of custom, law and statute” giving way to the arrival of Liberty and Reason, not in “favoured spots alone, but [in] the whole earth.”
Sadly his optimism was quickly extinguished. After a heady start, purges and assassinations killed off most of the inspirational leaders, while men like Robespierre perverted dreams of justice into the bloodbath of The Terror and utopian schemes for liberty, equality and brotherhood foundered. A decade later the new republic had fallen under the spell of Napoleon Bonaparte. At the time it all looked like a complete failure but despite these disappointments the revolution had irreversibly altered Europe’s imagination — a powerful new impulse towards social justice and constitutional accountability had come into the world.
Five years after a comparable wave of idealism swept through the Middle East and North Africa, dethroning, or unsettling, no fewer than six dictators, the Arab Spring has left behind its own long trail of disappointments. Western hopes for progressive and democratic leaders emerging from the rubble of the past proved to be ill-founded. Some dictators left behind hollow security states which, as Libya and Yemen have shown, soon imploded without a strongman. In other countries all-pervading networks of patronage and corruption proved too entrenched for easy reform — hence, for example, the return to power of President Mubarak’s cronies. Meanwhile a mediaeval theocracy leapt into the vacuum created by America’s departure from Iraq, bulldozed part of the Sykes-Picot line which divides Iraq from Syria (a perfect symbol of the Islamic State’s larger goals) and successfully drew Western nations into a sanguinary proxy war which has devastated large swathes of both countries.
Five years later the youths who manned the frontlines of these frustrated revolutions have learned hard lessons. Now, for example, the slogan “Islam is the solution,” rings hollow. Islamist parties in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere governed with woeful inefficiency, often repressively, exacerbating chaos, uncertainty and in some cases terror in a region that already had more than its fair share of sectarian and political tension. Their failures showed how difficult it can be to dislodge the pathologies of the deep state in transitional democracies, and it revealed the fragility of new institutions pursuing good governance in the wake of a revolution. The West also learned how hard it is to help a long-repressed society establish the foundations of a modern liberal state.
It is fashionable to talk of the Arab Winter and to conclude that the political hopes of 2011 were just illusions, but easy dismissals miss the point. More than a third of the world’s 400 million Arabs are millennials and the Arab Spring has shaped their political views and hopes as profoundly as the end of the Cold War shaped those of their Western counterparts. In several parts of the Middle East the median age is 24 years old (nearly half of what it is in Germany and Japan) and a large part of the social and political elite send their children abroad for a liberal education. When these Westernised millennials return home they import social, political and religious values that are completely incompatible with the dogmatism of the region’s gerontocrats. They want tolerance, transparency, accountability, multi-party elections, dignity, privacy and a host of other overtly secular freedoms. It isn’t hard to see why so many commentators read the “youth bulge” as a democratic time bomb. Seen through this lens the Arab Spring is merely the first salvo in the eventual takeover of this younger cohort.
In many ways Saudi Arabia typifies the old guard’s fear of how the millennials will overturn its “meagre, stale forbidding ways of custom, law and statute.” The Kingdom criminalizes dissent (by imprisoning bloggers, lawyers and human rights activists), it hands out death sentences for blasphemy, or sedition (on flimsy or patently false evidence), and despite frenzied attempts to rebrand itself as a modern state, it still refuses to let women drive.
Petroleum’s uncertain future has forced the new Saudi monarch and (more significantly) his much younger heir, to announce urgent plans to rapidly overhaul the economy. The Saudis are even considering limited foreign holdings in the national oil company, Aramco (likely the world’s largest firm with a putative value of a trillion dollars or more). Meanwhile their arch-rival, Iran, is hurriedly concluding its nuclear deal with the US so that it can kick-start an ailing economy without sanctions. Other regional governments are also scrambling to prove to the West, as much as to their own citizens, that they too can adapt to the new century.
Many of these reforms and prospective reforms are driven by lingering passions from the Arab Spring, which is entirely as it should be. For as with the French Revolution, the ultimate importance of that revolutionary moment may well lie more in the ideas that it hatched rather than its mixed record of overthrowing autocrats and deeply-embedded ancien régimes.
