The Arab Spring has ended in failure
Dan Hannan
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The Arab Spring has ended in total ruin.
I don’t just mean that it has failed to deliver the freedoms for which its authors hoped in 2011. I mean, it has, from a very low base, made life even worse in the countries it affected.
Libya, Syria, and Yemen quickly descended into civil wars. Soon afterward, Egypt fell to a military dictatorship worse than that of Hosni Mubarak, who had never gone so far as to order peaceful demonstrators to be gunned down in the streets.
Tunisia, where it all began, could plausibly claim some successes at first. Its exiled politicians, including those affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, came back, and negotiated a pluralist constitution. Power changed hands peacefully at elections.
This was no small achievement, given the challenges that nation faced. A terrorist campaign succeeded in driving away the beach tourism that had been Tunisia’s main foreign revenue earner, especially following two devastating attacks in 2015 — one at the national museum and the second, three months later, at a holiday resort.
Despite all this, Tunisia remained a constitutional democracy until July 2021 when, under cover of COVID lockdowns, President Kais Saied closed down Parliament and sent troops into the streets. Since then, he has turned into an almost comic-book dictator, banning novels he dislikes, exiling or imprisoning opponents, and harassing critical media. Last month, he arrested Rached Ghannouchi, leader of the Ennahda Party, and the last speaker of Parliament before its dissolution.
Why should this matter to us? Tunisia, with the best will in the world, is hardly of critical strategic interest to the West. Authoritarianism, as this column keeps plangently noting, is on the march globally. What is one more dictator among many?
Part of the answer is that Tunisia was a test of whether multiparty democracies could flourish within the world’s fastest-growing religion. Superficially, Tunisia and Egypt started from similar places in 2011. Strongmen backed by the military, who had justified their autocracy by claiming to repress jihadi extremists, were toppled, and religious parties won the first free elections. But whereas Egypt’s Islamic opposition had been exiled to Riyadh, Tunisia’s, led by Ghannouchi, had been exiled to London, where it developed a very different sense of the relationship between state and citizen.
For example, the previous Tunisian constitution, under Ben Ali’s secular dictatorship, had prohibited relations with Israel. Ghannouchi’s followers, the supposed Islamists, understood that this was a question of day-to-day foreign policy, not basic constitutional law, and removed that clause. They went on to govern as mainstream conservatives, allowing religion in the public sphere but insisting on multiparty democracy and the supremacy of secular law.
They made mistakes, no question. But Ghannouchi was, for a while, the best hope for those who wanted a space within the political spectrum for tolerant Muslims. Instead of being presented with a choice between two kinds of authoritarians — one lot with long beards and the other with military uniforms — Tunisia offered the option of moderate conservatism, a kind of Muslim democracy, analogous to the Christian democracy that dominated the center-right in postwar Europe.
But it did not last. As in other North African countries, the generals had too much at stake to risk majoritarian rule, and a suitable front man was found to prop up the old order. Twelve years after the market trader Mohamed Bouazizi was driven to the terrible extreme of burning himself to death in protest against arbitrary state power and the confiscation of his property, Tunisia was back where it had started.
It is important not to misdiagnose the failure. What we see is not evidence that Islam is incompatible with democracy. From Bouazizi’s self-immolation onwards, Tunisians longed to create a state where leaders would no longer be able to make up the rules as they went along. No, what we see is the lengths to which local elites will go to preserve their privileges.
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What can the rest of the world do about it? Our options are limited. We are plainly not going to intervene to topple Saied’s squalid little despotism. But we can at least make clear that we do not regard his actions as legitimate. We can decline to subsidize his country, whether through the IMF or the various development banks we fund. We can refuse to train his cadets. We can ban his more autocratic supporters from our countries. At the very least, we can make clear that we still believe in representative democracy.
If we’re not prepared to say it, who will?