It always
seemed as if Arab countries were ‘on the brink.’ It turns out that they were.
And those who assured us that Arab autocracies would last for decades, if not
longer, were wrong. In the wake of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions,
academics, analysts and certainly Western policymakers must reassess their
understanding of a region entering its democratic moment.
What has
happened since January disproves longstanding assumptions about how
democracies can—and should—emerge in the Arab world. Even the
neo-conservatives, who seemed passionately attached to the notion of democratic
revolution, told us this would be a generational struggle. Arabs were asked to
be patient, and to wait. In order to move toward democracy, they would first
have to build a secular middle class, reach a certain level of economic growth,
and, somehow, foster a democratic culture. It was never quite explained how a
democratic culture could emerge under dictatorship.
In the
early 1990s, the United States began emphasizing civil society development in
the Middle East. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush
administration significantly increased American assistance to the region. By
fiscal year 2009, the level of annual U.S. democracy aid in the Middle East was
more than the total amount spent between 1991 to 2001.
But while it was categorized as
democracy aid, it wasn’t necessarily meant to promote democracy. Democracy
entails ‘alternation of power,’ but most NGOs that received Western assistance
avoided anything that could be construed as supporting a change in regime.
The reason
was simple. The U.S. and other Western powers supported ‘reform,’ but they were
not interested in
overturning an order which had given them pliant, if illegitimate,
Arab regimes. Those regimes became part of a comfortable strategic arrangement
that secured Western interests in the region, including
a forward military posture, access to energy resources and security for the
state of Israel. Furthermore, the West feared that the alternative was a
radical Islamist takeover reminiscent of the Iranian revolution of 1979.
The
regimes themselves—including those in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, and
Yemen—dutifully created the appearance of reform, rather than its substance.
Democratization was ‘defensive’ and ‘managed.’ It was not meant to lead to
democracy but rather to prevent its emergence. What resulted were autocracies
always engaging in piecemeal reform but doing little to change the underlying
power structure. Regime opponents found themselves ensnared in what political
scientist Daniel Brumberg called an ‘endless transition.’2 This endless
transition was always going to be a dangerous proposition, particularly in the
long run. If a transition was promised and never came, Arabs were bound to grow
impatient.
How, then,
does change occur? The U.S. and European policy communities coalesced around
the notion of ‘gradualism.’ Nearly everyone said they supported the objective
of Arab democracy but few seemed to think that anything creative or bold should
be done to bring it about. It made more sense to focus on economic reform first
and political change later. Perhaps it was just a matter of being realistic, of
accepting that politics—and, by extension, foreign policy—was the art of the
possible. Revolution was impossible.
Hundreds
of millions of dollars in Western assistance poured into the Arab world,
assisting small NGOs, supporting often weak political parties, and empowering
women to run for parliaments that had little power in the first place. This
aid, while crucial for organizations with no source of indigenous funding, fell
well short of what was required—a comprehensive, aggressive program supporting
democratization.
There was
something admirable about pro-democracy organizations like the National
Endowment for Democracy and the National Democratic Institute working under
difficult constraints, trying to push Arab regimes to open up, even if
slightly. They were funded by successive U.S. administrations that were not, in
fact, ready for actual democracy. Supporting civil society and offering
training and technical assistance to secular political parties seemed like a
workable compromise.
Colored
Revolutions
During the
Colored Revolutions, the West had played an altogether different role, offering
critical support not just for change but regime change. In both the Rose
Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the trigger was
stolen elections. Independent media played a key role in publicizing the fraud.
The founder of Rustavi–2, one of Georgia’s most watched channels and the voice
of the opposition, had set up the station with the assistance of a USAID-funded
nonprofit called Internews.
On November 2, 2003, the day of the contested polls, and during the vote count,
Rustavi–2 ran a scroll on the screen comparing the official results to the
parallel vote count and exit polling, which was funded in part by Western
governments and NGOs. Meanwhile, Pravda Ukraine, an important media outlet
during the Orange Revolution, was operating out of Washington, DC and relied
almost entirely on Western funding.
In Serbia,
Otpor (‘Resistance’), a student group, had been central in the overthrow of
President Slobodan Milosevic in the year 2000. Otpor was directly funded by
both the U.S. government and nongovernmental sources. USAID directly gave
hundreds of thousands of dollars to the student group. Reportedly, a
considerable amount was also channeled through covert American aid. Otpor’s Ukrainian counterpart Pora (‘High Time’) also received direct funding
from Western governments. Meanwhile, George Soros’s Open Society Institute
funded explicitly revolutionary activities. In the summer of 2003, OSI
organized the visit of leading Otpor activists to train over one thousand young
Georgians in nonviolent resistance.
Unlike the
often impenetrable and calibrated language it used in addressing the Arab
world, the West’s rhetoric in Eastern Europe was clear and unapologetic. During
Ukraine’s second round of elections in November 2004, President George W. Bush
sent Senator Richard Lugar as his special envoy. Lugar issued a forceful
statement condemning President Leonid Kuchma’s government for election fraud.
Soon after, Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to recognize the election
results and warned that “if the Ukrainian government does not act immediately
and responsibly, there will be consequences for our relationship, for Ukraine’s
hopes for a Euro-Atlantic integration, and for individuals responsible for
perpetrating fraud.” As political scientist Michael McFaul recounts, the
protestors in Maidan Square applauded
when Powell’s statement was read.3 Meanwhile, Lech Walesa, Poland’s first
democratically elected president, assured the crowd that the West was on their
side. The West had aligned itself with revolution.
The West
and the Arab World
The
Tunisian and Egyptian regimes fell faster than anyone could have expected. But
it also took longer than anyone should have imagined. Where opposition groups
in Eastern Europe came to count on Western support, in the Arab world, they
often found themselves standing alone.
In
September 2010, I asked a senior figure in Ayman Nour’s Al-Ghad (‘Tomorrow’)
party why liberal groups were having so much trouble gaining traction. “Everywhere
else,” he told me, “the reformers had the support of the international
community. We don’t have that.” Indeed, there had always been a pervasive
sense among Arab opposition groups—especially in Egypt and Jordan, two of the
largest recipients of U.S. aid—that they were fighting on two fronts, not only
repressive regimes but their Western backers as well. Before the revolution,
Ahmed Maher, a leader of Egypt’s left-leaning April 6 Movement, put it this
way: “The problem isn’t with [President Hosni] Mubarak’s policies. The problem
is with American policy and what the American government wants Mubarak to do.
His existence is totally in their hands.”
It may
have been the case that America’s influence—and leverage with Arab autocrats—was
on the decline. Perceptions, however, are more important than an objective
assessment of U.S. capabilities. The Arab opposition attributed outsize
importance to the West’s ability to direct and determine its own fortunes. This
sense of powerlessness fueled burgeoning Arab anger and frustration as well as
widespread anti-Americanism. Perceived U.S. bias toward Israel was central, but
so too was the general sense that the West had blocked, sometimes purposefully,
the natural development of an entire people and region. That reality put Arab
opposition groups in the awkward situation of seeing America as the hope for
democracy but, at the same time, hating it for falling so short.
"It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that international factors are now irrelevant."
Similarly,
Islamist leaders would often speak of an ‘American veto’ used by U.S. and
European officials to block democratic outcomes not to their liking. As senior
Muslim Brotherhood leader Essam El-Erian told me at the height of regime
repression in 2008: “Even if you come to power through democratic means, you
are facing an international community that doesn’t accept the existence of the
Islamist representation. This is a problem. I think this will continue to
present an obstacle for us until there is a real acknowledgement of the
situation.”
In recent
years, a growing academic literature and considerable empirical support have
pointed to the critical role of international actors in bringing down
autocrats. In their recent book, Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way provide extensive
empirical support to what many have long argued. They write, “It was an
externally driven shift in the cost of suppression, not changes in domestic
conditions, that contributed most centrally to the demise of authoritarianism
in the 1980s and 1990s.” Levitsky and Way find that “states’ vulnerability to
Western democratization pressure . . . was often decisive.”4 The key word here
is “often.”
America’s
staunch support of repressive regimes, and its unwillingness to back
pro-democracy movements, helps explain why the Arab world—until January 2011—seemed
immune to democratic change. But it does not explain why, finally, Egyptians
and Tunisians, with the odds stacked against them, found a way to defy
expectations and even history, bringing about their own remarkable revolutions.
Arab
Springs
In 2011,
the Middle East witnessed the second 'Arab Spring.' The first—now somewhat
forgotten—took place in 2005. President George W. Bush had announced in
November 2003 a “forward strategy for freedom in the Middle East.” In a speech
to the National Endowment for Democracy, he declared: “Sixty years of Western
nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did
nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased
at the expense of liberty.”
The Bush
administration cited democracy promotion among the reasons for its invading
Iraq and toppling dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003. As dubious, cynical and
inconsistent as they may have been, Bush’s policies helped produce an otherwise
unlikely outcome. The year 2005 saw the largest outpouring of pro-democracy
activism the region had ever seen up until then. On January 31, 2005, Iraqis braved
terrorist threats to cast meaningful ballots for the first time. In Bahrain,
fifty thousand Bahrainis—one-eighth of the population—rallied for
constitutional reform. And there was, of course, the Cedar Revolution, which
led to a removal of Syrian troops from Lebanese territory. The Iraq war
frightened Arab regimes into thinking that President Bush was serious about his
democratizing mission.
However,
after a succession of Islamist election victories in Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories, the U.S. backed off from its
aggressive pro-democracy posture. With a deteriorating security situation in
Iraq, a rising Iran, and a smoldering Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Arab
democracy came to seem an unaffordable luxury. This was not a time for
unsettling friendly Arab autocrats. Their Islamist competitors, known for their
inflammatory anti-Americanism, were, at best, an unknown quantity. American
policymakers shared an instinctive distrust of Islamists and made little effort
to understand how they had changed. At worst, Americans feared, the Islamists
would use their newfound power to roll back U.S. influence in the region.
Without
America to worry about, regimes felt they could do as they pleased.
Beginning
in 2006, Egypt experienced the worst wave of anti-Islamist repression since the
1960s, while Jordan, long considered one of the more open, progressive Arab
states, gradually descended into full-blown authoritarianism. Nearly every Arab
country in the region experienced a decline in political rights and freedoms.
This was
the Arab world that the newly elected President Barack Obama had to contend
with. Instead of challenging the authoritarian status quo, Obama reluctantly
accepted it. In his historic Cairo University address of June 2009, he promised
a “new beginning.” Instead, the Obama administration moved to rebuild
relationships—frayed from Bush’s democracy posturing—with Egyptian President
Mubarak and other autocrats.
President
Obama got one thing right—the centrality of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to
Arab grievance—but he got another wrong: that conflict was not, nor had it
ever been, the most important problem facing the region. But pursuing peace
seemed a more promising course than trying to refashion American foreign policy
into a force for something—Arab democracy—it had actively resisted the
previous five decades. The U.S. needed, or thought it needed, the support of ‘moderate’
Arab regimes to push the peace process forward. What Obama did,
albeit unwittingly, was remove the U. S. from its central place in the ongoing
Arab conversation over democracy. However hated he was, President Bush had injected
himself into the regional debate. The struggle for Arab democracy had been
internationalized.
Under
President Obama, the U.S. increasingly seemed beside the point. The election of
Obama—with his evident desire to build bridges with the Arab world, not to
mention his Muslim family and middle name—was the best possible outcome that
Arabs could have hoped for. It was difficult to think of an American politician
who seemed as sympathetic and thoughtful about the challenges facing the
region. But even the best possible outcome wasn’t nearly enough. America’s
unwillingness to align itself with democratic forces was not, it seemed, a
matter of one president over another, but a structural problem inherent in U.S.
foreign policy.
The
optimism over the Cairo speech quickly subsided. Somehow, in several Arab
countries, U.S. favorability ratings dropped lower under President Obama than
they were in the final years of the George W. Bush administration. The months
leading up to the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions were characterized by a
renewed despair. The Mubarak regime had embarked on a systematic crackdown on
opposition groups and independent media, culminating in perhaps the most rigged
elections in the country’s history. The results of the first round—returning
209 out of 211 seats to the ruling party—surprised everyone, including even
regime officials hoping for a more ‘credible’ result.
I was in
Egypt covering the elections. In the neighborhoods of Medinat Nasr and Shubra,
I talked to the Muslim Brotherhood ‘whips’ (the representatives who count the
votes). One by one, they ran me through all the violations. They didn’t seem
angry as much as resigned. But while opposition groups were demoralized, they,
along with a growing number of Egyptians, began to realize, with much greater
clarity, that gradual reform from within the system was impossible. The old
paradigm—of pushing for small openings from within—was roundly discredited.
Calls for civil disobedience and mass protest intensified. The ingredients were
there—the anger, disillusion, and the loss of faith in a system made for and by
ruling elites. All that was missing was a spark.
The First
Arab Revolution
Before
Tunisia, there were no successful examples of popular Arab revolutions. The
closest a mass movement came to ousting a regime was in 1991, when the Islamic
Salvation Front (FIS) won the Algerian elections in what was, up until then,
the region’s most promising democratic experiment and one of its earliest. With
the tacit, and sometimes not so tacit, support of Europe and the United States,
the military annulled the polls, banned the FIS, and sent thousands of
Islamists to desert camps. “When you support democracy, you take what democracy
gives you,” U.S. Secretary of State James Baker explained later. “We didn’t
live with it in Algeria because we felt that the radical fundamentalists’ views
were so adverse to what we believe in and what we support, and to what we
understood the national interests of the United States to be.” The fear of
Islamists in power paralyzed Western policymakers, turning a difficult
situation into a destructive one. The civil war that soon broke out would claim
the lives of an estimated one hundred thousand Algerians.
Having a
model helps. In Eastern Europe, Kmara copied Otpor and Pora copied Kmara. As
Georgian opposition leader Ivane Merabishvili recounts, “all the demonstrators
knew the tactics of the revolution in Belgrade by heart. Everyone knew what to
do. This was a copy of that revolution, only louder.” Until recently,
courageous young Arab activists had nothing to copy. That changed, finally, on
January 14, 2011, the day that Tunisians toppled President Zine El-Abidine Ben
Ali.
The model,
boiled down to its essence, is devastatingly simple: bring enough people into
the streets and overwhelm the regime with sheer numbers. “No state,” observes
sociologist Charles Kurzman, “can repress all of the people all of the time.”
Once protesters reach a critical mass, the regime finds itself in a precarious
situation. The decision to shoot may temporarily push back protesters, but it
is a risky course. The use of lethal force can provide the spark for an
embattled opposition, as on Iran’s ‘Black Friday,’ when around a hundred
Iranians were killed on the way to their revolution.
Such
violence threatens to strip regimes of their last shreds of legitimacy. It also
creates sympathy for opposition groups and their cause, spurring financial,
moral, and political support from the international community. More
importantly, the use of live ammunition on unarmed citizens can often provoke
divisions within the regime coalition.
Inevitably,
some in the security forces or the military will refuse to obey orders. In the
case of Tunisia, the army was simply not willing to oversee a bloodbath to
protect President Ben Ali. In the uprising against Libyan leader Muammar
Gadhafi that gained momentum in February, the Libyan regime shot down hundreds
of
peaceful
protesters. The move generated an immediate backlash against Gadhafi by the
U.S. and other Western powers, which in recent years had reestablished
relations with his regime. As the Filipino opposition figure Francisco Nemenzo
once wrote, “It is one thing to shoot peasants in some God-forsaken village and
another to massacre middle class dissenters while the whole world is watching.”
International
outrage, then, is an essential ingredient. Before the Tunisian revolution,
however, it had been almost entirely missing in the peculiar context of the
Arab world. With few exceptions, the most popular movements in the Arab world
have been led by Islamists, and for Western powers this made them more
difficult to support. At the height of international interest in the first ‘Arab
Spring,’ Egypt experienced the largest pro-democracy mobilization it had seen
in decades. On March 27, 2005, the Muslim Brotherhood staged its first ever
protest calling for constitutional reform, after the ruling party forced
through amendments that restricted opposition groups’ ability to contest
presidential elections. By May, the organization had staged twenty-three
demonstrations—an average of one every three days—in fifteen governorates. Some
brought out as many as fifteen thousand people. On May 4, the Brotherhood
staged a coordinated nationwide protest in ten governorates, with an estimated
fifty to seventy thousand protestors. In the course of less than two months,
the total participation of Brotherhood members neared one hundred and forty
thousand.
Such a
show of strength came at a price: nearly four thousand Brotherhood members were
arrested. Yet, the international community was largely silent. Paying a high
price, the Brotherhood learned its lesson. If that’s what happened when the
world was watching, what about when it wasn’t?
The New
Opposition
In
Tunisia, the Ben Ali regime couldn’t use the Islamist card. Tunisia’s Islamists
were either in prison, dead, or in exile. By destroying its main opposition,
the regime lost the last justification for its existence. Ben Ali couldn’t
argue that he was better than the alternative, because there was no alternative
left.
In Egypt,
the Muslim Brotherhood, despite its widespread following, played a significant
but relatively limited role in the protests, which it did not endorse until
after the success of the first day—January 25—was already apparent. Like
Tunisia, Egypt’s was a leaderless movement consisting of angry, ordinary
Egyptians who came not with ideologies or partisanship but the simple,
overarching demand that President Mubarak step down. Predictably, the regime
tried to point the finger at the Brotherhood but the reality in Tahrir Square
belied such claims.
That these
were leaderless revolutions meant that the regimes had no one to demonize,
except their own people. If they shot into the crowd, they were not killing the
Muslim Brotherhood but their own brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters. And
when they did kill—over two hundred in Tunisia and at least three hundred
eighty-four in Egypt—allied Western powers (and the international media) could
no longer turn away.
While
Arabs have long blamed the West, and particularly the United States, for
supporting their oppressors, this was perhaps the one case where American
support ultimately worked to their favor. The Egyptian military and security
forces did not enjoy full freedom of action. The U.S., as Egypt’s primary
benefactor, was watching closely. The Obama administration may have had a high
tolerance for regime repression,
but it was unlikely to tolerate massacres against peaceful protesters in broad
daylight. This, whether indirectly or directly, exerted pressure on regime officials
who had to make difficult choices on whether to use force against protesters.
The close relationship between the U.S. and Egyptian militaries also offered
another important point of leverage in the crucial final days of the
revolution, when the military had to decide whether to turn on Mubarak, one of
their own.
Lessons
from the Revolution
In Tunisia
and then Egypt, Arabs discovered a power they did not know they had. These
revolutions, as others before them, told a story of strength and safety in
numbers. There was no need to follow a sequence—economic reform first,
democracy later—or meet a long list of prerequisites. Arabs, it turns out, did
not have to wait for democracy. More importantly, they didn’t want to. The
hundreds of millions of dollars in
civil society aid had been rendered beside the point. America’s caution, hedging
of bets, and fetish for gradualism—previously the hallmarks of hard-headed
realpolitik—proved both foolhardy and naïve. Of course, Americans always said
they knew this: freedom and democracy was not the province of one people or
culture, but a universal right.
To Al-Qaeda’s dismay, real change does not come through violence. But it doesn’t
necessarily come through NGOs. Arabs kept on waiting for America to change its
policy and divest itself of dictatorship. It never did. So they did. In doing
so, they are forcing the U.S. to reconsider five decades of a failed, and
failing, policy in the Middle East.
It would
be a mistake, though, to conclude that international factors are now
irrelevant. In the cases of Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, international pressure, whether
from governments or citizens moved by what they saw on television, played a
critical role in undermining support for regimes that just months before were
thought by many to be invulnerable.
The
revolutions are far from complete. Tunisia has faced sporadic violence and a succession of unstable
interim cabinets. Despite being the original spark for the region’s uprisings,
it has, perhaps predictably, become the forgotten revolution. Egypt is still governed by an institution—the military—that
was long the backbone of the Mubarak regime. For many Egyptian activists, March
9 was a turning point, bringing back painful memories. That day, soldiers and
plainclothes thugs armed with pipes and electric cables stormed Tahrir Square,
detained nearly two hundred people, and then took them to be tortured in a
makeshift prison at the Egyptian Museum. As their challenges grow, the country’s
opposition groups have returned to their old fractious ways. Indeed, democratic
transitions are notoriously
messy and uncertain. Recognizing this, the Arab world’s new emerging
democracies will need support and assistance from the international community,
including the U.S. This can be done through technical assistance and election
monitoring. But more high-level involvement may be necessary as well, by
putting pressure on the new governments to uphold their commitments and
providing financial incentives to meet certain benchmarks on
democratization. The question is whether the U.S. and its European allies, with
their cash-strapped governments and skeptical publics, are willing to commit
billions of dollars to helping democratize a still-troubled region.
A great
deal is at stake. America was rightly credited for helping facilitate
transitions in many Eastern European and Latin American countries. If the U.S.
is seen as helping make another
transition possible, this time in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere, it will give
Americans much-needed credibility in the region. Successful transitions could
herald a reimagined relationship between the U.S. and the Arab world, something
that Obama promised in his 2009 Cairo address but failed to deliver on.
To be
sure, the United States has a checkered, tragic history in the region. For
decades, the U.S. has been on the wrong side of history, supporting and funding
Arab autocrats and undermining nascent democratic movements when they
threatened American interests. So critics of Western ‘meddling’ have a point:
whenever the U.S. and Europe interfere in the region, they seem to get it
wrong. That is precisely why it’s so important that, this time, they get it
right. But getting it right requires that the U.S. fundamentally reassess its
Middle East policy and align itself with Arab populations and their democratic
aspirations. This has
not happened.
Egypt and Tunisia, despite all their problems, remain the most
promising cases. Elsewhere, the situation is considerably more grave, with
U.S.-backed autocrats in Yemen and Bahrain having used unprecedented force
against their own citizens. Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Bahrain has
fanned the flames of regional sectarianism and made an already explosive
situation even worse.
Thus far,
the Obama administration has been behind the curve in nearly every country,
reacting to rather than shaping events. President Obama adopted a slow and
deliberate approach, and refused to take a stronger stand with America’s Yemeni
and Gulf allies. Even enemies such as the Syrian regime have so far escaped any
real pressure. If anything is clear, it is that Arabs have shown that something
more than caution and gradualism is called for in historic moments of change.
This time, they–not the international community–are leading the way. But they
and their countries need the international community to follow. Otherwise,
their revolutions may still fail.
1 Stephen
McInerney, “The President’s Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2009: Democracy,
Governance, and Human Rights in the Middle East,” Project on Middle East
Democracy, May 2008.
2 Daniel
Brumberg, “Liberalization Versus Democracy: Understanding Arab Political
Reform,” Carnegie Endowment, May 2003, p. 13
3 Michael
McFaul, “Ukraine Imports Democracy: External Influences on the Orange
Revolution,” International Security 32 (Fall 2007): pp. 45–83
4 Steven
Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after
the Cold War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Shadi Hamid is director of research at the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He was previously director of research at the Project on Middle East Democracy and a Hewlett Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. He has also served as a program specialist on public diplomacy at the U.S. State Department and a legislative fellow in the office of Senator Diane Feinstein. Hamid is a frequent commentator on Middle East affairs and can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/shadihamid.