We have an age-old Arab ritual come spring. Carpets dangle for
dear life from balconies as women folk flog the dust before packing them off to
the attic. A cleansing of a sort
that announces the summer’s sun.
That’s what many thought Arabs were doing back in 2011.
“Spring!” The status quo hanging on for dear life, a bit of a good whipping, a cleansing
of a sort. Therein the biggest
delusion began: that a hard beating would be more than enough to dust off an
epoch of abuse and failure. Worse! That it would all be done to the euphoric crescendo of Beethoven’s
Ninth.
Now we mourn,
lamenting the sameness of it all, because, we are told, it’s that damned
stubborn status quo. “Told you so!” This has
become the mantra of the strangest of bedfellows. For Bashar Assad? “Told you
so.” Against him? “Told you so.” Sissi, yes? “Told you so.” Sissi, no? Ditto
that.
Judging by the surface
collisions erupting across the region, the complaint is not entirely wrong. The
battle today as before seems
to be between the same old foes: the postcolonial state and Islamism. To each
country its own circumstance and flavor, of course, but the standard line is
that as much weakened systems gave way, the organized Islamists moved to share
the chair if not altogether usurp it, while the so-called liberals, played by this side and that,
aided and abetted, and now are content to revert to their time-honored habit of looking on.
The point being:
a historical opportunity has been missed and here we are in the throes of a counter-revolution with
regional and international forces taking up position as the status quo in one guise
or another reimposes itself.
The very seasoned Patrick Cockburn goes further in a recent piece
in The Independent. He argues that perhaps the single most instructive lesson
from the Libyan experience is that “demands for civil, political and economic
rights – which were at the centre of the Arab Spring uprisings – mean nothing
without a nation state to guarantee them; otherwise national loyalties are
submerged by sectarian, regional and ethnic hatreds.” Pretty much the case now
in five different archetypes of collapse: Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria,
the last three courtesy of the recent upheavals.
But if, indeed, this has been the grievous error of Arab oppositions,
the tragic reality is that it is but a continuum of the regimes’ own original sin. Dare we forget how
much cruelty they inflicted in the nation state’s name and how many worthy causes
were subverted under its banner? Or the success with which they made themselves
synonymous with the nation state
as they went about reducing entire national entities into family fiefdoms? In the end, this collapse of which
Cockburn speaks is as much the precursor as it is the epilogue to the revolts.
And still, at
least in the case of Syria, you could not help but marvel, during the very
early stages of the unrest, at how resilient civil society proved in the face of Assad’s efforts to
splinter a heaving nation along sectarian
identities, swiftly deploying violence to fracture civic solidarities. Just as
you could not but flinch as the Middle East’s most reactionary powers very quickly
mimicked the worst of Assad’s bloodletting.
It’s a grotesque
irony that, for both Assad and his external enemies, popular “demands for
civil, political and economic rights” have been equally unnerving, and for both,
counter-revolution has been the actual rallying cry. No less hideous is the
fact that even the most radical early calls for change by Syria’s first wave of
rebels did not envision, let alone plan, a regime change this bloody and this
devastating to the very meaning of Syria.
How, then, the
status quo might triumphantly hold forth against this blatantly infernal
backdrop is one of those questions very few of us are interested in poking
lest it interfere with the understandably simpler line of: “Told you so! Bashar
is staying.”
So it goes for Egypt.
You can almost hear history desperately dialing back in many people’s wishful
thinking at the mere mention of Sissi. But how can it? Not only because too
much has been broken to be put back together as it once was. But because neither
the state nor the Islamists have the skills, let alone the will and the
imagination, to tackle the profuse crises that finally unleashed the uprising. Regimes
tumbled, in the final analysis, because the states over which they presided had
long been slowly crumbling under them.
This is a region that is literally limping every which way in
the face of wholesale failure of staggering proportions. By every quantifiable
measure the state has been progressively recusing itself and the people simply can no longer make do with band-aids
and bread crumbs. Every
assumption has been turned on its head and every problem
begs for an urgent and serious solution, from the disastrous effects of climate
change on food security; to the technological disruptions that are
undecipherable to our governments; to the growing chasm between countryside and
city; to the ruling elites that simply cannot fathom the insistence of the
times on more open polities; to the grinding poverty and unemployment that lock
themselves tight, much like tree vines, around our political economies. Add to these the
deep ruptures that portend, where ever they have occurred, the end of imperious
centralized authority.
But this status quo
has entered the 21st century with all the battered tools and used up
tricks of the old one, and the dire consequences are literarily too painful to
bear.
A vacuum is not a state of affairs that calls for celebration,
but it is one that demands much more than the bowing of the head, arms up
resignation offered by many an analyst, as if what we are witness to is little more than a cynical power grab. Indeed, even in Syria, from such melancholic conditions there may yet emerge an opening. In a sober take,
Yazid Sayigh wisely sees in a much-diminished Assad clique hanging on for dear life a possibility.
Ironically, that survival
may be the only thing capable of paving the way for serious dissent to openly
emerge from the regime’s own social constituencies and institutional
base.
To date, the National
Coalition has failed signally to generate a critical political opening of this
kind. And it becomes more unlikely with each passing day that the coalition
will be able to seize the opportunity presented by such an opening should it
arise and draw a critical mass of rebel groups behind it. But in that vacuum, a
more effective kind of Syrian opposition may just arise.
There is a nexus
of vacuums everywhere you tread in the area. Small
mercies, I call them, borne out of the old order’s very inability to hold
itself together against overwhelming trends and pressures. Underwriting these
is a remarkably dynamic geopolitical map that is not likely to settle anytime
soon. Neither Turkey and its Erdogan, nor Iran and its Khameini, nor the US and
its allies and adversaries, nor Israel
and its colonized
Palestinians, nor Jordan and its Hashemites, nor the Gulf and its fractious
sheikdoms are today what they were but three years back—inside and out.
Pray tell, where
does “told you so! It’s that damn stubborn status quo” belong in this picture?
