30-04-2025
The ‘Arab Spring' belongs to another era
The 'Arab Spring' truly belongs to another era. But a more cautious approach alone is not enough by itself to keep ghosts of trouble forever at bay.
To avoid renewed unrest, many of the regimes of North Africa and the Middle East have, in varying degrees, learned to adjust their mores.
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As protests erupted in south-central Tunisia earlier this month, some wondered if we were witnessing a remake of the December 2010 events which sparked the Arab Spring.
Hundreds of inhabitants took to the streets of Mazzouna, a small city in the same province of Sidi Bouzid where a street vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire unleashing a wave of unrest which led to the fall of the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali regime, more than 14 years ago.
The catalyst for the protests, this time, was the death of teenagers who were crushed under the weight of the debris of a decaying school wall, which local authorities neglected to repair.
Another similarity were the protests by angry crowds which for a few days set tires on fire and blocked city roads to voice their anger.
But similarities stopped there; as Tunisia of 2025 was not the Tunisia of 2010. In fact, all the Arab countries, which had witnessed the watershed upheaval of 2011 and even those which did not, have in many ways changed great deal.
All across the region, there was a rude awakening the day after the Arab Spring. Ensuing experiences of civil war, chaos or just stalled transitions offered unappealing models.
In Libya, the institutional vacuum created by four decades of Gadhafi rule, combined with outside interventions and domestic strife, hurled the country into a chaotic situation from which it is yet to recover.
Revolts in Yemen and Syria evolved into full-fledged civil wars brought about by short-sighted and sectarian rulers and unbridled interference of foreign powers, wrecked the two countries.
Tunisia, the poster child of the 'Arab spring,' did for a while offer the semblance of an exception. But, as its inept governments engaged in political feuding at the expense of economic reform, the country quickly joined the ranks of failed experiences providing cautionary tales about the consequences of regime change under street pressure.
In most non-oil producing Arab countries, the lack of meaningful reform continued to fuel poverty and unemployment, breeding new contingents of despair.
Populations learned not to believe in the politicians' promises nor to expect their salvation through elusive democratic change. They ended up pinning more hope on individual solutions, mainly emigration, than on street protests.
To avoid renewed unrest, many of the regimes of North Africa and the Middle East have, in varying degrees, learned to adjust their mores.
In dealing with occasional eruptions of protest, more cohesive and disciplined security forces have mostly abandoned recourse to lethal means while the protesters themselves learned to eschew violence in expressing their grievances.
Drawing the lessons of the slippery path of extreme violence which ended up sealing the fate of 'Arab spring' regimes, such policies went a long way towards preventing protests from spinning out of control in more recent years, even if keeping a lid on vicious cycles of violence remained an uphill task in places awash with weapons, such as Libya or Iraq.
The North African countries, which were not engulfed by the 2011 turmoil, were in fact those which had the wisdom to avoid using excessive force in dealing with demonstrators.
Morocco escaped the maelstrom by managing to keep protests peaceful while pointing to the reforms and political overtures it had introduced in the nineties as well as by capitalising on the king's legitimacy.
Despite mass protests, from December 2010 to January 2012, Algeria, too, avoided bloodshed. It had been immunized by the memory of its bloody decade and was helped by oil revenues it used to cushion social woes.
On the political level, the post-2011 governments of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt learned the hard way that the fallen regimes' practices of dynastic rule, combined with corruption, were key to eruptions of anger, and hence should be a red-line for all not to cross.
A more cautious form of authoritarianism was born; as rulers realized they should not take their tenure for granted. They were now convinced they had to appease social discontent by introducing reforms or at least taking token measures in the face of looming unrest; even if such palliatives could take their toll on the budgets.
Not all regimes seemed to realize that the freedom of expression genie could not be put back in the bottle but no ruler could ignore the fact that social media have widened their reach and were proving, every day, that they were a step ahead of the authorities and of traditional media.
The aftermath of the Arab Spring also led the West to modify its approach to countries of the region. Desire for stability trumped all cards. Regional governments were now meeting the West half-way: while Europe and the US showed a willingness to refrain from democratic proselytism and the advocacy of regime change, the countries south of the Mediterranean accommodated Western calls to fight illegal emigration and curtail cross-border security threats.
In the battle for the hearts and minds, authorities in the Maghreb, in particular, stayed vigilant about the early signs of re-emergence of the 'Hogra' mindset among the disenfranchised. Such a mindset, long associated with the feeling by the poor and the marginalized of being disrespected by authorities, had always proven to be a mobilizing battle cry and a harbinger of incoming turbulence.
The Arab Spring truly belongs to another era. But a more cautious approach alone is not enough, by itself, to keep ghosts of trouble forever at bay. There remains the need for meaningful reform in order to revive hope in the future and make sure constituencies of despair start shrinking. Till that happens, too many cadres and underprivileged youth will continue to set their sights on Europe instead of seeking better lives at home.
