The ‘Arab Spring’ Never Happened (in English)

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Feb 16, 2017 United States
The ‘Arab Spring’ Never Happened (in English)

The ‘Arab Spring’ Never Happened (in English)

By : Anthony Alessandrini

To investigate the trials and tribulations of the phrase “Arab Spring” for English-language audiences since 2010, it may be useful to start with a Google search—or, rather, a quick history of Google search results. If one looks at the top results for English-language searches using the term “Arab Spring” from 2010-2012, here is what you get:

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A few things jump out, foremost among them the celebratory tone, accompanied by the desire to locate and attribute the credit for this “year of revolution,” as National Public Radio, hardly a hotbed of revolutionary desires, dubbed it. Was it Wikileaks that started things rolling? Should Facebook or Twitter get the laurel? How long would it be before Mark Zuckerberg was handed his Nobel Peace Prize?

In a more serious vein, what should also be noted via this short exercise in time travel is the extent to which readers at this point in time wanted to understand the chronology and, to some extent, the genealogy of events related to the uprisings (thus the popularity of interactive timelines). It is worth remembering that this was also the moment when various iterations of Occupy movements had come to prominence in North America and Europe. These movements very directly declared that the Arab Spring was a guiding inspiration for their tactics and actions; indeed, the defining statement released by Occupy Wall Street at its inception declared the movement’s debt to what it understood as the “Arab Spring”: “We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.”

If these initial responses betrayed a lack of nuanced understanding of the full depth and complexities of the popular uprisings and revolutions throughout the region that had come to be known as the “Arab Spring,” they nevertheless suggested a hopeful sign: young English-language audiences were beginning to shed their stereotypical views of “the Middle East” and find in these popular movements a set of interlocutors and inspirations for their own struggles.

 

Moving ahead to the top Google searches for 2012-2014, one immediately notices the major shift that has begun to occur.

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There are still attempts here to understand the roots of the uprisings, some quite serious (a study of the relationship between the Arab Spring and climate change), others still tied to the obsession with social media (“Twitter Revolution”; “Facebook, Twitter Help the Arab Spring Blossom”). But more significant in this phase is the suggestion that the time had come to identify what the final outcomes of the Arab Spring were. “Who Are the Winners and Losers from the Arab Spring?” asked the BBC; and, in a more negative mode, the Economist asked: “The Arab Spring: Has It Failed?” Beyond the idea of judging the success or failure of this thing called the “Arab Spring,” the most important thing to note here is the temporality of such articles. The Arab Spring, we were made to understand, was a thing that has happened; it is now, for purposes of analysis, over, and so the post-mortems can begin in earnest.

 

The most recent top Google searches confirm that “post-mortem” is the correct analogy here, at least for the dominant strand of English-language publications.

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Some of the strongest voices came from the left end of the spectrum. “What Happened to the Arab Spring?” asked Jacobin. The Guardian’s most-read piece on the topic has the title: “‘I Was Terribly Wrong’: Writers Look Back at the Arab Spring Five Years Later.” From a more mainstream angle, CNN was more direct: “Arab Spring Five Years On: Corruption Increased, Says Report.” The Arab Spring, in this reading (which continues to color the views of many English-language audiences today) may have actually made things worse (says report).

It should be noted that the forces of commerce still, in spite of it all, want a piece of the action—CustomerThink, “a global online community of business leaders striving to create profitable customer-centric enterprises,” featured a report on the “Arab Spring” in May 2016 that focused on “value co-creation” and the transformation of “service systems,” with a view to how such knowledge could help “the business world”). But for the most part, the consensus appears to be that the “Arab Spring,” a thing that had happened once upon a time, had not, for the most part, turned out very well at all. Far from a site of inspiration and information for popular movements, it had been turned into a warning: be careful what you wish for.

Why worry at all about such online ephemera? Surely scholars and activists—particularly those who have themselves been involved in the uprisings—have produced far better accounts, many of them here on Jadaliyya? And surely those are the ones we should pay attention to, rather than getting caught up in the question of what got the most clicks among English speakers over the past six years?

Of course. But this battle over the meaning—or, better said, the appropriation and re-positioning—of this term “Arab Spring” nevertheless matters. It matters, first of all, for English-language audiences concerned with addressing their own governments’ role in the counter-revolutionary violence that has resounded since 2010. The role of the US and its allies—not to mention that of international financial institutions pushing the neoliberal line of structural adjustment—in unleashing counterrevolutionary violence in the region has not received nearly the attention it deserves to, nor has it been sufficiently resisted by the left in North American and Europe. This is one reason for the shocking and inexcusable silence, even among the left, regarding the continuing slaughter occurring daily in Yemen, for example. If this was all true for US-based audiences in 2010, it is even more so today, in the era of Trump’s travel and refugee ban and the more general administration policy, so well named by Zaid Jilani: “If we bombed you, we ban you.”

But the struggle over the meaning of the “Arab Spring” also matters for English-language audiences in terms of both solidarity and inspiration. From the viewpoint of solidarity, it needs to be said that, as against the idea that the “Arab Spring” is over, popular struggles in the region of course continue, and deserve our support. Early reactions to the Arab Spring, which suggested that the West’s Orientalist stereotypes might be in the process of being overthrown, have been effectively replaced by a simplified narrative by which those living in the region can be understood only through the lens of fear (“the terrorist”) or pity (“the refugee”). The battle against Orientalism, in other words, continues.

From the viewpoint of inspiration, it is important that both of the differently simplified versions of the “Arab Spring”—the first idea that it represented a brief, completely non-violent, telegenic, social-media-based revolution that achieved its ends in about the period of time necessary to binge-watch a TV series; and the second idea that the “Arab Spring” names a noble but misguided failure that has brought the region nothing but death, destruction, and ISIS—be once and for all destroyed.

To do so, we need to fight for a different framework for understanding revolutions in the moments of their unfolding. As Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi has recently and brilliantly argued in his book Foucault in Iran, our analytical struggle, in the case of the popular uprisings and revolutions such as those of the “Arab Spring,” is “to save the integrity of the revolutionary movement from its later outcomes.”[1]

To do so means insisting, once and for all, that the “Arab Spring,” as popularly understood, never actually happened; nor has it, once and for all, ended. Others who are taking part in this roundtable are better equipped to describe, with the necessary complexity and commitment, what did in fact happen. As for what happens next, that is, to a great extent, up to all of us.

NOTES

 

[1] Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 75. 

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[This article is one of six contributions to the Jadaliyya roundtable on Arab Uprisings. Click here to read the introduction or read other contributions].
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Maya Mikdashi By :
Maya Mikdashi

American Elections Watch 1: Rick Santorum and The Dangers of Theocracy

One day after returning to the United States after a trip to Lebanon, I watched the latest Republican Presidential Primary Debate. Unsurprisingly, Iran loomed large in questions related to foreign policy. One by one (with the exception of Ron Paul) the candidates repeated President Obama`s demand that Iran not block access to the Strait of Hormuz and allow the shipping of oil across this strategic waterway. Watching them, I was reminded of Israel`s demand that Lebanon not exploit its own water resources in 2001-2002. Israel`s position was basically that Lebanon`s sovereign decisions over the management of Lebanese water resources was a cause for war. In an area where water is increasingly the most valuable resource, Israel could not risk the possibility that its water rich neighbor might disrupt Israel`s ability to access Lebanese water resources through acts of occupation, underground piping, or unmitigated (because the Lebanese government has been negligent in exploiting its own water resources) river flow. In 2012, the United States has adopted a similar attitude towards Iran, even though the legal question of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz is much more complicated and involves international maritime law in addition to Omani and Iranian claims of sovereignty. But still, US posturing towards Iran is reminiscent of Israeli posturing towards Lebanon. It goes something like this: while the US retains the right to impose sanctions on Iran and continuously threaten war over its alleged pursuit of a nuclear weapon, Iran should not dare to assume that it can demand the removal of US warships from its shores and, more importantly, should not dream of retaliating in any way to punitive sanctions imposed on it. One can almost hear Team America`s animated crew breaking into song . . . “America . . . Fuck Yeah!”

During the debate in New Hampshire, Rick Santorum offered a concise answer as to why a nuclear Iran would not be tolerated and why the United States-the only state in the world that has actually used nuclear weapons, as it did when it dropped them on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki- should go to war over this issue. Comparing Iran to other nuclear countries that the United States has learned to “tolerate” and “live with” such as Pakistan and North Korea, Santorum offered this succinct nugget of wisdom: Iran is a theocracy. Coming from a man who has stated that Intelligent Design should be taught in schools, that President Obama is a secular fanatic, that the United States is witnessing a war on religion, and that God designed men and women in order to reproduce and thus marriage should be only procreative (and thus heterosexual and “fertile”), Santorum`s conflation of “theocracy” with “irrationality” seemed odd. But of course, that is not what he was saying. When Santorum said that Iran was a theocracy what he meant is that Iran is an Islamic theocracy, and thus its leaders are irrational, violent, and apparently (In Santorum`s eyes) martyrdom junkies. Because Iran is an Islamic theocracy, it cannot be “trusted” by the United States to have nuclear weapons. Apparently, settler colonial states such as Israel (whose claim to “liberal “secularism” is tenuous at best), totalitarian states such as North Korea, or unstable states such as Pakistan (which the United States regularly bombs via drones and that is currently falling apart because, as Santorum stated, it does not know how to behave without a “strong” America) do not cause the same radioactive anxiety. In Santorum`s opinion, a nuclear Iran would not view the cold war logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) as a deterrent. Instead, the nation of Iran would rush to die under American or Israeli nuclear bombs because martyrdom is a religious (not national, Santorum was quick to state, perhaps realizing that martyrdom for nation is an ideal woven into the tapestry of American ideology) imperative. Santorum`s views on Iran can be seen one hour and two minutes into the debate.

When it comes to Islam, religion is scary, violent and irrational, says the American Presidential candidate who is largely running on his “faith based” convictions. This contradiction is not surprising, given that in the United States fundamentalist Christians regularly and without irony cite the danger that American muslims pose-fifth column style- to American secularism. After all, recently Christian fundamentalist groups succeeded in pressuring advertisers to abandon a reality show that (tediously) chronicled the lives of “American Muslims” living in Detroit. The great sin committed by these American Muslims was that they were too damn normal. Instead of plotting to inject sharia law into the United States Constitution, they were busy shopping at mid-western malls. Instead of marrying four women at a time and vacationing at Al-Qaeda training camps in (nuclear, but not troublingly so) Pakistan, these “American Muslims” were eating (halal) hotdogs and worrying about the mortgages on their homes and the rising costs of college tuition. Fundamentalist Christians watched this boring consumer driven normalcy with horror and deduced that it must be a plot to make Islam appear compatible with American secularism. The real aim of the show, these Christian fundamentalists (who Rick Santorum banks on for political and financial support) reasoned, was to make Islam appear “normal” and a viable religious option for American citizens. Thus the reality show “All American Muslim” was revealed to be a sinister attempt at Islamic proselytizing. This in a country where Christian proselytizing is almost unavoidable. From television to subways to doorbell rings to presidential debates to busses to street corners and dinner tables-there is always someone in America who wants to share the “good news” with a stranger. Faced with such a blatant, and common, double standard, we should continue to ask “If Muslim proselytizers threaten our secular paradise, why do Christian proselytizers not threaten our secular paradise?”

As the United States Presidential Elections kick into gear, we can expect the Middle East to take pride of place in questions pertaining to foreign policy. Already, Newt Gingrich who, if you forgot, has a PhD in history, has decided for all of us, once and for all, that the Palestinians alone in this world of nations are an invented people. Palestinians are not only a fraudulent people, Gingrich has taught us, they are terrorists as well. Candidates stumble over each other in a race to come up with more creative ways to pledge America`s undying support for Israel. Iran is the big baddie with much too much facial hair and weird hats. America is held hostage to Muslim and Arab oil, and must become “energy efficient” in order to free itself from the unsavory political relationships that come with such dependancy. Candidates will continue to argue over whether or not President Obama should have or should not have withdrawn US troops from Iraq, but no one will bring up the reality that the US occupation of Iraq is anything but over. But despite the interest that the Middle East will invite in the coming election cycle, there are a few questions that we can confidently assume will not be asked or addressed. Here are a few predictions. We welcome additional questions from readers.

Question: What is the difference between Christian Fundamentalism and Muslim Fundamentalism? Which is the greater “threat” to American secularism, and why?

Question: The United States` strongest Arab ally is Saudi Arabia, an Islamic theocracy and authoritarian monarchy which (falsely) cites Islamic law to prohibit women from driving cars, voting, but has recently (yay!) allowed women to sell underwear to other women. In addition, Saudi Arabia has been fanning the flames of sectarianism across the region, is the main center of financial and moral support for Al-Qaeda and is studying ways to “obtain” (the Saudi way, just buy it) a nuclear weapon-all as part and parcel of a not so cold war with Iran. Given these facts, how do you respond to critics that doubt the United States` stated goals of promoting democracy, human rights, women`s rights, and “moderate” (whatever that is) Islam?

Question: Israel has nuclear weapons and has threatened to use them in the past. True or false?

Question: How are Rick Santorum`s views on homosexuality (or the Christian right`s views more generally) different than President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad`s or King Abdullah`s? Can you help us tease out the differences when all three have said that as long as homosexuals do not engage in homosexual sex, it`s all good?

Question: Is the special relationship between the United States and Israel more special because they are both settler colonies, or is something else going on?