At what point does it become clear that a despotic regime which ruled for decades has come to the end of the road? Is it the moment when, on the streets, the balance of terror between hundreds of rioting young men and the security forces suddenly shifts, and helmet-clad policemen begin to flee for their lives while their vans are set on fire? Maybe it's when the president of the United States comes out in the media and announces that the long-time ally, who has received billions in military assistance and diplomatic backing, must go now.
On 17th December 2010, a street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia set himself on fire in protest of police corruption and ill-treatment after a local government official had harassed him and confiscated his fruit cart. This man’s name was Mohammed Bouazizi.
Following the self-immolation of Bouazizi, citizens from all walks of life— men and women, young and old, secularists and Islamists—all united to oust the dictatorial government that had not served the rights of its people. The death of the Tunisian fruit vendor triggered the revolutions throughout the Middle East that came to be known the “Arab Spring.” The attitudes that sparked the Arab Spring were shaped by a revolutionary mindset with the ideals and the principles of freedom, dignity, social justice and it had become a war between the repressive government and the citizens in opposition.
The aim of the Arab Spring was preceded by the authoritarianism and political corruption within the system that was exacerbating/aggravating social inequality, as well as other forms of freedom and hindering economic growth. The objective of the uprisings was to destroy these cancer cells that were well spread in the government bodies and to eliminate the criminal gangs that controlled these spring countries.
These regimes, which have been in control of these states for decades and have turned their countries into the backyards of their palaces. The corruption in these spring countries had turned a state within the state, but we do not exaggerate if we say that corruption is the state and the structures of the state came to serve this corruption. Whether these aims have been achieved or not is easier to ask than answer. They can not be answered simply with a “yes” or “no”, rather we can argue how successful it was to an extent.
The series of events that followed Bouazizi’s death seemed at the time a classic example of a domino effect where power shifted from the minority to the majority.
After two weeks of protests, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's regime collapsed and left the country in exile to Saudi Arabia. The protests, which call for democracy, freedom of opinion and political participation, have spread to Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Egypt, where popular protests have evolved to overthrow Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt and counter-revolution the Muslim Brotherhood government two years later. In Libya, Colonel Gaddafi's regime collapsed and after his death, and we witnessed a year of revolutionary victory, but this didn’t last long and the country became divided between armed militias, two governments and two parliaments, one in the east and the other in the west.
In Yemen, the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh fell and a civil war broke out which was joined by regional states. The revolution against the Syrian regime, and until this moment there is still a civil war in which more than 250,000 Syrians have been killed, millions displaced and most of the country's cities destroyed.
Today, four years later, the dreams of those who believed that the Arab Spring will come with democratic political systems, national security, and economic prosperity has been lost.
The fear of the future in all the Arab countries is reinforced by the current situation, and the economic conditions are even worse than before the outbreak of the revolutions in 2011.
Evaluation
Has the Arab Spring failed?
A question that is asked in all Arab and international conferences. For instance, one would answer this question based upon the casualties of the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring did, however, reveal the true colours of the repressive regimes. But in most Middle Eastern countries, there either has been an increase in political chaos or autocracy has been restored, meaning that there has been a return of these military regimes- all in a bid for political stability and people’s burgeoning desire for freedom. For instance, right now in Egypt, Libya, and Syria these military-led regimes have been re-established five years after the Arab Spring.
Why did most of the spring countries, such as Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, fail to complete the process of politically transforming and building a democratic system that fulfils the aspirations of young people who were at the forefront of the mass demonstrations that filled the streets of the state’s capitals? Why did the democratisation of these countries fail despite the success of the transition process in other parts of the world, such as Eastern European countries in the 1990s, and Latin America in the 1980s?
Why did the spring countries fail to turn from military or authoritarian regimes to democratic regimes, and instead all these countries failed again if they have not already failed? Instead, these countries have turned to civil wars which are difficult to know their end or outcome?
Will these countries return to the hell of military rule, like in Egypt, or will they turn into failed states of chaos and corruption with a complete absence of a legitimate government, like in Yemen, Syria, and Libya?
There are many questions on this topic.
In fact, there are several reasons behind this failure, and these reasons do not stem only in the middle eastern region, but also stems in other parts of the world.
There is a book called "geopolitics of the Arab spring” by the French writer Frederick who does not directly looking at the present state of the country, or from a history, sociological or political science point of view. Instead, he looks from another point of view known as geopolitics, means that he does not take information from the events occurring at that current time but he looks at the big broader picture (which is called the context of the Mediterranean historian Fernand Braudel's "long time”). This study explores the two main elements of the conflicts: how are they view their enemy, their intellectual affiliations, and their ways of dealing with time and place, methods of acting in time of peace and time of war, their individual and collective behaviour, and so on. He does not, however, limit his view to the registered population, the number of exported barrels of oil, or the size of the available military arsenal within a single state or between states.
At the same time, this approach requires studying the balance of power between the two main elements stated above. On this basis, anyone up-to-date with the Arab spring from the start of its first spark in Tunisia in 2010, and would know it turned into an Arab autumn with its major features: general chaos, civil strife, obstruction and the explosion of identities.
This great movement had reached a large part of the Arab societies (since December 2010), and no other movement has taken place since their political independence in the 1950s and 1960s.
All of these revolutions were as a result of the many years of conflict between the dictator and the governed.
It is true that these societies experienced major uprisings in the 1970s and 1980s (like the uprisings of the bread in the three Maghreb countries: Morocco 1981, Tunisia 1983-1984, Algeria 1988, which was as a result of the dramatic increases in the prices of basic foodstuffs). But these uprisings in these three Maghreb countries were not as intense as the uprisings of the Arab spring, The writer says: "We have heard: Ben Ali left, then Mubarak left, and then Gaddafi left, and we have heard people’s demands for freedom and justice. All this is important, but it was not enough without guidance and support.
The first uprisings (for the 1970s and 1980s) were eliminated before they even began, but they nevertheless still encouraged the movement of the Arab Spring. Therefore, we agree with the writer's opinion, when he believes that the Arab Spring was not a surprise.
So what happened, says Ensel. These uprisings were peaceful and they did not have the intentions of resorting to violence and militarisation in the beginning,
On the other hand, the catalyst of these uprisings (whether in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and Libya) were purely social and economic as a result of the poor distribution of wealth, and the spread of bribery.
In his famous book Competitive Authoritarianism, Steven Levitsky distinguishes between the various types of authoritarian regimes that rule the world. There are many authoritarian regimes and some even offer minimal competition in elections, the media, and party system.
What I mean by this is that the results of the elections may be rigged and the political opponents may be subject to permanent detention. For instance, like in Egypt with this type of authoritarian regime where they were known for their single-digit turnouts in elections before the uprising.
But there is a degree of liberalism in dealing with the opposition and in managing the political scene.
There is another type of authoritarian regimes that are "dominant." In other words, there isn’t a multiparty system or media exposure. Like in Libya where there was a strong authoritarian regime with high degrees of censorship in their national broadcast media where communication was blocked to prevent the domestic spread of information that was necessary for peaceful protests.
The first model of authoritarian and competitive regimes has a higher probability of a successful transitioning to a democratic system than the probability of the dominant type of authoritarian regime where instead it would turn into a very weak democratic system, often leading to a political model of instability or even worse the return of military rule.
Levitsky's theory may be correct here on the Arab Spring. The form of authoritarian regimes that ruled in Syria and Libya is the most comprehensive model in the Arab region and perhaps the world excluding North Korea.
But in Yemen and Egypt, the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh (the previous president of Yemen) and Hosni Mubarak (the previous president of Egypt) were certainly authoritarian and competitive compared to Syria and Libya which had only authoritarian regimes (go over). At the same time, however, they all wanted to inherit their power before the outbreak of the revolution which had stopped them. The inheritance of power had extended for decades. This meant that there was a weakening of institutions and strengthening the social networks of elites and causing a continuation of the ruling regime, even at the expense of the citizen’s interests.
Thus, the Arab revolutions collided with the strong forms of tyrannical structures that belonged to the previous regimes, making it difficult to shift the democratization of these institutions and to manage the process of transformation itself, like as in other parts of the world such as Eastern Europe.
These structures played a destructive role not only in obstructing the transformation process but also in helping to create non-governmental military organisations such as those in Syria and Iraq, Hezbollah in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen.
All these military structures were formed directly or indirectly by the structures of the former political regimes in order to impede the transition process. These countries already had a weak social structure, which is still composed of tribal and pre-state tribal affiliations.
Therefore, when these countries moved into a stage of military chaos — and not only political, this opened the door for these countries to enter the civil war.
The last factor that played a role in the failure of the transformation process in the Arab Spring countries is the lack of regional institutions that lead or at least sponsor the transformation process, as was done with the European Union in Eastern Europe. The Arab League is a traditional institution and is not governed by democratic or legal institutions. It is not involved in these political affairs and therefore left each country of the Arab Spring to take any direction and perhaps Tunisia is an exception to its own components, while the other Arab Spring countries like Syria, Libya, Yemen and Egypt passing this process of transformation through political experimentation.The Arab Spring gave the opposition parties the chance to make a change but without help and guidance from the UN, so that this process of transformation slipped into armed conflict and even civil war.
Unfortunately, the bitter truth seems today that civil war is the natural successor to the nature of authoritarian regimes which ruled our Arab countries for decades.
Results of the Arab Spring
The Guardian newspaper says that the conditions of the Arab Spring countries are worse than those that led to the so-called Arab Spring and the existence of the current circumstances may trigger another so-called Arab Spring but a much stronger one.
In addition to Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Libya, which have been devastated by wars for four years, two oil economies – Saudi Arabia and Algeria – have been hit by a slide in oil prices to more than half. The latest international report on development in the Arab world released by the United Nations since 2014 shows a dark picture of the future of the region.
While the total population of the Middle East and North Africa accounts for 5% of the world's population, but this region accounts for 45% of terrorist activity worldwide and accounts for 45% of the total number of refugees. 68% of deaths in the Arab world are related to conflicts and civil and regional wars.
Arab states are almost unable to meet the demands of their more than 100 million young people, who are threatened by poverty and unemployment and driven to terrorism, the report says (what report baba?)
Over the past six years, these countries, and even those that have maintained relative stability, such as Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Tunisia, and Egypt, have been unable to solve the economic development of their societies and cut corruption in their government departments.
Faced with this dark image, the difficult living conditions and the arrival of conservative right-wing currents in the Western world, Arab societies that have failed to reap the fruits of the revolutions of freedom may rebind against what they see as a continuation of injustice, corruption, and tyranny.
Some studies have shown that more than one million people have been killed and according to the Amnesty International website, approximately 2.5 million people needed humanitarian assistance and protection, including asylum-seekers, migrants, and refugees. (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/01/arab-spring-five-years-on/)
In addition, the Arab Spring which included the refugee crisis, the civil wars (in Libya, Syria, and Yemen) and the economic downturn in the affected countries cost more than eight hundred billion dollars between 2010 and 2017.
Studies have shown that these amounts were in the stock and investment markets and now this money has been given to arms-producing and military services companies. Last year Jamie Doward reported that “In the years preceding 2011, Britain, on average, sold £41.3m worth of small arms, £7m worth of ammunition and £34.3m worth of armoured vehicles to the Middle East and North African governments. In the five years that followed, annual sales rose to an average of £58.9m, £14m, and £59.6m respectively.” (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/12/observer-view-Britain-shameful-role-in-arms-trade-arab-spring-Yemen)
All of this resulted in the total destruction of the infrastructure of Libya, Yemen, Egypt, and Syria, leaving eight million to leave their homes and 14 million children did not have a school to attend. This left more than forty-million unemployed (which was up to 60 percent increase in unemployment rates) and this caused more than 70 million people have become below the poverty line.
As a consequence, this led to the widespread economic stagnation throughout the Middle East, and this is as a result of the political chaos that accompanied the Arab Spring.
As well as the complete economic collapse, there were many areas of social distress, including the phenomenon of widespread drug use/abuse, violence between oppositions and irregular, illegal migration. This makes it crucial for developed countries to intervene to prevent these issues like to the immigration crisis from arising in other countries, which would go on to affect the global peace system. In addition, the spread of jihadist groups has also impacted economic growth, which affected tourism which is a major service in Egypt and Tunisia, resulting in huge declines in the number of visitors-tourism revenues have declined by approx. 40% over the past years.
Clearly, there have been negative aspects of the Arab Spring on neighbouring countries and EU countries.
In 2011, the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean has exceeded 207,000 (according to UNHCR figures), of whom more than 80% have done so to the southern shores of the European countries. Apart from these 207,000 migrants, more than 3,400 people have died and these figures are still increasing over the years. We have seen that the number of migrants is increasing especially between the end of spring to mid-autumn because of the weather conditions and sea movement which encourages illegal immigration, and sometimes this has exceeded 1,000 immigrant arrivals per day to the Italian coast, during this period.
What has drawn my attention is that most of those who have entered Italian borders belong to mainly three countries: Syria, Eritrea, and Somalia. The reason is that of political turmoil and its economic and social repercussions in these countries, making it difficult for citizens to live in these conditions and especially in Syria where the civil war which over half the population homeless and exiling at least four million.
Syrians and the immigrants from the African countries make up more than 45 percent of those who arrive at the Italian coast.
Most of these migrant groups have come from Libya to various parts of Europe and this has been especially easy for them because Libya’s coast makes up 1,770 km and of which there isn’t strict control and this makes it easy for refugees to leave the Libyan borders. Illegal immigrants come from six countries along with Libya: Algeria, Tunisia, Chad, Niger, Sudan, and Egypt.
The truth is the Arab Spring was never the democratic movement that Western governments or the media made it out to be. In fact, the Arab Spring had very little to do with democracy; although it clearly involved some liberal-democratic groups. It was instead a revolutionary movement led primarily by conservative, religious and Islamist groups against the secular Arab tyrannical regimes.
Introduction
The Arab revolution was a wave of both violent and non-violent demonstrations, riots, foreign interventions, and civil wars in North Africa and the Middle East that began on 18 December 2010 in Tunisia with the Tunisian Revolution. The topic I will be exploring is how the Arab spring has so radically altered the geopolitics of the region and this project will give me a chance to explore the Middle East and North Africa's past, present and future. To begin to make an assessment of these revolutionary uprisings, I will offer a bird’s eye view of how the revolution has transformed every dimension of the region’s politics. Although my project question is “how successful was the Arab Spring?” I have learned that labelling the uprising as “Success or failure” will not help us understand this ongoing revolutionary wave.
I have chosen to pursue in this specific area of politics because I wish to broaden my knowledge on these societal and political affairs that are still occurring today since the spring of 2011.
I will be considering/exploring some arguments in my project and will be arguing that getting rid of a tyrannical leader is not enough and that building democratic networks, and restoring legitimacy in a failed state, are much more difficult tasks.
Media
One of the most important factors that helped us to understand the situation and raise awareness and the reality of the Arab Spring and that is admired by humanity because it stopped the hand of injustice is social media.
Countries with greater access to social media, like Tunisia and Egypt, have proved to be more successful in mobilising large groups of people, and even successful overall than those with stronger state control over social media like in Libya and Syria.
The British newspaper Financial Times produced a report on the role played by social media. The internet shaped the events of revolutions and indirectly led to the overthrow of the tyrants in the region as well as showing us the pros and cons of the uprise.
The newspaper devoted its article on Twitter, which continues to play an important role in the continuation of communication between the opposition forces, which can be used as a basis for planning tactics, dissemination of ideas, as well as an easy way to get more information.
For example, the page of this Egyptian journalist "Mahmoud Salem" famous on Twitter as “@Sandmonkey" followed by 130 thousand people was one of the many news sources during the time of the uprising that led to the fall of regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya in 201.
The revolutionary euphoria had the potential to liberate not only those societies already ignited but ultimately many others too. For instance, Twitter showed us the protests that took place in 2009 against the presidential elections in Iran, which were then alleged to be counterfeit and then activists on Twitter organised protests and released any information and news about any clashes or deaths.
The article said that another one of the positive outcomes of twitter during the social revolution has shown a great network of public opinion on political issues, and has enabled many influential figures in the Arab world to present their views on this platform.
The revolutionary euphoria had the potential to liberate not only those societies already ignited but ultimately many others as well.
What happens after the revolutions?
The transition from a revolution to drafting a new constitution is not easy.
The Founding fathers who built America were immigrants from different countries but all of them were united by one thing: to create a democratic state. Unfortunately, the people of the Arab Spring until now do not have this value because of the brutal history they lived under previous governments and the rampant corruption within them.
Only a few have the determination to seek a new democratic system because restoring confidence in a flawed state is a very challenging task.
Leading Arab intellectuals are warning that western intervention will either help beleaguered these Arab tyrants or else will “support” the Arab Spring in order to keep Arab nations in line with the priorities of neoliberal economics.
No one knows what the status of these countries would be in the future without the global intervention these countries receive today, but everyone is certain that what has happened in these countries can be solved by the United Nations and they can assist in securing and maintaining the national borders that violate those countries.
The United Nations can help to get rid of the tyrannical rule and to replace it with a rule in which people govern themselves through the mechanisms of modern democracy and to create a society that is vital, creative, productive and open.
But one would argue that the Arab spring was always better described as an awakening: the real revolution is not so much in the city squares as in the mind.
The lack of education and high illiteracy rates in these Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries are one of the main obstacles to democratisations. Public education is essential for critical thinking and problem solving and with successful education reforms, this will encourage a new generation of independent citizens that are determined in maintaining a stable democracy.
In order to achieve this, it is also necessary for the people to create another culture opposite and completely different from what was inherited from previous regimes.