Loading ...What Happened to the Arab Spring?
by Gilbert Achcar & Nada Matta
Jacobin
Today marks the fifth anniversary of the start of the Arab uprising. Sparked in Tunisia on December 17, 2010, a wave of revolutionary contagion spread across the Arab world. Millions of people took to the streets demanding dignity, democracy, and social justice. Mass mobilizations on an unprecedented scale in recent history took place in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria, and transformed social and political dynamics across the whole region. A politics of hope became possible.
Five years into the uprisings, however, counterrevolutionary forces composed of the old regimes and Islamic fundamentalist forces have regained the political initiative, and are now violently vying for control. Egypt is under a worse dictatorship than before its uprising, and civil wars have broken out in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. Hundreds of thousands have died, and many millions have been displaced.
How to take stock of this conjuncture? What are its main features and possibilities? Nada Matta for Jacobin sought the answers to these questions with Gilbert Achcar, one of the world’s leading analysts of the Arab region.
When the Arab uprising started, you pointed out from the beginning that it will be a long process of struggle that would include periods of success and retreats. Five years into the revolts, what is your general evaluation?
To clarify the terms of the discussion, the dominant view in the beginning, especially in Western media, was that the Arab region was entering a period of democratic transitions, which would take weeks or months in each country and remain relatively peaceful, ushering into a new regional era of electoral democracy.
According to this view, the transition had been basically achieved in Tunisia with the fall of Ben Ali, and in Egypt with the fall of Mubarak. It was believed that the same pattern would spread to most countries of the region through a domino effect, similar to what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989-91. This vision was encapsulated in the label “Arab Spring” which spread very quickly.
It was predicated on the view that this “Spring” was the result of a cultural and political mutation born by a new generation connected to global culture, thanks to the new information and communication technologies. According to this view, the uprisings were essentially, if not exclusively, a struggle for political freedom and democracy.
This vision was not completely off the mark, of course. These dimensions were definitely a salient feature of the uprising. However, the key point that I emphasized from the beginning was that the deep roots of the regional upheaval are social and economic, before being political. What happened was a social explosion in the first place, even if it took on a political character like any large-scale social explosion.
Its social background could be told from the fact that it first occurred in the two countries that had witnessed the most outstanding accumulation of social struggles, class struggle, during the preceding years: Tunisia and Egypt. The uprising’s slogans themselves were not only political, they were not merely about democracy and freedom, but also and very much so about social demands.
From this angle, the regional uprising could be analyzed through Marxist lenses as a classic case of social revolution resulting from the protracted blockage of development that has characterized the Arab-speaking region for three decades, with record low rates of growth producing record high rates of unemployment, especially among the youth.
I was particularly prepared to see things from that angle as I had been teaching a course on “Problems of Development in the Middle East and North Africa” for several years before the uprising. It was clear to me that the developmental blockage of the region would sooner or later lead to a major social explosion.
That’s why I described early on what started in Tunisia on December 17, 2010 and then spread to the rest of the region as the beginning of a long-term revolutionary process. By this, I am referring to historical processes of revolution which unfold not over weeks and months, but over years and decades. The uprisings were opening a long-term period of regional instability that would necessarily go through ups and downs, revolutionary upsurges and counterrevolutionary setbacks, and would also involve a lot of violence.
At the beginning, I sounded pessimistic because I was telling people to cool down from the euphoria that gripped them, stressing that this was far from being the end of the story, that what is at stake is extremely complex and difficult, that it would take a long time, and that it would not remain peaceful. I also emphasized from the very beginning that the Tunisian and Egyptian scenarios of relatively peaceful overthrow of the rulers could not be repeated in countries like Libya and Syria, or the monarchies for that matter: I said this before the uprising started in any of these countries.
Nowadays, I may sound optimistic in asserting that the revolutionary process is far from over and inviting people to cheer up away from the dominant gloom that is gripping them. The situation looks disastrous and catastrophic in several countries: above all, of course, in Syria where a huge tragedy is going on, but also in Yemen, Libya, and Egypt. This is, however, not the end. There will be no stability in the region, in the long term, unless radical social and political change occurs.
To be sure, there is no inevitability for such change to occur. My attitude is not one of optimism, but one of apprehending the dynamics of the crisis in historical perspective, and stressing that there is still hope. The only safe prediction one can make is that, short of the emergence of the subjective political conditions for social and political change, i.e. organized political forces bearing the banner of progressive change, the region is doomed to see more disasters such as those we have seen unfold over the last two years in particular.
Could you describe the economic and social causes that stand behind the uprisings? What is this protracted development blockage that led to the uprising?
This is analyzed in detail in the first two chapters of my book, The People Want. To put it a nutshell, if you look at the rates of economic growth in the Arab-speaking region compared to all other parts of Africa and Asia, you cannot fail to note that they have been quite low. The rates of GDP growth, especially GDP per capita growth, have been very low.
This means that the economies have been unable to create jobs matching the demographic growth, thus producing massive unemployment, especially young and female unemployment. The Arab-speaking region has held the highest rates of unemployment in the world over recent decades.
This protracted economic blockage has produced explosive social consequences: not only massive unemployment, but also a host of social issues including huge local and regional inequalities. The coexistence of extremely ostentatious wealth and extreme poverty creates huge frustration. This problem worsened considerably since the oil boom of the 1970s. As I keep saying, the real question in 2011 was not so much why the explosion did occur, but why it did take so long to occur given the over-accumulation of explosive potential.
Now, the reason for this economic blockage is to be found in the workings of neoliberalism in the Arab context. Like most countries of the world, the Arab states started embracing the neoliberal paradigm in the 1970s. This led to a gradual retrenchment of the state from the economy. According to the neoliberal creed, the declining role of public investment was to be compensated by the private sector to which many incentives were offered.
This model of private-led growth did work in some countries with appropriate conditions, such as Chile or Turkey or India, albeit with a high social cost. In the Arab region, however, it could simply not work — due to the character of the state.
The vast majority of Arab states combine two features: they are rentier states, i.e. countries in which rents (from natural resources or strategic functions) constitute a sizeable part of the state income, and states that are all located on a scale going from “patrimonial” to “neopatrimonial,” the major peculiarity being the existence of a core of plainly patrimonial states, i.e. states which are “owned” by the ruling group for all intents and purposes, unlike the “modern state” where the ruling personnel are only civil servants. These features led to what I called “dominant political determination of the orientation of economic activity.”
If you add to that the general political conditions of high instability and conflict in the region, you understand that there was no way that the private sector would become the engine of some economic miracle as the neoliberals wanted to believe. Private investment remained quite limited, speculative in large part, and oriented toward quick profit. The decline and stagnation of public investment were not compensated for by the private sector. The neoliberal model failed miserably in the Arab region.
All this points to the fact that the upheaval was the result of a structural crisis, not of an episodic or cyclical one. And it was not a process of democratization coming on top of a long period of development, as happened in some “emergent” countries, but the result of a protracted blockage. The logical conclusion therefore is that the region’s countries need a radical change of their sociopolitical structure in order to overcome the blockage.
Removing the tip of the iceberg, such as removing Ben Ali or Mubarak and their entourage, could not end the turmoil. Hence my emphasis from the beginning on the long term, and on the notion of “revolutionary process” as distinct from “revolution” tout court believed to have ended with the downfall of the autocrat.
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