The Arab Revolution of 2011

A Comparative Perspective

Saïd Amir Arjomand

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781438454887, 9781438454894
• eBook ISBN: 9781438454900
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Social Sciences

How do we make sense of the Arab revolution of 2011? What were its successes, its failures, and significance in world history? The Arab Revolution of 2011 brings together a broad range of perspectives to explain the causes, processes, and consequences of the revolution of 2011 and its critical implications for the future. The contributors, in this major addition to the sociology of revolutions, step back from the earlier euphoria of the Arab Spring to provide a sober analysis of what is still an ongoing process of upheaval in the Middle East. The essays address the role of national armies and foreign military intervention, the character and structure of old regimes as determinants of peaceful or violent political transformation, the constitutional placement of Islam in post-revolutionary regimes, and the possibilities of supplanting authoritarianism with democracy. The revolution of 2011 is also examined within a broad historical perspective, comparing the dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya with such epochal events as the European revolution of 1848 and Russia in 1917.

1

THE ARAB REVOLUTION OF 2011 AND ITS COUNTERREVOLUTIONS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

SAÏD AMIR ARJOMAND

I cannot think of a better phenomenon than revolution for demonstrating that history remains an open book. Revolutions as they unfold are read either according to the modern myth of revolution or by means of historical recollection. The latter usually gains in strength as the gap between myth and reality becomes evident. But historical recollection in the first instance takes the expectation of the exact repetition of history—in this case, the replay of the revolutionary script based on the French revolution of 1789. And it, too, is sooner or later is found not to fit the case. At that point, we reopen the book of history, and there is no way of prejudging how far back we need to go to find appropriate parallels. As the course of revolution constantly changes, each new development and event evokes parallels from the past which are not necessarily or even usually the closest to the time of that event. In this chapter I will look for parallels and contrasts while sketching an overview of the Arab Revolution of 2011 by comparing the three countries in which it was successful in that year, namely, Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. Syria will also be considered as Bashar al-Assad, just like Mu`ammar al-Qadhdhafi, decided to suppress the uprising ruthlessly, and, as I shall argue counterfactually,¹ without external military intervention, the Arab revolution would have ended in failure and civil war in Libya, as it actually did in Syria.

A GLOBAL COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

As a revolutionary wave in a cultural/civilizational zone or a world region, the Arab revolution of 2011 is strikingly similar to the European revolution of 1848. The “Springtime of Peoples” (Rapport 2008) was indeed sociologically similar to the “Arab Spring” in many ways. The revolutions of 1848 and 2011 were constitutional revolutions in their goals, what I elsewhere call teleologies. (Arjomand forthcoming). In both cases, however, the revolution spread over several different polities and its outcome varied accordingly. We may thus speak of different outcomes of a single revolution in different countries. Last but not least, we find a very interesting parallel both in terms of the rapid spread and generality of revolutionary mobilization.

Signs of unrest preceding a revolution are widely ignored at the time and only in retrospect seen as those of the gathering storm. There were such signs in Milan and indeed an uprising in Sicily at the beginning of 1848 that may well have prompted Alexis de Tocqueville to rise in the French Chamber of Deputies on January 29 to say: “I believe that right now we are sleeping on a volcano. … Can you not sense that the earth is trembling again in Europe? Can you not feel … the wind of revolution in the air?” (Cited in Rapport 2008, 42; emphasis added). Tocqueville was derided, however, and his plea to the government to concede constitutional reform was ignored. Similar signs of unrest triggered by the self-immolation of the Tunisian peddler Muhammad Buazizi in December 2010 preceded the revolutionary storm of the following month, but no Arab autocrat lost any sleep over them.

The European revolution of 1848 was definitively set off by the endemic revolutionary cycle in France but does not fit the 1789 script at all. Revolution broke out in Paris on February 22, 1848, and two days later, on February 24, Louis-Philippe packed his bags and left, even faster than Ben Ali did in Tunisia in January 2011. In Egypt, Mubarak was packed away eighteen days after the outbreak of revolution on January 25, 2011. The ripple effect of the revolution in Paris was amazing. The American chargé d’affaires in Vienna wrote that the news of the February days in Paris “fell like a bomb amid the states and kingdoms of the Continent … various monarchs hastened to pay their subjects the constitutions which they owed them” (cited in Rapport 2008, 57). According to a report from Berlin on February 28, “it is impossible to describe the amazement, the terror, the confusion aroused by the latest reports from Paris crowding on each other almost hourly” (cited in Hamerow 1958, 99). Then, in March 1848, the revolution suddenly spread through continental Europe, including the partitioned Poland, like prairie fire. Revolution also broke out on March 13 in Vienna, and two days later, one Viennese observed excitedly that “the word ‘constitution’ is giving a new movement to the waves of the time—a movement that will be felt over the whole globe” (cited in Rapport 2008, 65–66). On the same day, “constitutional” hats, parasols, and pastries were being sold by Czech artisans and bakers in Prague (Rapport 2008, 71).

Similarly, the Arab revolution broke out in January in Tunisia and Egypt, triggering the revolt of Cyrenaica (eastern Libya) against Qadhdhafi and spread to the Yemen, Bahrain, and Morocco in mid-February, and had reached Syria and the rest of the Arab world by March 2011. A year later, when the Tunisians, the Egyptians, and the Libyans each have their own separate postrevolution problems, the Arab revolution had not lost momentum. Toward the end of January 2012, demonstrators from the Tahrir Roundabout (it is not a square)² attacked the Syrian embassy in Cairo, while late in February 2012, the Tunisian interim government invited representatives of sixty nations to an international conference in support of the Syrian opposition to the Assad regime. Young Libyan revolutionaries turned up in Syria on the side of the anti-Assad freedom fighters to spread the Arab revolution, and the Libyan government continued to provide arms to Syrian freedom fighters to the end of 2012 (The Economist, 1/28/12, 48; 1/12/13, 41).

Like the European revolutions of 1848, the Arab uprisings in 2011 were constitutional in their inception. The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were certainly seen that way by the revolutionaries themselves. Prominent among slogans written on placards carried in Maidan al-Tahrir were “Constitution First!” and “No principles above the constitution.” The new lyrics chanted in the sit-ins in the Casbah early in the spring of 2011 went:

Hey-Oh!

Congratulations!

A new constitutional Assembly!

A new constitution! (Cited in Coll 2011, 40)

The Libyan revolution, too, had the beginnings of a constitutional revolution, being led by the lawyers who represented massacred prisoners and turned the Benghazi courthouse into the center of their provisional government, the National Transitional Council, chaired by a defecting minister of justice, Mustafa `Abd al-Jalil. `Abdul-Hafiz Ghogha, leader of the lawyers’ union, became its deputy head until his resignation in January 2012. Furthermore, to stem the tide of revolution, President Assad of Syria, and more successfully, King Muhammad VI of Morocco, fairly quickly promulgated counterrevolutionary constitutions.

Eighteen forty-eight was the revolution of ideas mounting as a tidal wave. It was the constitutional and nationalist revolution of the European intellectuals; the Arab Spring began as the democratic revolution of the educated Arab youth. Both revolutions opposed the status quo, and their ideologies were marked by opposition to absolutism in an idiom of citizens’ rights, in the former case, and by a political culture of civil resistance and opposition to authoritarianism in the idiom of the rule of law and human dignity (karāma), in the latter. The overwhelming majority in the 1848 Frankfurt parliament consisted of the educated bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum), led by more than two hundred lawyers who kept the four craftsmen and the lonely peasant in awed silence (Hamerow 1958, 124–25). They were the new social agents of the emergent public sphere, and saw their historic mission as the unification of a nation in a new democratic order (Giesen 1998, chs. 3, 5) In the Arab world, groups of the educated youth such as the Coalition of the Angry Youth Uprising and the Muslim Brotherhood Youth started the revolution in Egypt. In Libya, the declaration by the Coalition of February 17 establishing the National Transitional Council in Benghazi explicitly reserved five of its thirty seats for the youth³ (Filiu 2011, 39, 164). The first Libyan local elections in Misrata in February 2012 were organized by the youth groups. (Gulf Times, 2/21/12) The Arab revolution of 2011 thus began as a revolution of the youthful intelligentsia.⁴

It is true that there had been more than 3,400 strikes and sit-ins by organized labor between 1998 and 2010 in Egypt, but these were local and settled with wage increases (Beinin 2012, 92, 103). The main unionization in 2011 was in fact done by middle-class employees, beginning with the formation of the first independent trade union by tax collectors in 2008, with teachers and other civil servants joining with it in January 2011 (Beinin 2012, 93). Furthermore, the neighborhood communal protest events and those sponsored by civil associations in early 2011 were at least as important (El-Ghobashy 2012, 24).

The electorate, however, should not be confused with the young demonstrators and activists that triggered the revolution. The victory of the conservative groupings in general and the Islamists in particular in the Tunisian and Egyptian elections contrasted strikingly with the poor showing of the liberals,⁵ not to mention the radicals and youth organizations; and most observers found the contrast surprising. The 1848 parallel, however, makes this result appear less surprising and more normal. In both cases, the electorate was much more conservative than the revolutionary protesters. France was one European country that held several elections after February 1848. The Constituent Assembly elected in April 1848 had fewer than a hundred Progressive Republicans, as compared to about three hundred Monarchists and five hundred Moderate Republicans. Much better known is that fact that Louis Bonaparte was elected president by universal suffrage with three-quarters of the vote on December 10, 1848. However, the Legislative Assembly elected in May 1849, too, was dominated by conservatives: the 450 Monarchists constituted a majority of nearly two-thirds (Aron 1968, 335–36).

As has been noted universally, the media, Al Jazeera, the Internet, and social networks such as the Twitter and Facebook have played a major role in the spread of the Arab revolution. A giant screen on Tahrir Roundabout provided round-the-clock TV news (Filiu 2011, 37, 52–53). Along with cell phones, the Internet and social networks are components of a new public sphere that is critical to the leaderless revolution of the educated Arab youth, and have in turn injected a new life into the Arab press. Cyber cafes are the hub of young people at the core of a wider circle constantly communicating and texting by mobile phones; Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and other television stations are watched in coffee houses and local dens, political and revolutionary rap, music, poetry and lyrics, in classical and colloquial Arabic, are widely disseminated through the Internet and all in all, they create a pan-Arab public sphere from Morocco to the Gulf. But are we witnessing the incipient formulation and elaboration of a new form of consciousness, a new Arab culture? Hamid Dabashi (2012) argues persuasively that that is the case.

Except for France, the European monarchs saved their crowns and the state through the revolutionary storm of 1848. The king of Württemberg said he refused to “mount the horse against ideas” (Namier 1964, 5), and the king of Prussia embraced the revolution. The Hapsburg monarch also saved his crown and the imperial state, buying off the peasantry after the Vienna parliament unanimously abolished the subjection of the peasants in July 1848 (Namier 1964, 22–26). The Prussian king made a similar bid for the support of the German peasantry in December (Hamerow 1958, 187–91). With the notable exception of Libya, where the regime was destroyed by foreign military intervention, and despite fierce popular attacks on their security apparatus, the Arab states survived the Arab revolution of 2011 largely intact. In Syria, the state, its army and security forces remained largely intact, refused to negotiate with the opposition, and ruthlessly engaged in a protracted civil war.

In the short run, the revolution of the intellectuals in 1848 failed to achieve both its constitutional and its nationalist goals, and often ended with reaction. It foundered on the contradictions of the principles of nationality and self-determination in the multiethnic Hapsburg empire, which claimed inclusion in the Greater Germany but comprised Poles, Czechs, Slavs, and Hungarians as well as Germans. This gave the counterrevolution the opportunity to split and subvert the liberal revolution of 1848. Again in the short run, the revolution also failed to achieve its constitutional goal when the Frankfurt Constitution of 1849 was rejected by the king of Prussia to whom it offered the crown of united Germany. However, in the long run it had momentous consequences because the reaction completed the work of revolution: the Piedmontese constitution of March 4, 1848, indeed became that of unified Italy in 1860, remaining in force until 1946 (Rapport 2008, 79); the Hapsburg empire became the dual Austro-Hungarian constitutional monarchy (1866); and the Imperial (Reich) Constitution of 1871, as well of the subsequent German constitutions, bore the deep imprint of the 1849 Frankfurt Constitution. Thus, the failed European revolution of 1848 shaped the constitutional development of modern Europe. As for achieving its nationalist goals, the unifications of Germany and Italy can very plausibly be considered the long-term consequence of the 1848 revolution.

The dialectic of revolution and reaction, which made for the realization of some of the goals of the 1848 revolutionaries by the reaction, is not without parallel in the Arab Spring of 2011. On July 29, 2011, to stem the tide of revolution manifested in massive protests, the king of Morocco, Mohammad VI, who still retains his religious authority and the traditional title of the Commander of the Faithful (amir al-mu’minin) (Article 41), promulgated a new constitution ratified by his people in a referendum at the beginning of the month. It was in many ways better than the Egyptian constitution of December 2012, and transferred the king’s power to dissolve parliament to the prime minister, and his power to grant amnesty to the parliament, and recognized Berber as an official language alongside Arabic. Elections were held in November 2011, and the head of the Islamist Justice and Development Party, which held the largest number of parliamentary seats (107 out of 395), was appointed prime minister in accordance with the new constitution.⁶ In Egypt, owing to the survival of the “deep state,” counterrevolution triumphed in the summer of 2013. The new regime established by the Egyptian army, however, rested its legitimacy on the rule of law and order. It declared the chief justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court its interim president and immediately embarked on amending the suspended constitution of 2012, putting a new constitution to a national referendum in January 2014.

Closer to us in time, the revolutionary cycle of the fall of Arab governments shows some similarities to the post-1989 negotiated color revolutions that took place in Soviet Central Eurasia—recognizably a single ideological bloc and arguably also a distinct civilizational zone. Not only the Tunisian Jasmine revolution but the Arab revolution of 2011 more generally invites comparison with the post-1989 velvet or color revolutions of Central and Eastern Europe. Like the Arab world, the formerly communist Central and Eastern Europe constituted a world region. The similar regime falls in the two world regions, however, had different causes. I would contrast the different causal patterns in terms of the domino versus the ripple effect.

The domino effect can be defined as the fall of one regime after another as a result of removal of credible threat of suppression of popular revolt by armed forces. President Gorbachev’s refusal to commit the Warsaw Pact forces (read the Soviet army) to defend tottering regimes within the communist bloc during the decisive confrontation between regimes and oppositions in East Germany and Czechoslovakia in November 1989 (Collins 1991) thus triggered the fall of one regime after another in Central and Eastern Europe following Poland’s “self-limiting” revolution.⁷ Regime change at that point was typically negotiated by government in roundtable discussions with the opposition. The Central and Eastern European states...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword: Pangaea II: Global/Local Studies
• Introduction
• 1. The Arab Revolution of 2011 and Its Counterrevolutions in Comparative Perspective
• 2. Bringing Regimes Back In: Explaining Success and Failure in the Middle East Revolts of 2011
• 3. Is Democracy a Mirage? The Arab Awakening in Comparative Perspective
• 4. Did Inequality Breed the Arab Uprisings? Social Inequality in the Middle East from a World Perspective
• 5. A Place for Revolution: Urban Space in the Arab Spring
• 6. Quest for the Dawla Madania (Civic State): Visions of Egyptian Statehood
• 7. The First Year of the Tunisian Revolution
• 8. Why Burkina’s Spring Fizzled Away: Paradoxes of a Semiauthoritarian Regime
• 9. Civil Society in a Transcultural Comparison: Eastern Europe and the MENA Region
• 10. The 2017 Problem: A Next Revolutionary Situation
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover