ABSTRACT
If a short definition could be given of the 2011 Arab Spring, it would be the decline of people’s fear and the expansion of political public space, which in turn has had significant implications for constitutional empowerment and institutional change over time.1 This is why places such as Tahrir Square in Cairo or Avenue Bourguiba in Tunis have become household names both inside and outside the Arab world, implying a ‘new Middle East’.2 A French addition to the flood of literature on the Arab Spring compares it to the ‘1989 revolutions in the East’.3 This claim may be an exaggeration – the latter revolutions led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the bipolar Cold War and ultimately the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, while the Arab Spring had no such immediate strategic global consequences. It did, however, share a key feature with the 1989 revolutions: a surprising onset of popular protest that revealed the vulnerability of authoritarian rule. Given the raging controversy about authoritarian durability and resilience in the conceptual literature, this point is indeed crucial. The linkages between the opening of public spaces and the question of the durability of authoritarian rule touches on a little understood issue: a more conceptual and comparative orientation of the Arab Spring events in the light of the emerging transition paradigm or transitology. Consequently, this chapter evaluates such linkages between the Arab transformative moments in these very public demonstrations, their relationship to the revolutionary process and the concepts and issues of transitology. The chapter teases out some propositions of this emerging transition paradigm to see how they fare in the face of the events of the Arab Spring, and vice versa, to assist a fruitful cross-fertilisation between emerging conceptualisation and data on the ground. This encounter between available conceptualisation and events is overdue, especially as the belief in ‘Arab exceptionalism’ is refuted and even discredited and the Arab world is increasingly viewed through the lenses of transitology as a conceptual newcomer. The Arab Spring raises another important question beyond its assumed exceptionalism and the implications for the resilience of authoritarianism. Given the region’s geo-cultural location and the power of its Islamist organisations, the Arab Spring addresses a second critical issue in the democratisation literature: the relationship between secularism and democracy. Though the Arab Spring, as its adjective indicates, involves only a maximum of 400 million (mostly Muslim)
people (among the 1.6 billion Muslims globally – approximately twenty-five per cent) they are in a region that is at the core of the Muslim world. Not only is this region the birthplace of Islam (and other monotheistic religions), but the region also harbours the city of Mecca to which pious Muslims turn in their prayers five times a day and hope to visit for pilgrimage and salvation at least once in their lifetime. Consequently, the Arab Spring’s response to the basic question of how to combine Islam and democracy resonates throughout the Islamic world and beyond. Its transitional experiences provide insights into the general debate about secularism and democracy in the light of similar analyses and findings about the role of the Catholic Church in Poland and of liberation theology in Latin America. This chapter first explores the initial patterns of protests and in particular the varieties and challenges of the Arab Spring five years after the start of mass protests in 2011. Four major indices (processing forty-three indicators) for the years 2009-2014 (and 2015 when data are available) are presented for five countries identified with the Arab Spring: Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen (see the respective endnotes for each table’s index definition and data). Second, the chapter explores the idea that there is indeed a transition paradigm, and critically assesses some of its contributions as well as its challenges in relation to particular details of the Arab Spring. Third, the analysis addresses what characterises any major transition, including the Arab Spring: the transformative process and the entry of new political actors – in this case the entry of Islamists into legal and formal political life. These are important components of what is dubbed here ‘the three Ms’: the Masses, especially their liberal-leftist youth segment, the Mosque (or Islamists) and the Military. Youth constitute the majority in all Arab societies and they pioneered the mass protests. The detailed analysis focuses here, however, on the Mosque or Islamists. Their legalisation and legitimisation constitutes an important characteristic of the ongoing process of transition. We know for instance that the military’s impact – the ‘deep state’– is primarily due to its coercive capacities. The Mosque or Islamists – even their armed groups – do not constitute an equal counterpower. The cases of Al Qaeda in Yemen and the Islamic State/Da’esh in Syria apart, both Tunisia’s Al Nahda and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood were admitted as regular political groups. They constituted their own political parties, ran for elections and won a majority – a first in the Arab world. Even when they were no longer in government, this still begs the question: Why do they constitute such a formidable counterpart? Is it because they represent ‘deep society’? Hence, the chapter investigates in greater detail the patterns of organisation and recruitment as manifested in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the mother organisation of Islamist political action across most of the Arab and Muslim worlds. The rise and subsequent demise of the Mosque as an explicit political actor should equally shed light on the (under-researched) role of religion in transitology. In the fourth section of the chapter, I evaluate the Mosque’s ideological appeal and approaches to mobilisation, especially the characteristics of the Islamists’ membership and organisational power. Though in many countries the
‘Brothers’ (Al Ikhwan) are old organisations, they are in the recent transition process new political actors assuming novel governance roles in the Arab world and beyond. Hence attention needs also to be devoted to the concept of political learning. The fifth section details challenges to Islamist-oriented governance that offset its huge assets and finally brought about its decline. A sixth section returns to the implications of the Arab Spring experience for the transitology paradigm: transition is an inherently conflictual process that arises during, and as a response to, a crisis of the state and of society. In conclusion, the chapter puts forward general propositions based on some of the principal patterns from the Arab Spring case to advance the conceptual debate on transitology and its implications for democratisation in the region.
