2011: The Arab World’s 1989 or 1848?
BY MARK N. KATZ
Largely quiescent for decades, the Arab world has experienced a surprising—and surprisingly powerful—wave of revolutionary activity beginning in January 2011 and continuing ever since then. So far, the “Arab Spring,” as it is popularly known, has resulted in the downfall of Tunisia’s Zene el-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Although his regime still hangs on for now, an explosion injured Yemen’s Ali Abdallah Saleh so severely that he had to be taken to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment, where he has remained. As for Libya, Muammar Qaddafi has been unable to suppress his NATO-backed opponents. Even more impressively, Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad—despite assistance from Iran—has been unable to suppress his opponents, who are not receiving support from NATO or, apparently, anyone else. The powerful opposition movement that arose in Bahrain has been suppressed, but still smolders. Opposition activity in Morocco, Jordan, and Oman has resulted in the monarchs of these countries announcing various concessions and changes in an effort to contain and assuage it.
What is remarkable about the Arab uprisings of 2011 is that they are mass movements which are calling for democratization and modernization in their countries. Radical Islamists appear to have been caught off guard by them just as much as the West and the authoritarian regimes they are aimed at. This has led to hope both in Arab countries and the West that the Arab Spring resembles the wave of democratic revolutions that swept through Eastern Europe in 1989, ushering in successful democratization and economic growth in the Middle East and North Africa.
Yet while such an outcome would be highly desirable, it is by no means guaranteed. Indeed, there is the possibility that the Arab uprisings of 2011 may turn out like the wave of revolutions seeking democratization that swept across Europe in 1848. Revolutionary activity then spread across most of the continent. As George Mason University provost and historian Peter N. Stearns noted—long before he came to GMU—in his 1974 book, 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe,
…for the most part these various risings were interconnected, linked by economic causation, ideology, and by the fascination of revolution itself. Knowledge that a regime elsewhere had been shaken seemed a valid reason to try the same thing in one’s own backyard (p. 1).
A similar process of revolutionary activity in one country contributing to its occurrence elsewhere appears to be very much at work in the Arab uprisings of 2011 as well.
Almost all the revolutions of 1848, though, were defeated by the forces of autocracy. In France, the forces of democratic revolution did succeed in establishing the Second Republic. But the man elected president by a wide margin at the end of 1848—Louis Napoleon—would go on to overthrow the republic in 1851 and rule autocratically as Emperor Napoleon III until his, and his regime’s, downfall in 1870. The European democratic revolutionary wave that burst forth so hopefully in 1848, then, largely failed while autocracy prevailed. A similar outcome to the Arab uprisings of 2011 is a distinct possibility.
How, then, will the Arab uprisings of 2011 turn out? We cannot know for sure until they are over—and perhaps not even then. However, what happened in Europe in 1848 and in Eastern Europe in 1989 appears to have set the bounds for what the outcome of a region-wide democratic revolutionary wave can be: either complete failure, or complete success. Of course, there can be an outcome in between these two extremes, with democratic revolution succeeding in some cases and failing in others. Indeed, the Arab Spring already appears to have a mixed outcome with democratic revolutions apparently having succeeded in Tunisia and Egypt, apparently having failed in Bahrain, and as yet undecided in Libya, Yemen, and Syria.
A mixed outcome would imply that the individual, idiosyncratic factors at work in each country are of paramount importance. And indeed, it is possible that what we may be witnessing in the Arab World is several, separate attempts at revolution that just happen to all be occurring simultaneously. But this seems unlikely in that we know that, with the help of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media not available in 1989 (much less 1848), the revolution in Tunisia inspired the one in Egypt, and that both inspired democratic revolutionary activity elsewhere. And since the origins of these Arab uprisings of 2011 were linked, this raises the possibility that their outcomes might also be linked—and that something similar to the region-wide, albeit starkly different, outcomes to the revolutionary waves of 1848 and 1989 might occur in 2011 or shortly thereafter.
But which will it be—1848 or 1989? We will know for certain if and when the results of the Arab Spring more resemble one or the other. Until then, one way to address this question is to try to assess whether and to what extent factors similar to those that led to the failure of the 1848 democratic revolutionary wave and the success of the 1989 one may be at work now in the Arab World.
While an outcome to the Arab Spring resembling what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 would be highly desirable, there were two unusual factors present then that are not present now. First: in 1989, not only was there growing popular opposition to the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, but this occurred right at the time when their external patron, the Soviet Union, was in the process of retreating from its costly Cold War era overextension. Specifically, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s making clear in July 1989 that the USSR would not defend the East European communist regimes (Garthoff 1994, 400) greatly encouraged their opponents—both inside and outside of these regimes—as well as prevented the East European communist leaderships from even trying to make use of their increasingly unreliable security services for suppression.1 Second: the willingness of East European publics to embrace democracy, the West, and capitalism was facilitated by the sense that doing so was a reassertion of their nations’ independence and a repudiation of their erstwhile occupiers.
Neither of these factors is present in the Arab Spring. Unlike Eastern Europe in 1989, the countries experiencing the Arab Spring in 2011 are not being occupied by a great power rival of the United States. Instead, the U.S. has been the patron of some—but not all—of the Arab countries where uprisings have occurred and, of course, has itself been occupying Iraq. Thus, Arabs now are not as inclined—as East Europeans in 1989 were—to see America and the West as saviors. Indeed, while the protesters in the Arab uprisings of 2011 genuinely seem to want democratization, they are much warier of the West than their East European counterparts were in 1989 both as a result of American support for Israel and Western support for most authoritarian Arab regimes. In addition, the protesters in the Arab Spring do not have the same enthusiasm for rapid capitalist transformation that their East European counterparts of 1989 did. Indeed, the unpopularity of the admittedly corrupt and inegalitarian efforts to pursue capitalist economic development by the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt appear to have contributed to the outburst of opposition against them.
By contrast, two factors present in 1848 that helped crush the democratic revolutionary wave in Europe then also appear to be present in the Arab world now. One is that internal authoritarian forces in each country experiencing widespread democratic opposition remained strong both in 1848 and now. At present, the authoritarian regimes in Yemen, Syria, and Libya are all clearly both willing and so far able to defend themselves against even widespread, sustained opposition. Even in Tunisia and Egypt where two authoritarian rulers were ousted, it is the leaders of their respective armies who have remained in charge, will decide when elections will be held, and perhaps who will be permitted to contest them. And even when elections are held, it is unclear how much authority these army leaders will allow the newly elected presidents—much less parliaments—to have over them.
Another is that both in 1848 and now, certain external powers have acted vigorously to suppress democratic revolution in other countries. In 1848-49, this was Tsarist Russia while now it is Saudi Arabia. Neither attempted to intervene everywhere to suppress democratic revolution, but concentrated its efforts on nearby countries especially important to each. Back then, Tsarist Russia intervened militarily in the Hungarian part of the Austrian Empire and in the Romanian lands. At present, Saudi Arabia has intervened militarily along with the United Arab Emirates in Bahrain, reportedly given billions of dollars to the beleaguered Sultan of Oman, attempted to orchestrate a transfer of power in Yemen from the reviled Ali Abdallah Saleh to someone more acceptable to Yemenis but also compliant with Riyadh, and counseled King Abdallah II of Jordan not to follow the Obama Administration’s call for him to allow democratic reform. And so far, these Saudi efforts have been successful—just as Tsarist Russia’s were in the mid-19th century.
Events may yet turn out otherwise, but so far the Arab uprisings of 2011 appear to more resemble what happened in Europe in 1848 than Eastern Europe in 1989. Yet even if authoritarian forces completely prevail in the Arab World now as they did in Europe in the mid-19th century, the 1848 analogy is not one that Arab authoritarian regimes can draw too much comfort from. For while European authoritarian regimes prevailed against their democratic opponents in the short run and some even instituted reforms (though often half-heardtedly) in order to forestall similar uprisings, the autocrats were very much on the defensive afterward. Sooner or later, these authoritarian regimes all fell and were replaced either by democratic ones, or by revolutionary authoritarian ones that claimed to be democratic and which themselves were subsequently replaced by democracies including some in 1989.
Finally, while the aspirations of the European democratic revolutionaries of 1848 were defeated in the short run, their ideas prevailed in the long run. Similarly, the defeat of the aspirations of the Arab democratic revolutionaries of 2011, should this occur, will not necessarily prevent their ideas from prevailing in the long run either.
Mark N. Katz, Professor of Government and Politics at George Mason University, writes and teaches about transnational revolutionary movements.
REFERENCES
Garthoff, Raymond L. 1994. The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Stearns, Peter N. 1974. 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe. New York: W.W. Norton.
ENDNOTE
- The one regime that did try to violently suppress the opposition—Romania—was also one that Moscow had lost influence over decades previously. [↩]
