The Arab Spring did not bring democracy to the region, but it remains a beacon of hope for struggling Arabs.
Fourteen years ago, on January 14, 2011, Tunisians filled Habib Bourguiba Boulevard, the central thoroughfare of Tunis, with cries of freedom and dignity as they celebrated the ousting of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. He had fled the country and announced his resignation after 28 days of relentless civil disobedience expressed by public square “occupations” in almost every city of the country, triggered by the haunting self-immolation of fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi in the town of Sidi Bouzid.
The Tunisian people’s victory against their longtime oppressor and his suffocating, corrupt regime was so remarkable, so spectacular that it inspired a wave of Arab uprisings across the region.
In major cities from Yemen to Morocco, millions of freedom-hungry denizens joined the Tunisian “occupiers” of the Bourguiba Boulevard to celebrate the ouster of their fiercely authoritarian regime and call for their own liberation. With the Tunisian people’s perceived achievement of “karama” (dignity) and “hurriyya” (freedom) a new movement was born that placed the entire region on a revolutionary trajectory of “tahrir” (emancipation).
More than a decade later, the legacy of these uprisings, which came to be known as the “Arab Spring”, is mixed at best. One Arab country, Syria, which began its own revolutionary journey right after Tunisia on March 30, 2011, armed rebels managed to oust dictator Bashar Al-Assad only last month, after 14 years of devastating war and loss. In other Arab Spring countries, including Tunisia, the revolution came faster but has been short-lived with authoritarianism, oppression and conflict re-entering the picture soon after the initial successes of the revolting masses.
All this, of course, does not take away from the moral and political valour of the 2011 uprisings. The moral symbolism of these revolutions – as the remarkable victories of once muted peoples against some of the most coercively guarded states in the world – has staying power.
The new social and political patterns of public life that emerged on the back of these revolutions have endured in Tunisia and the rest of the Arab region. The body politic of the state before 2011 was dominated by political decay of delegitimised rulers and undermined by excessive coercion and executive power and by exclusionary practices. These revolutions emboldened peoples of the region to demand a say over the nature of their governance and permanently changed how we talk about and analyse Arab postcolonial state-society relations.
To this day, January 14, 2011, stands as a historic moment that ignited a moral flame, a cry for freedom as it were, for the multitudes populating the Arab geography. It insinuated itself in the hearts, minds and imaginations of Arab youth gripped by the clamour of a better future. Tunisia’s revolution and those that followed it in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen drew inspiration, confidence and moral vigour from the meltdown of whole authoritarian apparatuses previously thought immune to sudden, people-powered overthrow.
However, it cannot be denied that the banners of freedom and dignity erected on the ruins of fallen regimes soon gave way to counterrevolutions.
After the overthrow of authoritarian rulers in 2011, the allure of revolution swiftly lost its shine in most Arab Spring countries. This has not transpired as a result of the idea of revolution itself having fallen into disfavour among the Arab publics that were “square occupiers”. It certainly was not because ideological rivals of the revolution, including those championing electoral democracies (or even those rooting for “Islamic democracy”, such as Tunisia’s Rachid Ghannouchi), were given sufficient time to prove or disprove their worth. Rather, swings in the counterrevolutionary pendulum from Tunisia to Egypt resulted in “the revolutionaries” being forced into a defensive stance and pressed to give up their “revolutionary” demands. Indeed, with the passage of time, revolutions and revolutionaries have gradually degenerated in every setting.
In places like Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen with their newly acquired freedoms, political parties began to deviate from the original purposes of their democratic beginnings. Rekindling of old forms of political polarisation, economic and social rifts, armed militias and systemic tensions involving deep state actors and civilian protagonists was what led to this deviation. Meanwhile, the wealth gap between the haves and the have-nots that had framed the original cries for freedom and dignity remained intact. This multifaceted crisis tolled the near-death knell of true revolutionary transformation, ie a complete rupture with the ousted authoritarian systems.
The result has been the formation of so-called Arab Spring quasi-democracies that are said to be “hybrid regimes”, with mixed brands of authority, having very few of the ideals the Arab street had called for during the Arab Spring uprisings.
Today, the jails of some of these “democracies” are populated with political activists accused of “conspiracy to subvert state power” – coercive charges that many thought were confined to the dustbin of history after the 2011 revolutions. Rule of law, which was one of the core demands of the uprisings, has been abandoned, and the law itself is being mobilised against actors who should be contributing to the nation from an open public square, if not a democratic parliament. Rather than using their know-how for the benefit of the state, they are rotting in jail cells for the crime of intimidating the powers who secured control of the state after the revolutions. Such purges are putting doubt in the minds of the people about whether a revolution that would bring about a complete break from the traditional authoritarian practices of the past would ever be feasible.
Under such democratic reverses, where the freedom of association, participation, contestation and expression is in constant jeopardy, elections themselves inevitably lose credibility. Low voter turnouts speak to this democratic degeneration in elections held in places like Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia.
In many Arab Spring states, the political opposition has the same democratic shortcomings and weaknesses as the ruling powers, resulting in a belief by many voters that elections are futile however fair and free they may be on the surface. Intra-party democracy remains weak, if not absent. Those who lead political parties and civil society organisations tend to cling to power and baulk at democratic alternation of leadership positions. As a result, those who made the 2011 revolutions possible – the people – are losing interest in the electoral process.
Of course, culpability for the democratic degenerations since the 2011 revolutions is not to be placed on deep states or domestic political leaders alone.
Arab authoritarianism has been revitalised and revolutionary fervour culled in more than one case in the past 14 years through pacts that post-uprising Arab governments have made with Western powers and institutions from the United States and the European Union to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). For example, in countries like Lebanon and Egypt, the IMF played a key role in keeping authoritarianism alive by providing governments with funds, slashing any hopes their people might have held for new leaders or revolutionary, long-lasting solutions to their economic and political woes.
The Arab street has not forgotten the August 2013 Rabaa massacre, which saw security forces kill hundreds of supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi, who had been democratically elected. They are also not indifferent to or unaware of the Western-facilitated Israeli genocide in Gaza and Arab states’ inability to put an end to it for 15 long months.
The Arab publics are very much aware that their states with experienced or would-be despots at the helm are now no more than terror or migration watchmen. They protect borders and seek to ensure the elusive “stability” that is of mutual interest to regional and Western leaders.
This is, perhaps, the most consequential and enduring legacy of the Tunisian revolution and the wider Arab Spring. The “emperor” is not defeated, sure. But he is exposed. Just as the vain emperor in the famous Danish folktale, the nakedness of Arab states and their rulers has become impossible to conceal. There are no clothes. There is no cover. There is no “democracy”, bargain politics, power-sharing or free citizenship. The uprisings have built a new state-public relationship in the Arab world and let the cat out of the bag: The emperor has no clothes.
Fourteen years after Tunisia’s revolution, democracy is still missing in Tunisia and in the wider Arab world. But so are all the emperors’ clothes, and the Arab peoples have taken note. The revolutions’ legacies live on.