The fall of the Syrian regime surprised everyone. The Assad regime gained an aura of continuity in the absence of the will of the people. The “savage state” – as the French researcher Michel Seurat wrote early in the late 1970s – adopted a systematic policy of breaking the popular will, and relied on regional and international alliances to ensure its survival.
He did not realize that foreign alliances alone, without internal legitimacy rooted in popular satisfaction, do not guarantee his survival, because they are vulnerable to geostrategic fluctuations that are a close feature of the current regional and international situation. Strategic uncertainty is the keyword of our contemporary times.
What the regional and international actors who accepted Assad’s return to joint regional and international action missed was that ferocity conceals structural weakness and widespread fragility.
The author of this article argues that there is an increasing demand from the moment of the outbreak of the Arab Spring of 2010/2011 until now for stability from all actors – national, regional and international – in the Arab region, which prompts them all to invest in it, but the failure to include peoples’ aspirations for a decent life in it and competition Among themselves over defining its content, trying to impose it, and the trade-offs required for it, is one of the basic reasons behind what has become known as “Arab exhaustion.”
The Arab Spring announced the end of the old formulas in politics, economics, and society, with people searching for something new that has not yet crystallized
Although I am convinced that one of the important repercussions of the Arab Spring era was the internationalization of domestic policies, this internationalization, which increased more than it should have, has been proven – after more than a decade – to increase internal and regional instability, which requires searching for other approaches. It contributes to achieving the stability desired by everyone.
The basic assumption behind this article is that the stability that has been absent from the region over the past years is located in a space where internal, regional and international factors intersect, and that without creating and creating common spaces in which these three levels are harmonious, the region will not be stable in the long term.
Deepening long-term stability, which means paying attention to the structural factors and deep structures on which this concept is based. These foundations and foundations cannot be discussed apart from the concept of “stability traps” that the writer of these lines formulated on the occasion of the decade since the Arab Spring.
By stability traps, I mean: the arena in which contradictions accumulate and the foundations of stability – as presented by internal, regional and international actors – which are mainly fueled by risks and grievances and are not addressed. The Arab reality is moving on seas of grievances.
Pursuing the short-term goal of stability can sometimes come at the expense of the long-term goal of deepening stability, and activities aimed at stabilizing and meeting immediate needs often fail to address structural issues, and even exacerbate these underlying issues that cause grievances. The risks increase.
The approach I propose here is the necessity of starting from a deeper understanding of the Arab Spring era and the repercussions it left behind and the issues it raised. Without reaching this understanding while seeking to express and formulate it in projects to rebuild the crisis-ridden Arab state; What will govern the view of regional and international actors in the region will continue to be: “limiting the negative effects of the problems of the Middle East and North Africa on other regions of the world.”
I entered prison in 2015, and I was trying to stop the expansion of the counter-revolution by preserving and strengthening the political field in Egypt, by building consensuses between the various political forces, and I came out in 2019, and the chants of the second wave of the Arab Spring are still being chanted by the Arab masses in Algeria and Lebanon. , Iraq, and Sudan. Syria restored this spirit to sectors of the Arab masses who aspire to freedom, dignity, and decent living, despite their deep sadness over the genocide taking place in Gaza.
The stability that has been absent from the region in recent years occurs in a space where internal, regional and international factors intersect, and without creating common spaces in which these three levels are in harmony, the region will not be stable in the long term.
The scenes of protests extending from 2011 until now, and despite the defeats and civil wars that resulted from them, and the manifestations of the collapse of states and the displaced, prompted me to search for what I called in my first book after prison – published by Dar Al-Maraya in Cairo in 2021 – “the narrative of the Arab Spring,” by which I mean its basic essence. .
The historical reading of the Arab Spring uprisings indicates that we are facing a restructuring of all history in the region. We are facing a historical turning point. The old has led to explosion, and is no longer able to provide responses to the challenges of society and the state, but the new has not yet crystallized, and this is our historical mission, as I believe, and the moment is filled with a lot of what is pouring into the future, and to the extent that social actors are able to capture the components of this moment, the extent to which we will be The first path to stability.
I realize that the projects of the migrating past were not merely fleeting formulations and phrases carried by the power of authority in the broad sense of defining authority; It is a form or proposal of life, and of the nature of society with its network of relationships. It is a discourse and practice of political, social, and economic perceptions and imagination, and a cognitive perception of life and the state, from which emerge customs, traditions, institutions, language, and a perception of society and its individuals, a perception of the self and the other that expresses itself in laws, legislation, a constitution, and production relations. Therefore, dialogue between the new coming and the old departing is necessary to achieve stability.
We are living in a transitional period that requires awareness of the transitional time, which is characterized by mutual reassurance between social and political forces, and awareness of everyone’s interests in order to carefully integrate them into reform projects.
The narrative of the Arab uprisings – then – is a search for a new social contract through which the national state will be rebuilt with new elites. This contract is based on four components: freedom/democracy, social justice/fair distribution of resources, liberating the national will from regional and international hegemony, and a fair position of support. The rights of the Palestinian people.
This dream is driven by new generations of young people with a dominant female presence. This dream is supported by broad social segments, but at the same time it raises the concerns and fears of other groups about its repercussions, which have become a confirmed reality in their country or in neighboring countries. In their opinion, it has undermined political and economic stability in a number of countries, and has so far sparked three civil wars, leaving 10 million refugees, most of them in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. Some are trying to attribute the instability and escalation of conflicts to the era of the Arab Spring.
This hadith ignores a number of considerations:
- Firstly: It is necessary to distinguish between the essence of the Arab Spring and the inability to manage the requirements of transitional periods. The Arab Spring – as we presented – in its two previous waves (we do not know if Syria is the beginning of a third wave or not?) is the aspiration of the Arab peoples, especially the younger groups among them, for freedom, social justice, and good governance, and a protest against corruption and poor distribution of income.
It is an expression – from my point of view – of a historical transformation in the region that announces the end of old formulas in politics, culture, economics and society, and a search for a new one that has not yet crystallized.
It is an announcement of the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, as the region is living in a transitional phase between the two eras: the old, migrating, and the new, which has not yet been established. Hence, we are living in an “interregnum” phase, as Zygmund Bauman puts it in his book Modernity and the Holocaust.
As for the failure to manage the transitional periods, it has occurred and there is nothing wrong with it, on all sides. The forces of change did not realize the nature of the transitional time, so they did not seek to build consensuses and attack them with molars.
- secondly: The Arab transitional phase is also characterized by the fact that the state has become subject to question, so that what is required to build it is to rethink it. The fundamental challenge facing the national community in every Arab country is to bring about a democratic transformation with a social essence. One of the conditions for his success is rebuilding the state. But by introducing new formulas for reconstruction.
The formula of the post-independence state has ended, and this is taking place in light of the decomposition of the concept of the state in the imagination of the Arab citizen, and the dissipation of the historical capital that was accomplished over the last century in some countries, which allowed the establishment of a number of institutions with established traditions that led to the state performing its functions independently of Orientations of the political system.
We are now faced with a dilemma that afflicts most Arab countries, which is that the continuation of the state depends on the continuation of the ruling political system, especially in light of the decomposition of the national state into its primary elements of sectarian, tribal, ethnic, regional, and sectarian lines.
- Third: The second wave of 2018/2019 came to confirm that authoritarian regimes, no matter how “stable” they seem, are unsustainable, and that the struggle for freedom, dignity and democracy cannot be curbed, and the path to long-term stability in the region is through a democratic commitment capable of long-term economic achievement. Long term.
The Arab Spring was – as we presented – the culmination of the failures of the ruling elite in building the state and building consensus around it. The large-scale demonstrations, led by disillusioned youth, have declared the death of the principles upon which the region’s states were founded, demonstrated the limits of coercion, centralization and patronage in the region’s governance structure, and also revealed low levels of commitment to existing state structures and social contracts.
- Fourth: If we imagine that giving priority to stability over democracy might lead to the elimination of terrorism – as is the perception of some Western countries – then the only variable that was consistently linked to the number of terrorists was the Freedom House Index of Political Rights and Civil Liberties, in which countries that enjoy a greater degree of freedom are Less likely to become a birthplace for international terrorists.
- Fifth: The relationship of the major powers with the region after the end of the Cold War was governed by the logic of maintaining the status quo, and the intervention of Presidents Bush Jr. – after the attacks of September 2001 – and Obama – during the Arab Spring uprisings – represented an exception to this.
In other words, international actors were all in demand for stability in the region, but they could only focus on supporting authoritarian regimes that they perceived could bring stability.
They have to accept the ongoing Arab “time of turmoil” as a historical phenomenon over which external actors have very limited influence, if any at all. Their goal became not to try to “fix” the region, but rather to limit the negative effects of the Middle East’s problems on other regions of the world.
The bottom line is that stability, as formulated by the Arab Spring era and confirmed by the Syrian lesson:
- In the transitional time – which is a temporary time that paves the way for a new era – stability requires a temporary agreement between the old and the new to build the state, with what this means in terms of elements of continuity for some of the old and change that comes from the new.
- Stability has international and regional dimensions. However, in essence, it is a local demand whose components determine the agreements on the nature of the social contract that social groups reach at a certain historical stage. The role of political systems is to express this moment of consensus through constitutions, laws, and general policies that guarantee its maintenance and preservation.
- The search for stability is understandable and a legitimate demand for all actors – local, international and regional – but supporting the return of tyranny, the persistence of economic/social disparities, the inability to achieve economic achievement, and the inability to manage religious, cultural and ethnic diversity, lead to adverse results for stability itself in the long term.
These are the conclusions that I reached early, and the Syrian earthquake reminded me of them again, but the question remains: What is the impact of the disintegration of the ancient Middle East, at the heart of which is Israeli brutality, and I do not say hegemony, after the flood on the stability of the region?
A question worth pursuing in a separate article.
The opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera Network.