Notes on a Revolution

by Shashank Joshi for RUSI.org

The study of revolution is fraught with the bias of hindsight and skewed by the human propensity for optimism, the conviction that tyrants must always fall. We label uprisings - velvet, rose, orange, cedar, jasmine - as if collecting them on a shelf that celebrates the end of history, and with the assumption that they are propelled by identical logics. With Tunisia's successful and unexpected expulsion of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and the waves of dissent that unleashed across the region, the next colour stands ready to be appended to the next revolution. But as Egyptian air force jets buzz their own capital and the crowds swell, it is worth pausing and considering Tunisia's example, the ripples it has produced, and the lessons that might be drawn.

Lessons from Tunis and Cairo

Pressure, it has been shown, need not come from the expected channels. This is not as obvious as it seems. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has been the spectre that haunts Mubarak's police state - at least according to the regime's pleas to Washington. Beaten back for decades, it commanded a large membership and strong loyalties. Yet when the protests began, its response was cagey. Many of its members joined in anyway, but the Brotherhood was far from being the focal point of dissent. Nor did the agitation follow on the heels of a disputed election, indicating the impressive ability of disparate social groups and classes to generate revolutionary energy. Much has been made of the social networked revolutions. Their importance should not be exaggerated: labour movements and rural workers played a key role in Tunisia's uprising, which was a genuine mass movement.
 
But social networks have provided a conduit for communication and organization to younger groups who stand entirely outside formal institutions and who have no particularly Islamic bent to their opposition.[1] The bottom-up facets to the Jasmine revolution are significant when we consider the trajectory of Iran's revolution thirty years ago. Then, a clerical elite both played a key role in agitation against the monarchy and subsequently seized power.  The mixture of rural workers, union groups, and young internet activists in Tunisia - combined with the comparative quiescence of Islamic groups - gives its movement a broader base.

Social networks also accelerate the circulation of imagery and testimony that fuels international support (what in the Balkans was dubbed the 'CNN effect') and draws in the uncommitted, as with Iran's murder of the young protester, Neda, whose death was filmed and widely disseminated.

Western Involvement: Fuelling the Flames or Striking the Match?

For too long it was supposed that Arab autocracies must be tolerated because, below the surface, lay radical Islamic currents whose seizure of power would give impetus to transnational jihadi movements and set back the global campaign against terrorism. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood functioned as this bogeyman, despite the fact that 'jihadists loathe the Muslim Brotherhood ... for rejecting global jihad and embracing democracy'.[2] In Tunisia, despite the disintegration of the Islamist al-Nahda party long ago (its leader is in exile), this concern emerged almost as soon as the dust had settled.

Nor is this an especially Arab canard: it has been invoked by military despots in Pakistan, such as General Pervez Musharraf, and brutal tyrants in Central Asia, such as Islam Karimov. In some cases, Islamist movements are domestically oriented coalitions with no global aspirations and no ties to terrorist groups (some even characterize the Taliban as such, though there is copious evidence pointing the other way).

In other cases, Islamist groups present enormous dangers. This is particularly so in Pakistan, where their fluid overlaps and cooperation have resulted in a continually shifting constellation of threats spreading far beyond the country. 

But invocation of the Islamist threat is a disingenuous manoeuvre, as it overlooks the accumulating costs of the present policy, a status quo in which coercive and venal regimes have fuelled illiteracy, immiseration, and inequality - creating a veritable Petri dish for Islamists, and a deep-rooted anti-Americanism that no amount of presidential speeches can eradicate.

This is not to say that Islamic groups will play no part in future regimes (they certainly will), nor that deeply illiberal groups will not make major gains, as Hamas and Hezbollah both did from an exploitation of democratic opportunities. But decision-makers ensconced in London and Washington should not fool themselves or others by believing that benign neglect is a wise choice.

In many cases, it is far from clear that the tin-pot tail is not wagging the State Department dog. In Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the US engages two state sponsors of extremism and terrorism (respectively) who for years have shielded their duplicity behind the safe assumption that the US deems no alternatives to exist. But even in the absence of this phenomenon, appeasing tyrants to stave off Islamists will, in the long run, push these sclerotic and wretched regimes into the arms of the latter through the worsening of social conditions. Not every regime will be able, like Saudi Arabia, to buy off its would-be dissidents. Eric Hobsbawm, in his seminal Age of Revolution, referred to the revolutionary age of 1848 as 'an age of superlatives', meaning that industry, communications and technology had generated the conditions of mass movement.[3] In the Middle East today, it is an age of mediocrities - mediocre growth, freedoms and opportunities.

Contagious Revolutions?

We have also seen that revolution is contagious. In the 1950s and 60s, the domino theory - that Communist revolutions were contagious - propelled escalating American efforts in Vietnam and, later, in Central America. Poland's example during the 1980s in repudiating Soviet influence was the first step in a series of popular assaults on the Soviet empire across Europe. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was premised on the idea that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would be but the first step in the transformation of the Middle East. In Tunisia, the self-immolation of a fruit vendor unleashed a barrage of protests, but also eighteen copycat actions in the week after the incident. These spanned Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Pakistan, Morocco, and Mauritania.

What is less noted is that contagion effects are already seeping out of the region.  The Tunisian example sparked off protest in Kirkuk, the Kurdish city in Iraq, and demonstrations in Gaza, Indonesia and Gabon. It need not stop there. The mass movements of the late 1980s inspired many in Kashmir, then on the cusp of an ongoing insurgency against Indian rule, despite the relatively low television ownership.[4] In most cases, the powerful imagery generated by acts of protest will not topple regimes, but it may push rulers towards opting for concessions over crackdowns, for fear of inspiring major dissent.

It is also worth recalling that the revolutions of 1989 were black swans, and the spiral-like interaction effects of simultaneous mass movements are tremendously hard to predict. Tunisia may yet presage something more radical than gradual change. Tunisia is idiosyncratic in many ways, with its large middle class, high levels of education, and weak security service. But the revolutionary energy seen there is remarkably similar to that which is coursing through the resolutely authoritarian cities of the Middle East in recent days. Something new is afoot.

American Discomfort

The dilemmas all this presents for Washington are acute. President Bush's so-called 'freedom agenda' was dead in the water by 2006, for reasons including American opposition to Hamas' election victory and the overwhelming militarization of the policy. That administration extended the same assistance and occasional obsequiousness to Saudi Arabia (as US governments have always done), and rendered enormous aid to the Pakistan Army, who had seized the reins of power in 1999.

When Islam Karimov's Uzbekistan massacred thousands in Andijan in 2005, criticism prompted the ruler to expel US troops from the Karshi-Khanabad airbase, which was being used for operations in Afghanistan. But by January 2011, Karimov was feted in Brussels by the head of the European Commission and NATO, such is the country's continued importance. In his celebrated Cairo speech in 2009, Barack Obama stressed the importance of democracy in the Muslim word, but tamely hedged that this ought to be 'grounded in the traditions of its own people'.

In any case, actions speak louder than words: democracy promotion has been a negligible priority for the White House. Over Obama's tenure, the Afghan war has greatly intensified, amplifying the need to keep onside illiberal democracies like Russia, partial democracies like Pakistan, and outright dictatorships like Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia (whose theological-political influence in Pakistan and Afghanistan is seen as valuable). In some cases, overt inaction is expedient. During the protests surrounding Iran's disputed elections, US intercession would have discredited the dissenting groups - no one could seriously think the Obama administration was protecting the Islamic Republic's rulers.

But in Egypt, Tunisia, and the like, American discomfort has been apparent. Hilary Clinton's call for 'restraint' by 'all parties', and her observation that the Egyptian government was 'stable', were punches pulled so hard that no one was persuaded by Obama's subsequent insistence - after the fact - that the US stood with the people of Tunisia.

Egypt is the fourth-largest recipient of US aid (after Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Israel). In 2010, Cairo received $1.75bn in military aid - many of the weapons turned on protesters will be implicitly funded with American tax dollars. In this context it strains credulity to accept that a studied neutralism is the best approach, given the supposed uncertainty of replacement regimes and the importance of keeping opposition movements untainted by US involvement.

The story is the same in Jordan, where the regime clamped down last year despite years of undertaking progressive reform, and in Yemen, where President Saleh took advantage of US concern over terrorism to consolidate his authority. The US is not tolerating, but actively facilitating these regimes. It is, as Condoleezza rice put it in 2005, under the illusion that it is 'purchasing stability at the price of liberty'.[5]

As early as February last year, Francis Fukuyama warned that 'Mr. Obama arrived in office with none of this baggage, and therefore had an opportunity to recommit the United States to peaceful democratic change. But the window is rapidly closing as the U.S. draws closer to the region's authoritarian rulers'.[6] If the window was shutting then, it must be on the cusp of closure today. If and when opposition groups overthrow US clients like Mubarak in Egypt and Saleh in Yemen, the pervasive suspicion of US motives will have been vindicated, and a generation will know that the world's oldest democracy chose to shut its eyes rather than use its manifold coercive levers over the autocrats.

And if all else fails, President Obama would do well to recall that his nation's own revolution was facilitated by France, for reasons of antipathy to England as much as ideology, but with no less world-historical consequences.

Shashank Joshi is a doctoral Student at the Department of Government, Harvard University

Notes

[1] Lauren Kirchner, Technology's Role in Tunisia, Columbia Journalism Review

[2] Robert S Leiken and Steven Brooke, "Moderate Muslim Brotherhood, The," Foreign Affairs 86 (2007), p107

[3] Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (London: Abacus, 1977), p359

[4] Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in conflict: India, Pakistan and the unending war (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), p148

[5] Condoleezza Rice,  speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 18 January 2005

[6] Francis Fukuyama, What Became of the 'Freedom Agenda'?, Wall Street Journal, 10 February 2010

Photo: Expressions of solidarity with protests in Egypt in Toronto, Canada (Flickr: Karim Rezk)