The Continuing Promise of the Arab Spring

Why Nostalgia for the Ancien Regime Is Misguided

Sheri Berman
J uly 17, 2013

Article Summary and Author Biography:

The Arab Spring was and remains a good thing; turmoil is not a bug in political development but
a feature of it.
SHERI BERMAN is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University.

With Syria descending ever deeper into civil war, the Egyptian military stepping in
to oust the countrys increasingly authoritarian elected government, and little
political progress elsewhere in the region, the heady early days of the Arab Spring
are a distant and fading memory. Some skeptics argue that this should prompt a
more positive reconsideration of the previous authoritarian order; others have
decided that liberalism is more important than democracy, and suggest sacrificing
the latter in an attempt to get the former. Still others -- perhaps a majority in the
West -- shake their heads sadly and link the problems to region-specific factors
such as religion and political culture, arguing that recent events show how Arabs,
or Muslims more generally, are simply unready for or unsuited to political
freedom.
The dismay at what is happening in the Middle East is legitimate, but the general
analysis of its causes and implications is hogwash. As I wrote in The Promise of
the Arab Spring, this is what political development in the real world actually
looks like, and anybody who expected smooth, quick, linear progress from tyranny
to liberal democracy was nave or foolish. Scores of countries around the world
have undergone democratic transformations in recent centuries, and almost none of
them have done so without turbulence, delays, and backsliding. All of the
advanced industrial democracies have troubles in their past that easily rival or
surpass what countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and even Syria are going
through now, and it is sheer ignorance or prejudice to ignore such historical
patterns.
The fundamental mistake most commentators on the Arab Spring make is
underestimating the scale, scope, and perniciousness of authoritarianism. Tyranny
is more than a type of political order; it is an economic and social system as well,
one that permeates most aspects of a countrys life and has deep roots in a vast
array of formal and informal institutions. Achieving liberal democracy is thus not
simply a matter of changing some lines on a political wiring diagram but, rather, of
eliminating authoritarian legacies in the society, economy, and culture as well.
This is almost always an incredibly difficult, exhausting, and protracted process. It
didnt happen in many parts of Western Europe until the second half of the
twentieth century, in fact, which is why so many earlier democratic experiments
there were flawed or outright failures. And it still hasnt happened in all of Eastern
Europe and Russia.
Fine, some might say -- many countries also had false starts or problems with
democratization. Why should that make us think differently about what is
happening in, say, Egypt now? Because those false starts and problems, the turmoil
and the chaos and yes, sometimes even the violence, were an inherent and often
necessary part of the process that ultimately abolished authoritarianism and paved
the way for liberal democracy. What is going on in the Middle East today is not a
bug in political development but a feature of it. History shows that illiberal
democracy is often a precursor to liberal democracy. What has happened time and
again is that a country begins with a nondemocratic regime, proceeds through a
phase (or several phases) of minimal or illiberal democratic experience, and
eventually emerges with a consolidated liberal democracy. Almost all early
democratic experiments around the world were illiberal or deeply problematic, and
many ended badly. Only after many generations and attempts were most countries
able to consolidate truly liberal democracies -- that is, to eradicate deeply ingrained
nondemocratic behaviors and attitudes and develop new ways of thinking and
acting that would enable liberal democracy to survive and flourish.
None of this is meant to suggest that, say, Mohamed Morsi was a good leader in
Egypt, or that the rebels in Syria are all J effersonian democrats, or that a bright
future for the Middle East lies just around the corner. It almost certainly does not --
as a look at, say, Europe from 1789 to 1945 would indicate. But it does mean that
the problems of the Middle East today are more the norm than the exception, and
that they have less to do with case-specific factors such as ethnicity, religion, or
ideology than they do with the inherent difficulty and complexity of building truly
liberal democratic regimes. Getting rid of authoritarianism is a long and nasty
process; in the Middle East, at least that process has finally begun.