The Arab Spring Is Still A Thing?

Summing up the argument of his latest book, The New Arabs, Juan Cole hums a hopeful tune about the long-term fate of the youth-driven uprisings in the Middle East:

The generation of young Arabs who made the revolutions that led to the unrest and civil wars of the present is in fact distinctive — substantially more urban, literate, media-savvy, and wired than its parents and grandparents.  It’s also somewhat less religiously observant, though still deeply polarized between nationalists and devotees of political Islam. And keep in mind that the median age of the 370 million Arabs on this planet is only 24, about half that of graying Japan or Germany.  While India and Indonesia also have big youth bulges, Arab youth suffer disproportionately from the low rates of investment in their countries and staggeringly high unemployment rates.  They are, that is, primed for action. …

[M]any of the millennial activists who briefly turned the Arab world upside down and provoked so many changes are putting their energies into non-governmental organizations, thousands of which have flowered, barely noticed, in countries that once suffered from one-party rule.  In this way, they are learning valuable organizational skills that — count on it — will one day be applied to politics.  Others continue to coordinate with labor unions to promote the welfare of the working classes.  Their dislike of nepotism, narrow cliques, and ethnic or sectarian rule has already had a lasting impact on the politics of the Arab world.  So don’t for a second think that the Arab Spring is over, no matter the news from Libya, Egypt, Iraq, or elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in an interview, Cole notes that the Bush-era neocons may indeed have helped spread democracy in the Middle East – just in the totally opposite way they intended:

To the casual observer, the Arab Spring seemed to come from nowhere. It was an extemporaneous uprising triggered by a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire—the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. In talking to many of the activists, Cole came to see that organized protests over the invasion of Iraq and the 2008 Israel-Gaza conflict also played a major role. Just as indispensable were a decade’s worth of labor organizing over economic issues.

“In some ways, it was the invasion of Iraq that often produced the first big street demonstrations that these young people were involved in,” explains Cole. “But then the Gaza War in 2008-9—that surprised me in the sense that it seems to have been a really big rallying point for the Tunisian youth.”

(Photo: Bahrainis protest against the government and call for the release of political prisoners on June 20, 2014. By Hussain Albahrani/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)