The Arab Winter

A Tragedy

Noah Feldman

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691201443
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mediorientale

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Why the conventional wisdom about the Arab Spring is wrong The Arab Spring promised to end dictatorship and bring self-government to people across the Middle East. Yet everywhere except Tunisia it led to either renewed dictatorship, civil war, extremist terror, or all three. In The Arab Winter, Noah Feldman argues that the Arab Spring was nevertheless not an unmitigated failure, much less an inevitable one. Rather, it was a noble, tragic series of events in which, for the first time in recent Middle Eastern history, Arabic-speaking peoples took free, collective political action as they sought to achieve self-determination.Focusing on the Egyptian revolution and counterrevolution, the Syrian civil war, the rise and fall of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and the Tunisian struggle toward Islamic constitutionalism, Feldman provides an original account of the political consequences of the Arab Spring, including the reaffirmation of pan-Arab identity, the devastation of Arab nationalisms, and the death of political Islam with the collapse of ISIS. He also challenges commentators who say that the Arab Spring was never truly transformative, that Arab popular self-determination was a mirage, and even that Arabs or Muslims are less capable of democracy than other peoples.Above all, The Arab Winter shows that we must not let the tragic outcome of the Arab Spring disguise its inherent human worth. People whose political lives had been determined from the outside tried, and for a time succeeded, in making politics for themselves. That this did not result in constitutional democracy or a better life for most of those affected doesn't mean the effort didn't matter. To the contrary, it matters for history—and it matters for the future.

CHAPTER 1

THE PEOPLE WANT

Who were the “people” who wanted the overthrow of their regime?

The word sha‘b is particularly resonant in modern Arabic. Indeed, it is one of the most powerful and layered words in the contemporary political vocabulary. Its Qur’anic antecedents stem from a famous verse (49:13): “O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another.” The “peoples” (shu‘ub) of the verse are plural. In contrast, the “people” of the modern Arabic sha‘b is singular—and takes a singular verb.

The modern resonance of the Arabic word for “people” lies in Arab nationalism, an intellectual and social movement with origins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This movement posited the existence of an identifiable Arab nation, made up (in its grandest reach) of all Arabic speakers from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east. Sometimes this body was characterized as the “Arab people” (al-sha‘b al-‘arabi), sometimes as the “Arab peoples” (al-shu‘ub al-‘arabiya).¹ For that people or community of peoples, hitherto unknown to history under a single unified term, Arab nationalism prescribed a nation—and ideally, a single, overarching nation-state.

The dream of a single Arab nation-state never came to pass. From the end of World War I and the Versailles peace treaty forward, the trope of the Arab people or peoples has always been reflected through the existence of multiple states that shared and contested the self-description and sometimes the political appellation “Arab.” Thus the citizens of the individual states of the Arabic-speaking world might describe themselves as the people of Egypt or Syria or Tunisia, while simultaneously continuing to think of themselves as part of a greater Arab nation.

It is significant that the “people” of the chants that began in January 2011 were not subdesignated by the states to which they belonged (as in, “the Tunisian people want”) or explicitly named as “Arab” (as in, “the Arab people want”). From a literary standpoint, the explanation may be that the chant was borrowed from a poem by the Tunisian author Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, which begins (rendered literally), “If some day the people wanted life.”² It is also true that the phrase scanned well in Arabic without the added syllables of a national or pan-national designation.

But it is also worth noting that, within a short time of the initial Tunisian protests against the Ben Ali regime, the term “Arab” in the phrase “Arab spring” was identifiably if not deliberately dual. On the one hand, Tunisians and then Egyptians, Syrians, Libyans, and so forth were demanding change in their own particular countries. When they called themselves “the people,” they were speaking as citizens of the states they constituted. On the other hand, by self-consciously echoing the claims of other Arabic-speaking protesters in other countries, the chanters were suggesting that a broader people—implicitly, the Arab people or peoples—were seeking change from the regime or regimes (more on this shortly) that were governing them.

The fact that the people were seeking change first of all in their own countries reflected the institutional realities of Middle Eastern states in the early 2010s. Although different actors in different Arabic-speaking states were often politically entwined, none was fully interdependent: to call for change in one country was not necessarily to call for change elsewhere, or everywhere. In the first instance, chanting Tunisians wanted Ben Ali out, Egyptians wanted Mubarak to go, and Syrians wanted to rid themselves of Bashar.

It is a crucially important fact of the Arab spring and its aftermath that the distinctive institutional arrangements, politics, and demographics of individual countries operated more or less on their own—and produced drastically divergent outcomes. Egypt and Syria and Tunisia look radically different from one another today because they were different countries, whose differences outweighed their similarities when it came to the realities of change. The same is also true of Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and the other countries where the Arab spring had important effects.³

Yet the broader, pan-Arab national aspect of the call to change also must not be minimized or gainsaid. For one thing, very early in 2011, the movement that seemed to be spreading from country to country came to be called the Arab spring. It manifested itself to one degree or another in essentially every Arabic-speaking country, including those where it had little to no chance of making a substantial impact, such as Saudi Arabia. And it did not spread to non-Arabic-speaking countries in the region, such as Turkey and Iran, which have experienced separate and distinct protest movements of their own on their own very different timing.^*

That is no coincidence. The phenomenon of the Arab spring turned out to be distinctively and uniquely Arab in scope. By extension, the protesters’ repeated invocation of the “people” in different places implied a transnational Arab identity, or if you prefer, a broader Arab nationalism that connected the Arab “peoples” to one another. Each of the groups of people in different countries chanted the same Arabic slogan referring to the “people”—using the same resonant words, in the same language, transcending different dialects.⁴ Other slogans were also shared, to be sure, sometimes in the same words, sometimes with variations. But the slogan asserting peoplehood distinctively stands for the iterative, shared, cross-border process of diffusion, imitation, and common identification.

The contagion of the protests from one Arabic-speaking country to another was also at the same time the product of Arabic media, especially satellite news stations like Al Jazeera. Those stations not only broadcast across borders but, by doing so, have maintained and transformed the ideas and rhetoric of Arab peoplehood. In the discursive space of pan-Arab media, the Arab “peoples” are encouraged, consciously and unconsciously, to participate in common experiences and aspirations. The Al Jazeera phenomenon of common identification across borders, shaped by language and culture, previously had been the subject of much academic discussion.⁵ But it had never before been demonstrated through actual political action, repeated across borders in the performance of a script that was learned in the first instance through satellite television, if supplemented by the Internet and emergent social media.⁶

Having identified the complexity of the correct level to identify “people” protesting, however, does not resolve the question of who the people were. Rather, it opens a deeper, more fundamental aspect of the same question. When some people form a group and take to the streets and claim to be the people, are they? What if the group has no single, stable membership? How many protesters does it take for us to begin to think that “the people” is speaking? Are numbers part of the answer at all?

In approaching this delicate and important question, it is useful to distinguish two different methods of approaching it, which will in turn yield two different kinds of answers. One is historical, sociological, and descriptive. The other is political, philosophical, and normative.

The historical approach begins with the background assumption that “the people” is an abstraction, not a concrete object. The historian Edmund Morgan’s classic account of the rise of the idea of popular sovereignty in England and America is called Inventing the People.⁷ The title more or less sums it up: the “people” do not exist as a natural fact. They and their capacity to act collectively must be invented.

Seen from this perspective, it can never be historically accurate to say that “the people” were gathered in a public square to demand change. To the contrary, as a historical-descriptive matter, there are only individuals and groups claiming to speak in the name of the people or on their behalf. Even if every single citizen of the country turned out to chant, the citizens’ claim to be the people would still be an abstraction rather than historical reality. The artifact to be studied is the claim to representative peoplehood—and the human beings, existing in that time and space, who make it.⁸

A related descriptive way to look at the question, one that draws on literary and cultural theory, is to say that individuals and groups like those who gathered in the Arab spring are engaged in a performance of peoplehood.⁹ This approach depicts the actors as undertaking certain actions and saying certain words that are both familiar and ever-changing. Background cultural beliefs and collective memories function like scripts that enable the acts and words to create what the participants understand as speaking for the “people.”^†

In addressing recent events, this descriptive approach would turn to sociologists in order to figure out who were the specific people chanting that “the people” wanted the overthrow of the regime—and to cultural and literary historians to understand what they were thinking when they did so. The sociologists would be prepared to draw on all the tools available to make sense of contemporaneous events: not only news reports but data drawn from social media, film, surveys, mobile phone providers, and interviews. If police and intelligence archives eventually open, those might also provide rich sources of exploration for future historians. The goal of the inquiry would be to find particular individuals and then generalize about them—to find out not only who, exactly, joined protests but also what kinds of people they were, categorized by class, sex and gender, religious and ethnic denomination and viewpoints, and of course political beliefs and attitudes.

It must be said that answering these sociological questions for, say, Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia is extremely challenging—despite the fact that these events occurred in the past decade and that many of the participants are still alive and able to speak. Historians of the French Revolution, who have grappled with similar questions when seeking to understand different actors who claimed to speak in the name of the people, face what is in certain ways a far more technically challenging problem, since the people in question are long dead and records are incomplete.¹⁰ Knowing who, exactly, stormed the Bastille is notoriously difficult. Yet the very multitude of sources available to us in considering contemporaneous events makes the challenge of determining who protested during the Arab spring almost as hard. The sheer quantity of data makes it difficult to justify generalizations. And if the sociologists do try to generalize, we can be sure that some people who were participants in the events will talk back and tell them they are wrong—a problem that historians of the eighteenth century do not face.

Nevertheless, we can try our best to apply the historical-sociological approach to the Arab spring and what followed. In doing so, we have to consider the changing composition of crowds and the competing claims of protesters in different waves, especially in Egypt. We have to let certain representative views or voices stand in as shorthand for others, running the risk of error and misrepresentation in doing so. Yet some such analysis seems to me necessary to discussing the events of the Arab spring and their aftermath. It would be frustrating and to a degree irrelevant if we were to consider the dramatic arc of the story solely from the point of view of abstractions.

Applying literary and cultural-historical approaches to the Arab spring is also challenging in its own way. The slogans chanted by the protesters can offer us tantalizing textual markers of their ideas. The size and timing of the protests—political-cultural happenings aimed to change the world—also cry out to be interpreted, almost as if these, too, were texts. It is impossible to engage the Arab spring seriously without trying to place these words and acts in the context of history, politics, and meaning-making in the Arabic-speaking world over the past century or more. At the same time, the work of interpretation is inevitably incomplete and necessarily affected by our own commitments, beliefs, and values.

For these reasons, and others, it is therefore also worth considering a different, alternative method of addressing the question, one rooted in normative theories of politics and philosophy. This approach begins with a different presupposition than the historical-descriptive. It assumes that, under some circumstances, it does make sense to talk about the people and what they want. The people, after all, are the demos in democracy. “The rule of the people” is only a coherent description of a form of government if it is possible to speak about “the people” governing themselves. Similarly, if we want to criticize autocracy or other unattractive forms of government, we must be able to describe who rules in them in some relation to the rule of the people.

Political theorists, the philosophers who make it their business to talk about government, are perfectly aware of historians’ distrust of their categories. But they are not deterred—because what they are after is something different from simple description. Political theory asks: What is the right way to govern? This normative question, focused on what ought to be done and answered in terms of good and bad, cannot be answered purely by positive, factual analysis. It requires norms and values. And to get at norms and values, we need precisely the abstractions that historians like to break down.

Thus, a political theorist asking who were the people seeking political change wants to know primarily whether those individuals had a convincing or legitimate claim to speak on behalf of the rest of the population of citizens. Raw numbers or other empirical facts may contribute to a normative analysis of what counts as genuine representativeness. But the numbers and demographics alone will never be enough. They must be processed through a normative framework.

That framework is what allows us to ask not only what happened in the Arab spring and its aftermath but also what we should think about. It allows us to evaluate political developments in the light of justice and well-being. Without it, we could not make a judgment distinguishing the good of constitutional democracy in Tunisia from the circularity of Egypt or the evils of brutal civil war in Syria. Historians, of course, make such evaluative judgments all the time—mostly without admitting it. But the real basis for their judgments is often their own implicit political theory.

In what foll...