THE YOUNG Jordanians were celebrating outside the Egyptian embassy in Amman. “Arab revolution, from Marrakesh to Bahrain,” they chanted to a deafening drumbeat. “They’re scared, they’re scared of the people’s revolt.” On Twitter and Facebook activists are vying with each other: “Jordan next”, “No, Syria”, “No, Yemen” . . . Yesterday there were clashes and casualties in Yemen, Algeria and Iran. Over the weekend in Bahrain, despite generous bribes from the king to every family, police had to drive crowds off the street with tear gas and baton rounds.
Around the Arab world and beyond, not least in Iran, they are looking to Tahrir Square. Its revolutionaries made clear from the start that, just as they had drawn inspiration from Tunisia, so too the rest of the “Arab nation” should follow their example. One placard gently teased: “Do you too have problems with your leader. . .?” An editorial in the Qatari daily Al-Sharq summed it up: “The revolt is Egyptian and the joy is Arab”.
That susceptibility to infection is in part a function of the sense of an Arab nation, a single people, divided by borders but linked by language, religion, history and culture, and now perhaps by Qatar’s Al Jazeera and networking young people online. The nation is now expressed, author Robin Yassin-Kassab writes, “by Lebanese and Egyptian pop music, Egyptian comedy, Syrian period dramas, by the same tele-evangelists, by itinerant labour and the common police-state heritage”.
The dream of political pan-Arabism, a popular construct of Arab nationalism of the first half of the last century, faded in the ascent of authoritarian inward-looking ruling national elites. Ironically, it is now being reborn in a way that is terrifying to those same ruling classes many of whom claim its mantle. Whether or not the winds of revolution blowing from Cairo are sufficient to build or sustain mass opposition movements in the next few weeks, the genie is out of the bottle. Sooner rather than later the game will be up for some of the most brutal and anti-democratic regimes in the world.
The bewilderment is also being felt in desperately wrong-footed Washington where, according to the Post, the White House is engaged in a frantic study of recent popular uprisings for lessons applicable to Egypt. The focus has been on how to help manage transitions in US-backed dictatorships like that in 1986 against Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Chile’s transition from dictatorship in 1990 or the 1998 uprising in Indonesia that drove out President Suharto. Officials have also looked to Serbia and Poland for lessons.
Their preoccupation is twofold: precedents like Poland for contagion in the regional spread of revolution, and the equally important internal dynamic of revolutions like that in Iran in 1979. Will Egypt’s road inevitably lead it to Islamism with all that entails? Indonesia and the Philippines suggest perhaps not, but many observers believe precedents won’t help and that the extraordinary Egyptian revolution is sui generis. We are into the realm of Rumsfeldian “known unknowns”.