Worry or Hope for the Arab Spring?
It has been half a year since the Arab Spring protests began, and many are now offering midterm assessments. The current state of the Arab world is a mixed picture; hardly two neighboring states can be painted with the same brush.
Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, believes that the geopolitics of the Middle East “are being reset for the worse”:
- The remaining dictators—Assad and Qaddafi, in particular—will not go easily. “Violence, along with the threat of imprisonment and international tribunals, has persuaded them that the future is winner takes all and loser loses all.”
- Secular, liberal groups across the region are weak, fractured, or nonexistent, leaving better-organized military or Islamist entities to take positions of political power.
- The fall of Mubarak, increasing oil prices, and projected US troop withdrawals have all strengthened Iran’s hand.
- Israeli-Palestinian relations are increasingly strained.
- Terrorists may benefit from the toppling of states that were traditionally anti-terrorist; this is already evident in Yemen and may be on the horizon in Libya.
Haass summarizes: “Take all this together, and you see a series of developments that are beginning to produce a region that is less tolerant, less prosperous, and less stable than what existed.”
The Economist, on the other hand, makes a case for hope:
- Tunisia and Egypt are moving forward—“the first more convincingly than the second.”
- The monarchies of Morocco and Jordan are showing potential for constitutional reform.
- If either Assad or Qaddafi were ousted, “the overall Arab movement towards democracy would enjoy a huge step up. And it could happen.”
- Libyan rebels enjoy the strong support of Tunisians and Egyptians.
Additionally, in contrast to Haass, the Economist argues that Islamists “have not been prominent,” and that elections should be contested regardless of their role so as to provide an alternative to violence as “the political tool of choice.”
The Economist concludes, rather boldly: “If both the Qaddafi and Assad regimes fell, the Arab spring would turn to summer.”
“…What is crystal clear is that the mood in the Arab world has changed irrevocably. Whether it takes a year or decades, it is plain that Arabs, like people everywhere, want a say in choosing who should run their lives. And at least some of them, in Libya and even Syria, seem likely to have it. Viewed from six months ago, that is quite a miracle.”
The mood may have shifted, but where do we go from here?
Haass suggests avoiding any further military intervention for the same reason that the entire Arab Spring has (in his eyes) stalled: “it is easier to oust a regime than it is to help put something clearly better in its place.” Our interests outweigh our influence in the greater region, and the most pragmatic step now would be to assist individual states in creating the trappings of democracy.
The Economist article ends on a similar note, stating the importance of the Arabs in shaping their own future: “it is for the Arabs themselves to create this more hopeful world.”
