{"id":2319,"date":"2020-12-21T08:15:20","date_gmt":"2020-12-21T13:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=2319"},"modified":"2021-01-08T16:32:22","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T21:32:22","slug":"the-first-decade-of-the-arab-revolutionary-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2020\/12\/the-first-decade-of-the-arab-revolutionary-process\/","title":{"rendered":"The First Decade of the Arab Revolutionary Process"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>en years ago, on 17 December 2010, a young street vendor in the town of Sidi Bouzid in central Tunisia sparked a political firestorm that soon engulfed the whole country, before spreading across the entire Arabic-speaking region, in what has been known since 2011 as the \u2018Arab Spring\u2019.<\/p>\n

The initial months of that \u2018spring\u2019 were euphoric, while a wave of massive protests engulfed the region, culminating in six major uprisings in total, as Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria followed Tunisia\u2019s example. Soon after that initial upsurge, however, the revolutionary wave receded, giving way to a counter-revolutionary onslaught. The Bahraini revolution was besieged and suppressed. The Syrian regime managed to withstand the popular uprising, which turned into civil war until Iran came to its rescue in 2013. A little afterwards, a reactionary military coup took place in Egypt, followed by other setbacks as well as by the outbreak of civil war in Libya and Yemen. This perilous defeat dispelled whatever illusions remained; euphoria gave way to pessimism while many quarters declared the dreams of the \u2018Arab Spring\u2019 to be dead.
\nBoth euphoria and dejection though were equally the outcome of superficial impressions in reaction to the revolutionary wave and the subsequent relapse. They both overlooked two fundamental features of the big bang that shook the region in 2011.<\/p>\n

\"\"The first feature is that the explosion had deep roots in the intractable structural crisis resulting from the transformation of the dominant social\/political system into an impediment to development, causing very low rates of economic growth and hence very high levels of unemployment, especially young and female. The ebb of the revolutionary tide and the reactionary onslaught that followed did nothing to solve this core structural crisis, which continued to worsen under the conditions of political instability that have prevailed regionally since the beginning of the crisis. This means that the events of 2011 were but the beginning of a long-term revolutionary process that will not come to an end until the necessary radical change in the nature of the prevailing political\/social system is achieved. Should this change not occur, the region risks sliding into catastrophic decline, heralding a long historical dark age.<\/p>\n

The second overlooked feature is the tight control exerted by the political and social system in the Arab region over key levers of state power\u2014especially the armed forces. The widespread expectation in the early months of the \u2018Arab Spring\u2019 that the region would witness a \u2018democratic transition\u2019 as smooth as that experienced in other parts of the world was based on a na\u00efve underestimation of the solidity of the state\u2019s main body and its repressive backbone, as well as of the readiness of ruling elites to destroy their countries, massacre their populations or drive them out in their quest to preserve their power and privileges\u2014as the Syrian regime has been doing. This na\u00efve misconception was enhanced when cases such as Tunisia and Egypt, where the \u2018deep state\u2019 sacrificed its head in order to preserve its foundations until a new head emerged like the tip of the iceberg, were mistaken for \u2018the regime\u2019s overthrow\u2019 that the people wanted, according to the famous chant.<\/p>\n