The Bewilderness

The second year of the Arab Spring

Tunisia has now elected a government but faces continued discontent. Immolations, the new symbol of frustration, continue to burn and kill. Martyrdom in the streets of Tunisia will not be abandoned once it has been discovered to be a potent weapon. Yet, immolations are not frequent in other Arab springs.

Take Libya. A new wave of protests is flooding towns and cities at the slow progess undertaken by the National Transitional Council. The sheer complexity of work that needs to be achieved is daunting; but transitional arrangements will always lack legitimacy if they do not concentrate on a short and clear handover. Libya needs an election sooner rather than later: taking to the streets may be the signal for this (similar to their Egyptian brethen).

Now Algeria is beginning to see sporadic protests, similar to those which sparked regime change and civil war in Maghreb regimes. Youth unemployment, frustrated aspirations and glimmerings of reform sparked the crisis of legitimacy. Last year, Algeria was an outlier. This year, along with Syria, it may be centre stage.

Tunisia must conjure its blogosphere

Is this an indication of the new Tunisia as a moderate Islamist is sworn into power? At the Douz Sahara festival, Tunisian bloggers and social networks were able to set up a workshop for discussing the protest movement and their role within it. Something must have changed, as bringing all these troublemakers together would have been a godsend for secret policemen in the old days. 

This was a clear landmark in promoting the expansion of a Tunisian blogosphere; alternative media are necessary to keep a check on their new politicians. The compliant media of the previous dictatorship will take a long time to unlearn the internal harpies of censorship and deference towards authority. 

The Tunisian government is dominated by the Islamist movement, Ennahda, and faces strong economic headwinds in the next few years. It is the worst time to seek growth when your neighbours across the sea are plummeting down a sinkhole of debt. 

But I can legitimately ask: is this the first time that an Arab country has more democratically elected members in government than a country in the European Union, that paragon of democratic values? Fingers to lips, ssshhhh, don't tell anyone.....

A messy and bloody summer for the Arabs

The 'Arab Spring' has not been transformed into an Arab summer. Moves towards democracy in some places have been countered by counter-revolution, civil war and repression. A stalemate has developed as the Islamist movements creep out from the wings and take centre stage. With the strength of their social movements underpinning democratic mobilisation, they are preparing to ride the revolutionary wind and obtain an influential position in post-upheaval elections. Economic quagmires only increase their attraction.

At a further remove, the Islamist movements have taken advantage of war to seize territory and influence. Al-Qaeda adherents have moved to obtain a territorial base in South Yemen. They have seized and maintain a toehold on the towns of Zinjibar and Jaar, despite bombing and shelling by government forces. Internecine tribal warfare has not dislodged them either.

In Libya, Islamists have killed the military commander of the rebels. General Younes, a defector from the Qaddafi regime, was murdered a few days ago. However, the retelling of his death draws out the arbitrary and brutal nature of the fanatics. It appears that a militia undertook an opportunistic revenge killing against one of their old oppressors. It confirms an impression of lawless instability in the rebel ranks and encourages more sceptical parts of the British press to speculate whether partition is on the cards.

A messy and bloody instability, which allows extremists to gain more visibility, though it is not clear if this is a temporary confluence, or a long-term trend. 

Schrodinger's Gaddafi

Attack helicopters zoom in to the breathless hagiography of the waiting press. In a spontaneous show of support, William Hague pops up in Benghazi, supporting the run-away militias that cling to life in eastern Libya. The whole country has entered a half-life: a political box where Schrodinger's Gaddafi is unable to confirm whether he is or he is not in power.

Two £40 million Apaches, launched from a ship off the Libyan coast, pounded ground defences in a devastating show of strength.

They fired laser-guided Hellfire missiles to destroy a radar installation to the west of the oil port of Braga, then blew up an anti-aircraft gun before their two-man crews returned safely, despite coming under enemy fire from AK47s.

Hague has declared the whatever they are of Benghazi, the legitimate representatives of the Libyan people. Except they aren't really, because the Libyan people are not really flocking to support anyone. So why shore up this faction? Morale boosting symbolism for the rag tag and bobtail jihadist remnants plus local tribes, or a flagging attempt to avoid the Libyans negotiating with each other. 

We have an escalation strategy, not an exit strategy. And if an Apache is shot down....?

The Arabs find their feet and their voices

Reading Ben Wilson's "The Making of Victorian Values" has provided some striking similarities between the change in values that transformed Britain in the early nineteenth century and the current disturbances within the Arab world. Britain in the eighteenth century was a rugged, brutal island where entertainment was violent, cruel, witty and drunk. By 1820, all of these fairs and bawdy traditions were erased by a conformist middle-class that wished to erase its own connections with the gin-sodden success of its ancestors. The swift revolution in values was enhanced by a rapid demographic turnover; by 1830, most of those living in Britain were children of the nineteenth century: intoxicated by progress, thankful for victory and confident of British superiority. Their values were to remain strong, if changing over time, till another demographic turnover in the 1960s.

The combination of economic change, demographic revolution and political instability afflicts the Arab world. The protestors that have dominated the Arab Spring are the youth: students, graduates, the unemployed and dispossessed. It is not clear if there is a consensual set of values as Britain enjoyed, or that a number of competing value systems jostle for attention. These range from westernised secularism to the salafist fundamentalism financed by Saudi Arabia. Whichever value system wins is likely to maintain a dominant position in Islamic regions for a number of decades whilst the current demographic runs its course.

The adoption of values within the younger generation has been favourable to originalist versions of Islam like Salafism and Wahabism. The simplicity and clarity of this doctrine has led to the abandonment of regional forms of Islam such as the Sufi movement in Pakistan or the syncretist traditions of Indonesia. Even the fundamentalists are deformed by compromising with modernity, but on current trends, the dominant value system is likely to be religious, populist, democratic, maybe technocratic and tempered by a strong secular minority. This depends upon the balancing of Islamic identity, participatory notions of representation, and music, that are currently underpinning the crisis in North Africa.

Intervene in haste, repent at leisure

The outcome for protests in each Arab country depends upon the level of frustration, the level of force used to quell the disturbances and the institutional complexity of each society. Where a civil society has developed, the transition has tended to be more peaceful: the rumblings of a secular, frustrated class has eased the succession within or between elites. The outcome may be flawed, chaotic and uncertain; but the revolutions have favoure greater representation within a recognisably liberal framework. They share some similarities to the flawed and failed colour revolutions of ex Soviet states. Only Bahrain fails to fit this model due to the intervention of Saudi Arabia; an intervention that may have fatal consequences.

The other two countries where protests have coalesced into a threat against the existing regime are Yemen and Libya. These are fractious countries where the existing dictator has maintained their rule through tribal alliances and nepotism. The narrow base of this ruling network is exposed with the rise of the losers. Lacking the constraints of limited freedom or independent power bases, these regimes have degenerated towards stand-off and civil war, abetted by theviolence unleashed by the long-standing rulers.

As such, the intervention in a civil war without an exit strategy and supporting a ragbag council of disaffected tribes is not a planned benefit for the West. We may have prevented the quick outcome in a civil war and endorsed a stagnant unstable partition for a few months. Is the consequence just revisiting Saddam Hussein's Iraq on the North African coast, maintaining no-fly zones for the next ten years as chaos festers within this vacuum. Our best outcome is the removal of Gaddafy and his replacement with a weak balancing act or an allied victor after the end of a civil war.

Egypt's 'Mighty Duo' co-opt the revolution

Egypt has approved constitutional changes in a reasonably free and fair election. The referendum sets a timetable for legislative elections and agreed term limits for the presidential post. The referendum was passed through strong support from the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) and the Muslim Brotherhood. Opposition to the vote was mainly concentrated in Cairo and Alexandria whereas the provinces voted positively for the proposals.

Opposition is derived from the liberal protesters, who have failed to coalesce into campaigning parties. They paint a picture of the traditional duopoly, the NDP and the Muslim Brotherhood, co-operating to preserve power and complain that they have been given insufficient time to create political institutions top channel their support. Perhaps this is the case; perhaps ruling military council wishes to provide evidence of change and prevent further upheaval. They will look at the revolts in Tunisia with some apprehension.

The concern is that the forthcoming elections will write the new constitution. If The Muslim Brotherhood gets the upper hand, then Islamism may gain the upper hand. However, the complexity of wooing a strong secular minority, the Christians and the public sector NDP may place severe constraints on what the Muslim Brotherhood could achieve in a constritutional convention.

Into the bow wave

It is rather dull waiting for all of this debt to collapse. Whether we call it 'extend and pretend', 'delaying the inevitable', delay the day' and any other such labels that magical financing brings up, government has subprimed the pump for a few years now, and nowhere more than China or the United States. Opposites attracting for a united ruin.

We have had some calm for a while now, since markets don't appear to be able to digest more than one crisis at a time if generated from within. Events are moving beyond the markets: with upheavals in the Middle East placing, perhaps, too much weight on the entitlements of the West for their survival in their present form.

An oil shock could produce such a whirlwind that the bow wave of a reserve currency dying leaves Irish or Greek default as a careless whisper, blown away before it registers beyond the local setting. One can perceive dimly and wide eyed the worst case scenario of this potential tsunami: the United States wrecked and insular; Europe broken: its currency union divided, its markets balkanised and a North African littoral condemned to a generation of irrational and imperialist fundamentalisms; Japan condemned to a rapid decline in living standards under the twin decay of debt slavery and depopulation; a China, recentralising and marshalling a cheated bourgeoisie through post-communist expansionism, fighting chosen wars with its proxies.

We have the potential to revisit the 1930s under our policy mistakes and, then as now, not all representative institutions survived.

A region wracked by unrealised dreams

There seem no end to the upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa: protests continue in Oman, Yemen, Tunisia, Bahrain and Iran. Egypt seems a calm oasis for the moment.

The first revolution begins its slow and fractious process. The discontent with the existing elite has resulted in further resignations from the interim government and the legalisation of the Islamist movement, Ennahda. This development recalls the warning from many analysts: the most organised movements are able ot capitalise on the chaos.

Can the protestors avoid the danger of Islamism: one regime, one vote, then everlasting government, freedom forever revoked. The reports that protests have avoided references to existing issues: Palestine, Islam and Israel are far from the truth. They have voiced their demands after victory. Only the desperate rulers invoke the traditional scapegoats to save their hides. Their own lies no longer work. You can't portray Israel as the wolf when you huffed and puffed on your own people.

The original inchoate coalitions have fractured as disciplined Islamist movements give voice to their traditional goals in rallies. Can the western media convey the Islamic symbols within which protest and death is presented and celebrated? Is there not a greater willingness to martyr for a cause than we would see in equivalent demonstrations elsewhere; a more casual brutality in beating and shooting demonstrators? For the existing regimes, life is cheap and devalued.

When life is that devalued, civil wars will follow. What do the Libyans have to lose? Their lives, their homes, their honour. Once war starts, barbarity swiftly follows...

An ethical cleansing is reversed for Libya

History never loves a loser, especially  in revolutions. They tend to appear mad and bad, deserving of their fate, after prolonging the agony needlessly. Such rulers tend to have overstayed their sanity, identifying the nation and the state with themselves. Just as they lose sight of power and its responsibilities, they distance themselves from reality. Remember the denials of the spokesman during the Iraq War: now listen to the sons of Gadhafy. 

The West (and its shadow in the East) does not like a loser either. Gadhafy can no longer guarantee oil or gas, and the revolution has endangered all of the foreigners on Libyan soil. The revolution has ensured an ethnic and an ethic cleansing. As soon as none could be taken as human shields or hostages, the sanctions were applied. Gadhafy did not help his own cause with the appalling brutality that ensures his downfall will be written in his own blood.

The forces have acquired the sticking positions that tend to favour civil war: an area of rebellion, now heading for the capital, plus loyalist obstacles like the port of Sirte.Does this mean that we are in for a long haul?

As I wrote earlier, such upheavals tend to radicalise  if the initial demands for having aspirations are not met. Ghannouchi of Tunisia, a hold-over of the previous regime, fell on his sword tonight.