Back
in 2011, the Arab uprisings were celebrated as world-changing events
that would re-define the spirit of our political times. The
astonishing spread of these mass uprisings, followed soon after by
the Occupy protests, left observers in little doubt that they were
witnessing an unprecedented phenomenon—‘something totally new’,
‘open-ended’, a ‘movement without a name’; revolutions that
heralded a novel path to emancipation. According to Alain Badiou,
Tahrir Square and all the activities which took place there—fighting,
barricading, camping, debating, cooking and caring for the
wounded—constituted the ‘communism of movement’; posited as an
alternative to the conventional liberal-democratic or authoritarian
state, this was a universal concept that heralded a new way of doing
politics—a true revolution. For Slavoj Žižek, only these ‘totally
new’ political happenings, without hegemonic organizations,
charismatic leaderships or party apparatuses, could create what he
called the ‘magic of Tahrir’. For Hardt and Negri, the Arab
Spring, Europe’s indignado protests
and Occupy Wall Street expressed the longing of the multitude for a
‘real democracy’, a different kind of polity that might supplant
the hopeless liberal variety worn threadbare by corporate capitalism.
These movements, in sum, represented the ‘new global
revolutions’. [1]
‘New’,
certainly; but what does this ‘newness’ tell us about the nature
of these political upheavals? What value does it attribute to them?
In fact, just as these confident appraisals were being circulated in
the US and Europe, the Arab protagonists themselves were
anguishing about the fate of their ‘revolutions’, lamenting the
dangers of conservative restoration or hijacking by free-riders. Two
years after the fall of the dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen,
not a great deal had effectively changed in the states’
institutions or the power bases of the old elites. Police, army and
judiciary; state-controlled media; business elites and the
clientelist networks of the old ruling parties—all remained more or
less intact. The fact that Egypt’s provisional military rulers had
imposed a ban on strikes and brought more than 12,000 activists
before military tribunals suggests that there was something peculiar
about the character of these ‘revolutions’.
In a sense,
these contrasting reactions—lauding and lamenting—reflected the
paradoxical reality of the Arab ‘revolutions’, if we take
‘revolution’ to mean, minimally, the rapid and radical
transformation of a state driven by popular movements from below. The
polarities of opinion echo the profound disjunction between two key
dimensions of revolution: movement and change.
The celebratory narratives focused predominantly on ‘revolution as
movement’—on the dramatic episodes of high solidarity and
sacrifice, of altruism and common purpose; the communitas of
Tahrir. The attention here is centred on those extraordinary moments
in every revolutionary mobilization when attitudes and behaviour are
suddenly transformed: sectarian divisions melt away, gender equality
reigns and selfishness diminishes; the popular classes demonstrate a
remarkable capacity for innovation in activism, self-organization and
democratic decision-making. These outstanding episodes certainly
deserve to be highlighted and documented; however, the focus on
‘revolution as movement’ has served to obscure the peculiar
nature of these ‘revolutions’ in terms of change, with little to
say about what happens the day after the dictators abdicate. It may
even serve to disguise the paradoxes of these upheavals, shaped by
the new political times in which grand visions and emancipatory
utopias have given way to fragmentary projects, improvisation and
loose horizontal networks.
Transformative strategies
Are
we then really living in revolutionary times? In a sense we are. The
crisis of Western liberal democracy and the dearth of accountable
government in many parts of the world, combined with increasing
inequality and a feeling of deprivation affecting large segments of
the world population, including skilled and educated layers,
subjected to the neoliberal turn, have created a genuine political
impasse and heightened the need for drastic change. A decade earlier,
David Harvey had pointed to this malaise in arguing that the world
needed a Communist
Manifesto more
than ever before. [2] But
then as now, a world in need of revolutions does not mean that it has
the capacity to generate them, if it lacks the means and vision
necessary for a fundamental transformation. In another sense, then,
these may not be revolutionary times so much as paradoxical ones,
when the possibility of ‘revolution as change’—that is, rapid
and radical transformation of the state—has been drastically
undermined, while ‘revolution as movement’ is in spectacular
supply. The Arab upheavals expressed this anomaly. It is not
surprising that their trajectories—barring the cases of Libya and
Syria, which assumed the form of revolutionary wars, mediated by
foreign military intervention—resemble none of the known pathways
for political change: reform, insurrection or implosion. They seem to
have a character of their own.
Historically,
social and political movements following a reformist strategy usually
organize a sustained campaign to exert pressure on the incumbent
regime to undertake reforms, using the institutions of the existing
state. Relying on its social power—the mobilization of the popular
classes—the opposition movement forces the political elite to
reform its laws and institutions, often through some kind of
negotiated pact. Change happens within the framework of existing
political arrangements. The transition to democracy in countries like
Brazil and Mexico in the 1980s was of this nature. The leadership of
Iran’s Green movement is pursuing a similar reformist path. In this
trajectory, the depth and extent of reforms can vary: change may
remain superficial, but it can also be profound if it takes the form
of cumulative legal, institutional and politico-cultural reforms.
By contrast,
the insurrectionary path requires a revolutionary movement, built up
over a fairly extended period of time and developing a recognized
leadership and organizational structure, along with a blueprint for a
new political order. While the incumbent regime deploys its police or
military apparatus to resist any change, defections begin to split
the governing bloc. The revolutionary camp pushes forward, attracts
defectors, forms a shadow government and builds alternative power
structures. This challenges the state’s ability to govern its own
territory, creating a situation of ‘dual power’ between the
regime and the opposition, which usually possess a charismatic leader
in the mould of Lenin, Mao, Castro, Khomeini, Wałęsa or Havel.
Where the revolution is successful, the situation of dual power
culminates in an insurrectionary battle in which the revolutionary
camp takes power by force; it dislodges the old organs of authority
and establishes new ones. Here there is a comprehensive overhaul of
the state, with new personnel, ideology and an alternative mode of
government. The Cuban revolution of 1959, or the Sandinista
revolution in Nicaragua and the Iranian revolution, both in 1979,
exemplify the insurrectionary course. Qaddafi’s regime faced a
revolutionary insurrection under the leadership of the National
Transitional Council which, with NATO backing, eventually
advanced from liberated Benghazi to capture Tripoli.
There is a
third possibility: that of ‘regime implosion’. A revolt may
gather momentum through strikes and other forms of civil
disobedience, or through revolutionary warfare progressively
encircling the capital, so that in the end the regime implodes,
collapsing amid disruption, defection and total disorder. In its
place, alternative elites hurriedly form new organs of power, often
in conditions of confusion and disorder, staffed by people with
little experience of public office. Ceaușescu’s regime in Romania
imploded amid violence and political chaos in 1989; but it was
succeeded by a very different political and economic order under the
newly established body, the National Salvation Front, led by Ion
Iliescu. In both insurrection and implosion, attempts to transform
the political system do not operate through the existing state
institutions but outside them—in contrast to the reformist path.
Sui generis movements
The Egyptian,
Tunisian and Yemeni ‘revolutions’ bore little resemblance to any
of these paths. A first peculiarity to note is their speed. In Egypt
and Tunisia, powerful mass uprisings achieved some remarkably swift
results: the Tunisians in the course of one month, and the Egyptians
in just eighteen days, succeeded in dislodging long-term
authoritarian rulers and dismantling a number of institutions
associated with them—including their political parties, legislative
bodies and a number of ministries—while pledging themselves to
policies of constitutional and political reform. These gains were
achieved in a manner that was, by relative standards, remarkably
civil and peaceful, as well as swift. But these rapid
victories—unlike the prolonged revolts in Yemen and Libya, or those
in Bahrain and Syria which are still ongoing—left little time for
the oppositions to build their own parallel organs of government, if
indeed this had been their intention. Instead, the revolutionaries
wanted the regime’s institutions—the Egyptian military, for
example—to carry out substantial reforms on behalf of the
revolution: to modify the constitution, hold elections, guarantee the
freedom of political parties and institutionalize democratic
government. Here lay a key anomaly of these revolutions: they enjoyed
enormous social prestige, but lacked administrative authority; they
achieved a remarkable degree of hegemony, but did not actually rule.
Thus the incumbent regimes continued more or less intact; there were
few new state institutions or novel means of government that could
embody the will of the revolution. Insofar as new structures did
emerge, they were soon taken over not by revolutionaries but by
‘free-riders’, those traditionally well-organized political
currents whose leaders had largely remained on the sidelines when the
struggles against the dictatorships began.
It
is true that the Central and Eastern European revolutions of 1989
were also astonishingly swift and, for the most part, non-violent:
East Germany’s took ten days, Romania’s only five. What is more,
unlike Egypt, Yemen or even Tunisia, they effected a complete
transformation of their national political and economic systems.
Notationally, we might explain this by saying that the difference
between what the people had—one-party Communist state, command
economy—and what they wanted—liberal democracy and market
economy—was so radical that the trajectory of change had to be
revolutionary; halfway, superficial reforms would easily have been
detected and resisted. [3] This
was quite unlike the pattern in Egypt or Tunisia, where the demands
for ‘change’, ‘freedom’ and ‘social justice’ were so
loosely defined that they could even be appropriated by the
counter-revolution. In this sense, the Egyptian and Tunisian
experiences bore a closer resemblance to Georgia’s ‘Rose
Revolution’ of 2003 or Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ of
2004–05, where in both cases a massive and sustained popular
movement brought down the corrupt incumbents. In these instances, the
trajectory would, strictly speaking, be more reformist than
revolutionary.
Nonetheless,
there was a more promising side to the Arab upheavals, a powerful
revolutionary drive which made them more thoroughgoing and
farther-reaching than the protests in Georgia or Ukraine. In Tunisia
and Egypt, the departure of the dictators and their apparatuses of
coercion opened up an unprecedented free space for citizens, above
all from the popular classes, to reclaim their societies and assert
themselves. As in most revolutionary situations, enormous energy was
released and an unparalleled sense of renewal transformed the public
sphere. Banned political parties emerged from the shadows and new
ones were established—at least twelve in Egypt, and over a hundred
in Tunisia. Social organizations grew more vocal and remarkable
popular initiatives began to emerge. With the threat of persecution
lifted, working people fought for their rights; unofficial industrial
actions and protests raged. In Tunisia, the existing trade unions
took on a more prominent role.
In Egypt,
workers pushed for new independent unions; the Workers’ Coalition
of the 25 January Revolution asserted the principles of the
revolution: change, freedom, social justice. Small farmers called for
independent syndicates. Cairo’s slum dwellers began to build their
first autonomous organizations; youth groups fought to upgrade slum
settlements, took on civic projects and reclaimed their pride.
Students poured onto the streets to demand that the Ministry of
Education revise their curricula. New groupings were formed—in
Egypt, the Tahrir Revolutionary Front; in Tunisia, the Supreme Body
to Realize the Objectives of the Revolution—to exert pressure on
the post-revolutionary authorities for meaningful reforms. Of course,
these represented levels of popular mobilization specific to these
exceptional times. But the extraordinary sense of liberation, the
urge for self-realization, the dream of a just social order, in
short, the desire for ‘all that is new’, this was what defined
the very spirit of these revolutions. Yet as these mass social layers
moved far ahead of their elites, the major anomaly of these
revolutions was exposed: the discrepancy between a revolutionary
desire for the ‘new’ and a reformist trajectory that could lead
to harbouring the ‘old’.
Refolutions?
How,
then, are we to make sense of the Arab revolts, two years after the
ousting of Mubarak and Ben Ali? Thus far, the monarchies of Jordan
and Morocco have opted for minor political reforms; in Morocco,
constitutional change allowed the leader of the majority party in the
Parliament to form the government. In Syria and Bahrain, protracted
battles against the coercive might of the regimes propelled the
uprisings to opt for the insurrectionary path, the outcomes of which
remain to be seen. The Libyan regime was overthrown in a violent
revolutionary war. But the uprisings in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia
followed a particular trajectory, which can be characterized neither
as ‘revolution’ per
se nor
simply in terms of ‘reform’ measures. Instead it may make sense
to speak of ‘refolutions’: revolutions that aim to push for
reforms in, and through, the institutions of the existing
regimes. [4]
As such,
‘refolutions’ embody paradoxical realities. They possess the
advantage of ensuring orderly transitions, avoiding violence,
destruction and chaos—the evils that dramatically increase the cost
of change; revolutionary excesses, the ‘reign of terror’ and
summary trials can be averted. Yet the possibility of genuine
transformation through systematic reforms and social pacts will
depend on the perpetual mobilization and vigilance of social
organizations—popular layers, civil associations, trade unions,
social movements, political parties—exerting constant pressure.
Otherwise, ‘refolutions’ carry the constant danger of
counter-revolutionary restoration, precisely because the revolution
has not made it into the key institutions of state power. One can
imagine powerful interests, wounded by the ferocity of the popular
upheavals, desperately seeking to regroup, instigating sabotage and
black propaganda. The defeated elites may spread cynicism and fear by
invoking ‘chaos’ and instability, to generate nostalgia for the
‘secure times’ under the old regime. Former high officials, old
party apparatchiks, editors-in-chief, powerful businessmen and
aggrieved security and intelligence-service operatives would
penetrate the institutions of power and propaganda to turn things to
their advantage.
In Yemen, the
key elements of the old regime have remained intact, even though a
renewed sense of freedom and independent activism promises to compel
political reform. Tunisia’s old ruling groups and economic mafias
are poised to fight back and block the path to genuine change, with a
dense network of political factions and business organizations at
their disposal. In Egypt theSCAF was responsible for widespread
repression, incarcerating large numbers of revolutionaries and
shutting down critical opposition organizations. The danger of
restoration, or of merely superficial change, becomes more serious as
the revolutionary fervour subsides, normal life resumes and people
grow disenchanted—conditions that have begun to appear on the Arab
political scene.
Different times
Why did the
Arab uprisings, with the exceptions of those in Libya and Syria,
assume this ‘refolutionary’ character? Why did key institutions
of the old regime remain unaltered, while revolutionary forces were
marginalized? In part this has to do with the very swift downfall of
the dictators, which gave the impression that the revolutions had
come to an end, achieved their goals, without a substantial shift in
the power structure. As we have seen, this rapid ‘victory’ did
not leave much opportunity for the movements to establish alternative
organs of power, even if they had intended to; in this sense these
were self-limiting revolutions. But there was also something else at
play: revolutionaries remained outside the structures of power
because they were not planning to take over the state; when, in the
later stages, they realized that they needed to, they lacked the
political resources—organization, leadership, strategic vision—that
would be necessary to wrest control both from the old regimes and
from ‘free-riders’ such as the Muslim Brothers or the Salafists,
who had played a limited role in the uprising but were
organizationally ready to take power. A principal difference between
the Arab uprisings and their 20th-century predecessors was that they
occurred in quite altered ideological times.
Up till the
1990s, three major ideological traditions had been the bearers of
‘revolution’ as a strategy of fundamental change: anti-colonial
nationalism, Marxism and Islamism. The first, as reflected in the
ideas of Fanon, Sukarno, Nehru, Nasser or Hồ Chí Minh, conceived
the post-independence social order as something new, a negation of
the political and economic domination of the old colonial system and
the ‘comprador’ bourgeoisie. Even though their promises far
exceeded their ability to deliver, the post-colonial regimes did make
some progress in education, health, land reform and
industrialization—measures that were affirmed in
national-development pacts: al-Mithaq in Egypt (1962), the Arusha
Declaration (1967) and Mwongozo guidelines (1971) in Tanzania. Their
major achievements lay in state-building: national administration,
infrastructure, class formation. However, because they failed to
tackle fundamental problems of unequal property and wealth
distribution, the nationalist governments began to lose their
legitimacy. As former anti-colonial revolutionaries turned into
administrators of the post-colonial order, they largely failed to
deliver on their promises; in many instances nationalist governments
devolved into autocracies, were saddled with debt, then pushed into
neoliberal structural adjustment programmes, if they had not already
been overthrown by military coups or undermined by imperialist
intrigues. Today the Palestinian movement is perhaps the last still
fighting for national independence.
Marxism was
undoubtedly the most formidable revolutionary current of the Cold War
era. The Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions inspired a generation of
radicals: Che Guevara and Hồ Chí Minh became iconic figures, not
only in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, but also for the
student movements in the US, Paris, Rome and Berlin. Guerrilla
movements came to symbolize the radicalism of the 1960s. They surged
in Africa after Lumumba’s assassination and with the hardening of
apartheid in South Africa. In the 70s a wave of ‘Marxist-Leninist’
revolutions overthrew colonial rule in Mozambique, Angola,
Guinea-Bissau and elsewhere. Although the focostrategy
promoted by Guevara did not bear fruit in Latin America, there were
successful insurrections in Grenada and Nicaragua towards the end of
the 1970s, while El Salvador appeared to be another likely candidate
for revolutionary advance. Latin American radicals found a new ally
as liberation theology inspired lay Catholics and even members of the
clergy to join the struggle. In the Middle East, the National
Liberation Front drove the British out of Aden and proclaimed the
People’s Republic of South Yemen; left-wing guerrillas played a
significant role in Iran, Oman and the occupied territories of
Palestine. The impact of these revolutionary movements on the
intellectual climate of the West was undeniable, helping to detonate
the worldwide rebellion of youth, students, workers and intellectuals
in 1968. In 1974, the Carnation Revolution overthrew the dictatorship
in Portugal. While some Communist Parties in Europe and the
developing world took an increasingly reformist (‘Euro-communist’)
course, significant forces within the Marxist-Leninist tradition
remained committed to a strategy of revolution.
But the
picture shifted dramatically with the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
The concept of revolution had been so integral to that of socialism
that the demise of ‘actually existing socialism’, following the
anti-Communist mobilizations in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and
the West’s victory in the Cold War, effectively implied the end of
‘revolution’ and of state-led development as well. Étatisme was
disparaged as inefficient and repressive, leading to the erosion of
personal autonomy and initiative. This had a profound bearing on the
notion of revolution, with its focus on state power, now identified
with authoritarianism and the failures of the Communist bloc. The
advance of neoliberalism, beginning in 1979–80 with the victories
of Thatcher and Reagan, later expanding as the dominant ideology
across much of the world, played a central role in this change of
discourse. In place of ‘state’ and ‘revolution’ there was an
exponential growth of talk about NGOs, ‘civil society’,
‘public spheres’ and so forth—in a word, reform. Gradual change
became the only acceptable route to social transformation. Western
governments, aid agencies and NGOs promoted this new gospel
assiduously. The expansion of the NGO sector in the Arab
world and in the global South more generally signified a dramatic
shift from social activism, informed by collective interests, to an
emphasis on individual self-help in a competitive world. In these
neoliberal times, the egalitarian spirit of liberation theology gave
way to a global surge of evangelical Christianity, informed by the
spirit of individual self-interest and accumulation.
The
third tradition was that of revolutionary Islamism, an ideological
rival of Marxism which nevertheless bore the imprint of its secular
opponent. From the 1970s, militant Islamist movements drew upon the
ideas of Sayyid Qutb in their battle against the secular states of
the Muslim world; Qutb himself had learned much from the Indian
Islamist leader Abul A’la Maududi, who in turn had been impressed
by the organizational and political strategy of the Communist Party
of India. Qutb’s 1964 pamphlet Milestones,
arguing for a Muslim vanguard to seize the jahilistate
and establish a true Islamic order, became the Islamist equivalent of
Lenin’s What
Is To Be Done?,
guiding the strategy of militant groups such as Jihad, Gama‘a
al-Islamiyya, Hizb ut-Tahrir, and Laskar Jihad. A number of former
leftists—Adel Hussein, Mustafa Mahmud, Tariq al-Bishri—defected
to the Islamist camp, bringing ideas from the Marxist-Leninist
tradition with them. The 1979 Iranian revolution was informed both by
leftist ideas and Qutb—Milestones had
been translated by Ayatollah Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader.
The Marxist-Leninist Fedayan-e Khalq and the ‘Islamic-Marxist’
Mojahedin-e-Khalq played a significant role in radicalizing
opposition to the Shah’s dictatorship. More important, perhaps, was
the popular theorist Ali Shariati who, as a student of the French
left-winger Georges Gurvitch, had spoken passionately about
‘revolution’ in a blend of Marxist and religious idioms, invoking
a ‘divine classless society’.[5] The
concept of revolution had thus been central to militant Islamism, in
both its Sunni and Shia forms. This tradition always stood in clear
contrast to the strategy of electoral Islamists such as the Muslim
Brotherhood, who aspired to build up sufficient social support to
capture the state through peaceful means. [6]
But
by the early 2000s, militant Islamists’ belief in revolution had
also run out of steam. In Iran, for instance, the once-cherished
idiom of ‘revolution’ had become associated with destruction and
extremism, at least by the time of Mohammad Khatami’s presidential
victory in 1997. Islamism—understood as a movement that sees Islam
as a comprehensive system, offering solutions to all social,
political and economic problems, with a stress on obligations rather
than rights—was entering into crisis. Dissenters argued that, in
practice, the ‘Islamic state’ promoted by Iran’s hardliners,
Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami and Indonesia’s Laskar Jihad, among
others, was damaging both to Islam and to the state. The late 90s and
early 2000s saw the rise of what I have called post-Islamist trends.
These are still religious, not secular, but they aim to transcend
Islamist politics by promoting a pious society and a secular state,
combining religiosity with rights, to varying degrees. Post-Islamist
currents such as Turkey’s AKP, Tunisia’s Nahda Party and
Morocco’s Justice and Development Party pursue a reformist path
towards political and social change; they are informed by the idioms
of the post-Cold War era—‘civil society’, accountability,
non-violence and gradualism. [7]
Lowered hopes
The
Arab uprisings thus occurred at a time when the decline of key
oppositional ideologies—anti-colonial nationalism, Marxist-Leninism
and Islamism—had delegitimized the very idea of ‘revolution’.
This was a very different era from, say, the late 1970s, when my
friends and I in Iran would often invoke the notion, even though it
seemed far-fetched; cycling through the opulent neighbourhoods of
northern Tehran, we speculated about how the Shah’s palaces could
be taken over and the lavish mansions redistributed. We were thinking
in terms of revolution. But in the Middle East of the new millennium,
hardly anyone imagined change in these terms; few Arab activists had
really strategized for a revolution, even though they might have
dreamed about it. In general, the desire was for reform, or
meaningful change within the existing political arrangements. In
Tunisia, scarcely anyone was thinking about ‘revolution’; in
fact, under Ben Ali’s police state, the intelligentsia had suffered
a ‘political death’, as one told me. [8] In
Egypt, Kefaya and the April 6th Movement, despite their innovative
tactics, were essentially reformist, in that they did not have a
strategy for the overthrow of the state. Some of their activists
reportedly received training in the US, Qatar or Serbia, largely
in the fields of election monitoring, non-violent protest and
network-building. Consequently, what transpired as the uprisings
unfolded were not revolutions per
se but
‘refolutions’—that is, revolutionary movements that wished to
compel the incumbent regimes to reform themselves.
In truth,
people may or may not have an idea about ‘revolution’ for it to
happen; the occurrence of mass uprisings has little to do with any
theorizations of them. They cannot be plotted and planned, even
though people may plot and plan them. Revolutions ‘simply’
happen. But having or not having ideas about revolutions does
critically influence the outcome when they do occur. The
‘refolutionary’ character of the Arab uprisings means that, at
best, they remain unfinished, since the key institutions and
interests of the old regimes—and the free-riders, Muslim Brothers
and Salafists—continue to frustrate the demands for meaningful
change. This outcome must be painful for all those who hoped for a
just and dignified future.
It
may be some consolation to recall that most of the great revolutions
of the 20th century—Russia, China, Cuba, Iran—that did succeed in
toppling the old autocratic regimes rapidly crafted new but equally
authoritarian and repressive states. Substantial disruptions in order
and administration are another side-effect of radical revolutionary
change. Libya, where the Qaddafi regime was violently overthrown, may
not be an object of envy for Egyptian or Tunisian militants. The
combination of Qaddafi’s brutality and Western interests in Libyan
oil resulted in a violent and destructive, NATO-assisted
insurrection which brought an end to the old despotic rule. But the
new administration has yet to give rise to a more inclusive and
transparent polity. The National Transitional Council remained
secretive about the identity of most of its members and its
decision-making processes. The internal divisions between Islamists
and secularists, its lack of effective authority over various
free-floating militia groups and its feeble administrative skills
rendered the NTC ill-equipped for government. [9] The
country experienced major dislocations—in security, administration
and the provision of basic infrastructure—before authority was
transferred from the NTC to an elected civilian body.
The point is
not to disparage the idea of radical revolutions, for there are many
positive aspects to such experiences—a novel sense of liberation,
free expression and open-ended possibilities for a better future
being among the most obvious. Rather, it is necessary to highlight
the fact that the revolutionary overthrow of a repressive regime does
not in itself guarantee a more just and inclusive order. Indeed,
radical ideological revolutions may carry in themselves the seeds of
authoritarian rule, for the overhaul of the state and the elimination
of dissent may leave little space for pluralism and broad political
competition. By contrast, ‘refolution’ may create a better
environment for the consolidation of electoral democracy because, by
definition, it is unable to monopolize state power. Instead, the
emergence of multiple power centres—including those of the
counter-revolution—can neutralize the excesses of new political
elites. Thus Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the Tunisian Ennahda
party are unlikely to be able to monopolize power in the same way
that the Khomeinists did in post-revolutionary Iran, precisely
because a range of powerful interests, including those of the old
regime, remain active and effective.
It
may then be worth considering another understanding of ‘revolution’,
along the lines developed by Raymond Williams in The
Long Revolution—that
is, a process which is ‘difficult’, in the sense of complex and
multifaceted, ‘total’, meaning not just economic but social and
cultural transformation, and ‘human’, involving the deepest
structures of relationships and feeling. [10]Consequently,
rather than looking for quick results or worrying about set demands,
we might view the Arab uprisings as ‘long revolutions’ that may
bear fruit in ten or twenty years by establishing new ways of doing
things, a new way of thinking about power. Yet at stake are not
merely semantic concerns about how to define revolutions, but the
hard problems of power structures and entrenched interests. However
one characterizes the process—as ‘long revolution’, or as one
that begins with the radical transformation of the state—the
crucial question is how to ensure a fundamental shift from the old,
authoritarian order to inaugurate meaningful democratic change, while
eschewing violent coercion and injustice. One thing is certain,
however: the journey from the oppressive ‘old’ to the liberatory
‘new’ will not come about without relentless struggles and
incessant popular mobilization, in both public and private realms.
Indeed, the ‘long revolution’ may have to begin even when the
‘short revolution’ ends.
[1] Keith
Kahn-Harris, ‘Naming the Movement’, Open
Democracy,
22 June 2011; Alain Badiou, ‘Tunisia, Egypt: The Universal Reach of
Popular Uprisings’, available at www.lacan.com;
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, ‘Arabs are democracy’s new
pioneers’, Guardian,
24 February 2011; Paul Mason,Why
It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions,
London 2012, p. 65.
[3] In
the German case, the imploded state institutions of the GDR could
easily be dissolved within the governmental functions of the FRG.
[4] The
term ‘refolution’ was coined by Timothy Garton Ash in June 1989
to describe the initial rounds of political reform in Poland and
Hungary, the result of negotiations between the Communist authorities
and the leaderships of the popular movements: Timothy Garton Ash,
‘Refolution, the Springtime of Two Nations’, New
York Review of Books,
15 June 1989. Here, I clearly use the term differently.
[5] Asef
Bayat, ‘Shariati and Marx: A Critique of an “Islamic” Critique
of Marxism’, Alif:
Journal of Comparative Poetics,
no. 10, 1990.
[6] Interestingly
al-Qaeda, the most militant and violent of jihadi groupings,
remained in essence non-revolutionary, due to its multinational form
and diffuse aims, such as ‘saving Islam’ or ‘fighting the
West’, and the idea of jihad as
an end in itself. See Faisal Devji, Landscapes
of Jihad,
Ithaca 2005.
[9] Ranj
Alaaldin, ‘Libya: Defining its Future’, in Toby Dodge, ed., After
the Arab Spring: Power Shift in the Middle East?,
London 2012.
[10] Anthony
Barnett, ‘We Live in Revolutionary Times, But What Does This
Mean?’, Open
Democracy,
16 December 2011.
