The Arab Spring at 10: Kings or People

A decade after the outbreak of the Arab Spring, the Middle East and North Africa are torn between two visions of progress-one democratic, aspiring to replace the dominant leaders of the region, another modernizing in its seeming form, which purports to replace the people inhabiting it. Where the latter project is currently ascendant, it is probably fated to founder on internal contradictions. Although the Arab publics may be ambivalent about democracy, the region still retains considerable democratic potential.

A decade after a spectacular public suicide in the Tunisian backcountry touched off that season of popular uprisings we have come to call the Arab Spring, the Arab world finds itself torn between two visions of progress: One seeks to replace the regimes that dominate the region; the other seeks to replace the people who inhabit it.

The first vision is expressed in the democratic venture with which the world thrilled on the opening days of 2011, when millions of Arab citizens took to public squares to bring an end to the brutality, neglect, and venality of their leaders. Although many observers have proclaimed the Arab Spring a failure over the intervening years for having generated just one tenuous democracy against three failed states and one military coup, events of late in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon, and Iraq show that the project remains alive.

The Arab Spring lives on in Algeria. In February 2019, shortly after learning that their octogenarian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, was seeking to add another six years to the twenty he had already spent in power, Algerians began a great hirak-or movement-that first forced Bouteflika to withdraw his candidacy, then secured his resignation a few weeks later. In the months since, a civilian (admittedly an establishment insider) has taken over the presidency thanks to a more-or-less free election, while presidential powers have been trimmed (admittedly not sufficiently) by a set of more-or-less popularly ratified constitutional amendments. Though-as Frédéric Volpi reminded us here-the ancien régime is not quite yet ancien and human-rights violations continue, so too do the protests. One can but feel that, at best, the future of Algeria is still not set in stone.2

At the other extreme, the democratic project persists in Iraq and in Lebanon. In both these cases, the October 2019 mass mobilizations opposing the corruption and mismanagement of embedded sectarian elites ultimately forced prime ministers to step down in December 2019 and January 2020, respectively. These have given little up to now, other than the moving of ministerial deck chairs, yet will not disappear. As two observers of Iraq wrote recently, "it is foolish to expect that public anger will not erupt into another wave of protests," and though Baghdad is momentarily quiet, protests continue in the south of the country.3 Similarly, in Lebanon, any possibility that demands for change would soften was quite literally vaporized on 4 August 2020, when an explosion of improperly stored fertilizer in a government warehouse laid waste to a large swath of Beirut, killed and maimed hundreds, and reminded all how criminally inept their leaders had become. Even assuming these popular pressures are unlikely to generate institutional change in the short term, we at least have proof of life.

Set against this groundswell movement for democratic government is a rival vision for Arab development: Enlightened absolutism. As the murdered Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi wrote in 2018, "the idea of the benevolent autocrat, the just dictator, is being revived in the Arab world."4 More than the old appeal to the need for firm hands on the tiller. Over the decade since the Arab Spring, the region's autocrats have remade themselves-at least, their reputations-from stolid defenders of an unpleasant status quo into agents of much-needed change. Whereas dictators of the old school could offer only subsidized bread, stale appeals to stability, and dark warnings of foreign conspiracies, their successors promise dynamic economies, efficient bureaucracies, and modern societies. They hire Western consultants for multimillion-dollar deals and hold glittering conferences touting plans for new gleaming cities, new education systems, infrastructure projects, and new views on Islam. They even promise to travel to other planets, liberate women, harness the newest technologies [End Page 140], and make the deserts bloom. Most of all, they promise to reinvent the Arabs—transforming them from a people overfed, indolent, and easily duped by peddlers of religious nostrums into lean, industrious folk who will single-mindedly pursue officially sanctioned programs for national greatness.