Aris Roussinos
UnHerd, May 31, 2023
“The first myth to be shattered was of the power of protest to express and impose the popular will.”
When Bashar al-Assad touched down in Riyadh last week, to be embraced by the Saudi king on the occasion of Syria’s readmittance to the Arab League, the Syrian War drew to a close, and with it the Arab Spring. His rule secure, his broken nation quiescent once again, Assad has indisputably won. Following its only tangible success, the Tunisian Revolution, being overturned by president Kais Saied’s bloodless coup, the final results are in — and, contrary to initial assumptions, they show a firm victory for absolute monarchy.
But though objectively a failure, the bloody, tangled events of the Arab Spring shaped the world of 2023. In a strange way, the war in Ukraine is downstream of the fiery suicide of a frustrated Tunisian street vendor in 2010, and all the dashed hopes and human suffering that flowed from it. The Middle East’s convulsions indeed changed the world, but not in a way anyone participating expected or intended.
As a reporter on the ground, it looked to me at first, as it did to many, as if the popular revolt across the Arab world was a vindication of Fukuyama’s much-misunderstood thesis of the arc of history inclining towards the worldwide victory of liberal democracy. Young, dynamic, idealistic protestors were leading their countries away from the autocratic regimes which had mismanaged their countries in the half century since independence from British and French colonial rule. It was the opposite of the failed attempt to impose reform that had broken Iraq: instead, long-repressed social forces from within had surfaced, ready and capable of leading their countries into a better future.
