Whither the Arab Spring?

It is a hard time to be an optimist about the Arab Spring. What started with the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor frustrated by the injustice and ineptitude of his country's corrupt leaders and then mushroomed into massive public demonstrations across the Arab world now seems to have degenerated into violence, instability, and chaos. Syria has been ripped apart by civil war. Bahrain's government continues its crackdown on its Shiite majority. Al Qaeda's presence in Yemen appears to be growing, as are secessionist pressures in the south of the country. Libya still grapples with lawlessness two years after the end of its civil war. Tensions between Islamists and secularists in Tunisia reached a boiling point in 2013. And, of course, following nationwide antigovernment protests in Egypt, a military-controlled transitional government has replaced the country's first democratically elected one.

This book nonetheless presents an optimistic assessment of the long-term prospects for the democratization of Arab countries. Drawing on the recent experience of a broad range of countries elsewhere in the world that embarked on their transition to democracy during what is known as the "Third Wave" of democratization, this book seeks to show that the trials and tribulations of the Arab Spring are neither entirely new nor unique. They are instead part and parcel of the struggles often faced by countries in transition to democracy. And from those countries' experiences, it seeks to illuminate a path forward for the countries of the Arab Spring.

The Puzzle

A recent Time magazine cover captured well the status of the Arab Spring nearly three years on. Published shortly after the June 30, 2013, mass demonstrations in Egypt against then-President Mohamed Morsi—which ended with the military removing him from office—it featured a split screen superimposed on a photo of the crowds in Tahrir Square. The caption "World's Best Protesters" was printed on the left and "World's Worst Democrats" was printed on the right—and the image of the crowd on the right was shaded blood red.

This is the puzzle presented today by Egypt as well as the other countries touched by the Arab Spring. The citizens of the Arab world have finally found their collective voice. Long trammeled by years of autocratic rule, they now fill the region's squares, roundabouts, and boulevards with their protests, braving tear gas, truncheons, and even torture to make themselves heard. Yet what began with such great promise—with the youth of the Arab world spontaneously protesting in the name of freedom, dignity, and opportunity—has yet to produce a functioning democracy. Instead, it has deteriorated in many parts of the Arab world into a complex and at times bloody struggle between youthful revolutionaries and stalwarts of the old regime, Islamists and secularists, Muslims and Christians, Sunnis and Shia. The euphoria that accompanied the early protests in Tunisia and Egypt—in those heady days when it looked as if Arab youth were set to tear the region from its history—has given way to deep-seated pessimism. Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria degenerated into violence and even civil war while Tunisia and Egypt have struggled to overcome the legacy of authoritarianism, to write new constitutions, and to keep their newly elected governments on the democratic path. Moreover, pessimism turned to consternation as the so-called liberals in Egypt and, for a time, Tunisia looked to the military to save them from elected Islamist governments. Some commentators have compared the events of the Arab Spring to those of 1848, when the youth of Europe also took to the streets to protest tyranny. Yet for all the tumult and upheaval, in the end little changed politically, at least for a generation. Others have drawn darker parallels with the French, Russian, and Iranian revolutions, in which more violent and extreme forces outmaneuvered nascent democratic movements. The Arab region's democratic activists have been remarkably successful in mobilizing citizens to take to the streets and in tearing down a number of the region's most despotic regimes, but they have been far less successful in translating that revolutionary energy into lasting political change.

The popular revolts of the Arab Spring have left not democracy but a political vacuum in their wake. All kinds of forces—political Islamists, ultranationalists and violent sectarians, secular democrats, elements of former regimes, and al Qaeda and other violent extremists—are now vigorously competing to fill that vacuum. The disorder has been so pervasive that many across the region and in the West have expressed the wish that the Arab Spring had never happened and have called for an end to the civil disobedience roiling the region. They have come to view free assembly itself as dangerous, too fraught with the risk of instability. Shortly before the June 30 demonstrations in Egypt, for example, the then–U.S. ambassador to Egypt delivered a now-famous speech discouraging students from protesting in the streets.

The puzzle is this: how could such widespread public demonstrations of citizens' hunger for change have produced so little change so far? In Egypt, for instance, how could a protest movement that reputedly collected an unprecedented 22 million signatures from citizens expressing no confidence in their elected president—and that mobilized those millions to take to the streets—have then ceded control of the country's transition to the military? How could the Egyptian people stage three popular revolts in the span of less than three years—against long-time strongman Hosni Mubarak, the interim military government, and Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government—yet still end up well short of democracy? Throughout the region, the last three years have seen a remarkable outpouring of popular protest yet far fewer constructive steps to build successful new democracies.

This book attempts to explain that puzzle and propose a way forward by examining recent experiences with democratization in other regions of the world: in the former Eastern bloc; the Muslim-majority countries of Asia; Latin America; and Sub-Saharan Africa. The Arab world was not the first region of the world to embark on a transition to democracy but the last. Before the Arab Spring, some ninety countries across the globe had embarked on transitions to democracy since the mid-1970s. What the experiences of those regions suggest is that much of the pessimism about the Arab Spring is unwarranted. Democracy takes time to take root, even under the best of circumstances. How the events of the Arab Spring play out—whether they lead to a more stable, prosperous, and democratic Middle East or something more sinister and tragic—is a...