“The Arab Spring”: 1989 all over again? Yes and No.

Yes – these popular uprisings of 2011 are – as they were in 1989 - all going down (or up) in flames at the same time. No nice sequence pacing one after the other, except Tunisia setting it off, and Egypt opening the floodgates next by showing the revolution's maximum dimension and potential, the way the Baltics and East Germany did in 1989. From these initial, hesitant steps into the breach it quickly turned into a free-for-all, in 2011 as in 1989. In North Africa as in Communist Europe, popular sentiment that had been slowly brewing for years came to a state of boiling. A growing awareness of much better living next door stoked the fire in both cases. Whether it was tv, underground cassette tapes and VHF movies in the 1989 case, or mobile phones, Facebook or Twitter in the most recent case, it was enhanced communication reaching (especially) young people that triggered both revolutionary chains.

But: No – the similarities are both indicative and yet superficial. In 2011 there is no common controlling authority being challenged, no superpower tottering, just local dictators. There is no ideology from the top, only the smokesceen of Islam veiling oldfashioned despotism and an unimaginable greed. Unlike Eastern Europe, the Arab world seems to have had few movements living a secret organized life aiming for change. There has been systematic oppression, suffering and still somehow the bare survival of ordinary people. But there was never an overt justification of Muslim misery the way the Marxist-Leninist ideology was used to justify the oppression and low lifestyle of the Communist world.

Then there is the material wealth, above all the oil and gas, available to many of the rebelling peoples in 2011. In Soviet-controlled  Europe there were no riches to be redistributed. In the Middle East and North Africa, the worst crime of despotic leaders has been the theft of national wealth in the face of the abject poverty of their subjects. As the spirit of rebellion awoke, the image of a better future is a strong stimulus that has no comparison in Eastern Europe of 1989. True, the East Europeans also expected a better material future, but the riches they imagined were not as concrete and massive as those of (e.g.) Algerians or Libyans.

An open question is still whether the follow-up in the Middle East and North Africa is likely to be as successful as that in Eastern Europe (which admittedly has its downsides even two decades later). Obviously in 2011 “democracy” of some sort is a goal, however inchoate, but it has no historical reference very close to the experience of North African or Middle Eastern societies. Autocracy is the more familiar model, and (as Hillary Clinton just said), the West does not have all the answers. We may be facing a future of some kind of modified "auto-demo-cracy" emerging, more akin to the various Asian regimes in existence today.

The thought keeps coming back to me that I have no good answer to the charge that a people gets the government it deserves. If a people finds itself living under a despot, that is as good as deciding to do so; it is their choice. Some have called me heartless for that view. Yet the world is cruel, and we can only at our own peril ask others to meddle in our affairs to impose their sense of what is right.

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