Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies ISSN: 1944-8953 (Print) 1944-8961 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjsb20 The ‘Anger Revolutions’ in the Middle East: an answer to decades of failed reform Alexander Kazamias To cite this article: Alexander Kazamias (2011) The ‘Anger Revolutions’ in the Middle East: an answer to decades of failed reform, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 13:2, 143-156, DOI: 10.1080/19448953.2011.578857 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19448953.2011.578857 Published online: 20 Jun 2011. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 683 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjsb20 Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, Volume 13, Number 2, June 2011 The ‘Anger Revolutions’ in the Middle East: an answer to decades of failed reform ALEXANDER KAZAMIAS Two weeks after the overthrow of Tunisia’s autocratic ruler, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, and four days after the outbreak of a mass uprising in Egypt, US President Barack Obama appeared on world television to stress the urgent need for reform. ‘We’ve also been clear that there must be reform—political, social and economic reforms that meet the aspirations of the Egyptian people’, he said.1 One month later, during which the Egyptian people also managed to depose their own dictator, Hosni Mubarak, and Libyan rebels took control of large parts of the country after fierce battles with Colonel Qaddafi’s troops, the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, once again declared: ‘Make no mistake about it, this popular wave of reform is spreading.’2 These messages are probably well meaning, but it is difficult to miss their deliberate abuse of key political terms and sheer lack of historical awareness. To refer to the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya as mere ‘reform’ is like describing the burning of the National Democratic Party headquarters in Cairo on 28 January 2011 as a plan for renovating the building! Moreover, some of the State Department’s Middle East experts should have known that a century ago, Egypt’s colonial ruler, Lord Cromer, wrote a celebrated two-volume account in which he described his autocratic policies in the Nile Valley as ‘the history of reform in Egypt’.3 Indeed, both Ben Ali and Mubarak were also supported by the West in running their countries with an iron fist, precisely because they were advancing programmes of political and economic reform.4 Therefore, to seek to somehow present the Winter of Anger in the Middle East as nothing more than an extension of these reforms betrays a desperate desire on the part of the USA to impose a discourse of continuity where there has been a decisive break. Interestingly, the only other side which shares this view of events is the former ruling National Democratic Party of Egypt, whose leaders continued to claim until the eve of Mubarak’s fall that what the protestors demanded in Tahrir Square was to ‘accelerate reform’.5 1 Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by the President on the situation in Egypt’, White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 28 January 2011, ,www.whitehourse.gov/the-press-office-/2011/01/28/remarks- president-situation-egypt .. 2 Hillary Rodham Clinton, ‘Remarks at the Human Rights Council’, Geneva, Switzerland, 28 February 2011, ,www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2011/02/157412.htm .. 3 Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, Vol. 1, Macmillan, London, 1908, p. 5. 4 See Nicola Pratt, Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Arab World, Lynne Rienner, London, 2007, p. 94. 5 Maged Boutros, Interview, BBC World, 5 February 2011. ISSN 1944-8953 print/ISSN 1944-8961 online/11/020143-14 q 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/19448953.2011.578857 144 Alexander Kazamias Nonetheless, what we have witnessed since last December in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya is nothing short of a full-scale revolution. Contrary to conventional belief, a revolution does not necessarily entail the complete removal and replacement of a ruling regime from power. According to Charles Tilly, a revolution can be said to have occurred as soon as a popular uprising forces the ruling regime to transfer some powers to a rival political bloc, which then begins to share sovereignty with elements of the old regime in a new ruling coalition.6 For this reason, events like the Russian Revolution of 1905, the Young Turks’ Revolution of 1908 or the Orabi Revolution of 1881 are known by these names despite the fact that none of them succeeded in deposing the rulers in charge, let alone remove their entire regimes. Nevertheless, in all three cases, Tsar Nicolas II, Sultan Abdul Hamid II and Khedive Tewfiq were forced after popular uprisings to share power with opponents under a new coalition. In this regard, many of the uprisings which took place in the Middle East during the winter of 2010 –11, like those in Jordan, Yemen and Bahrain, until the time of writing,7 could not be described as revolutions. In Jordan, mass protests were eventually checked when King Abdullah II replaced his former Prime Minister Samir al-Rifa’i on 6 February with a new government under Ma’aruf al- Bakheet,8 a change that did not involve alterations in the structures of the ruling regime. In Bahrain, despite a number of conciliatory gestures by King Hamad Bin Issa Al-Khalifa, like the release of political prisoners and the pardoning of the exiled Shi’a leader, Hassan Mushaima’, the mass protests in Manama did not force the country’s autocratic ruler to share power with the opposition. Finally, in Yemen, after 32 years in power, President Ali Abdallah Saleh was forced to declare on 2 February that neither he nor his son will stand for election after the end of his current term in 2013. Moreover, following continued protests the Yemeni president also promised on 28 February that he will form a national unity government with opposition members, but this pledge has not yet been fulfilled. Should it be, then we may start speaking about a limited revolutionary outcome in that country, too. In Tunisia, however, the overthrow of President Ben Ali on 14 January 2011 and the formation of a ‘national unity’ government three days later under Mohamed Al-Ghannoushi were clear signs that an advanced revolutionary outcome has been already achieved. As the Communist Party of Tunisia put it, ‘the success achieved thus far went only half way’ towards full revolutionary change.9 The fact that most of the key posts, including that of the prime minister, were still held by loyal ministers of the Ben Ali regime suggested of course that the revolutionary process still had a long way to go. Nevertheless, the inclusion of former opponents like Ahmed Ibrahim, Majib Chebbie, Mustafa Ben Ja’afar and the dissident blogger Slim Amamou, was clear evidence that power-sharing had begun. Furthermore, the dynamic engendered by the revolution continues to shake the structures of the Tunisian state. As a result, political prisoners have been released, exiled leaders like Rasheed 6 Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993, pp. 8, 14. 7 This is 6 March 2011. 8 Al-‘Arab Al-Yom, 8 February 2011. 9 Tunisian Workers’ Communist Party, ‘Min agl game’eya ta’assisseya tada’ ussos gumhureya dimokrateya’, Al-Badeel, 16 January 2011.  The ‘Anger Revolutions’ in the Middle East 145 Al-Ghannoushi and Moncef Marzouki were allowed to return, political parties have been legalized and a schedule for amending the constitution and holding elections by 24 July 2011 has been announced. In a further blow to the Ben Ali regime, new demonstrations forced Prime Minister Al-Ghannoushi to resign on 27 February and be replaced by Al-Baji Ca’ed El-Sebsi, a former minister under Habib Bourguiba.10 Similarly in Egypt, the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011, together with the removal of his son Gamal from the politburo of the ruling party, was also a tangible revolutionary outcome. Although the transfer of authority to a Supreme Military Council chaired by Field-Marshal Tantawi suggests that the revolutionary process is still incomplete, there are clear signs that the structures of the old regime are rapidly disintegrating. On 15 February, Marshal Tantawi proceeded to appoint a 10-member Commission for the Amendment of the Constitution with the aim of presenting recommendations in a popular referendum that would pave the way for free parliamentary and presidential elections in June and August, respectively.11 One member of the Constitutional Commission has links with the Muslim Brotherhood, while in an interim report on 22 February it was revealed that the proposed amendments will include the abolition of the 30-year-old Emergency Laws and the removal of the absurd conditions listed under article 76 for the approval of presidential candidates.12 Moreover, the Public Prosecutor was allowed to issue indictments against 17 former ministers of the old regime on various corruption charges, including former Prime Minister Ahmed El-Nazif and former Interior Minister Habib ‘Adli, while the assets of the Mubarak family were frozen and their exit from Egypt forbidden.13 Meanwhile, the Supreme Military Council promised to release an estimated 10,000 political prisoners, new political parties have been allowed to form and prison sentences were issued against the thugs of Mubarak’s parastate who assaulted protestors during the revolution.14 Finally, in a further attempt to share power with opponents, a cabinet reshuffle was carried out on 22 February, bringing in opposition figures like Yehia El-Gammal, Munir Abdel Nour and the leftist Gawad Abdel-Khaleq, while on 3 March, the army responded to popular calls and replaced Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, with ‘Essam Sharaf, an academic who served briefly under the old regime, but sided with the protesters in January. A revolutionary outcome has also taken place in Libya, where an uprising against Colonel Qaddafi’s regime started on 17 February in Benghazi and soon spread to other cities, mostly in the eastern part of the country. Although Qaddafi and his son, Seif el-Islam, are still controlling Tripoli and other western areas, the revolution has succeeded in winning over important army units. On 27 February, the rebels announced the formation of a 15-member National Council, led by Mustafa Abdel Gelil, which administers the liberated areas and coordinates the revolutionary effort from Benghazi. In contrast to the Tunisian and Egyptian 10 Al-Wassat Al-Tuniseya, 1 March 2011. 11 Al-Masri Al-Yom, 17 February 2011. 12 Al-Shuruq Al-Gadeed, 23 February 2011, pp. 3, 5. 13 Al-Ahali, 9 March 2011; Al-Masri Al-Yom, 19 February 2011, 5 March 2011. 14 Al-Masri Al-Yom, 24 and 28 February 2011. 146 Alexander Kazamias revolutions, the Libyan uprising split the army, largely along tribal/regional lines, and this has divided the country in a manner that seems to be leading to civil war. Nevertheless, however long the conflict might be, at the moment it seems unlikely that the Libyan dictator will ever restore his power over the eastern part of the country. In this regard, even if his overthrow is not impending, a forcible transfer of power has been achieved and a large section of the Libyan population is now ruled by a new political authority. Was this a ‘Facebook Revolution’? Media pundits like to exaggerate and oversimplify. A tested way of doing so is to attribute all new political and social movements to the latest mass consumed technological invention. As a result, the revolutions of 1989 were not apparently caused by the prolonged crisis of Soviet communism, but by the invincible power of the T-shirt. A decade later, the Anti-globalization and Anti-Iraq War movements were also attributed to the connecting force of mobile phones and SMS. The same technological determinism was again deployed extensively to account for the recent revolutions in the Middle East. According to New York Times columnist, Roger Cohen, ‘Tunisia was a Facebook revolution’ whose ‘leader was far away: Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook’! As for the Tunisian youth who risked and lost lives in order to make it happen, according to Cohen, this was a mere ‘vehicle’ [sic ] whose historic role consisted in being ‘able to use Facebook for instant communication’.15 Ironically, those who took such analyses seriously were the apparatchiks who ran Mubarak’s police state. On the third day of the revolution, the chiefs of Egypt’s security literally thought they could quell the uprising by pulling the plug on it. Between 27 and 30 January, all Internet and most mobile phone networks were closed down and cyber-protesters, like Wael Ghonem, were arrested and detained. Much to the regime’s vexation, however, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians began to gather in the streets on 28 January, forcing Mubarak to sack his government. Under these circumstances, the young protestors also began to organize the ‘One-million’ demonstration of 1 February, which forced the Egyptian president to announce that he is stepping down in September. In other words, contrary to the mythology of the technological determinists, two of the largest demonstrations in the history of the Middle East were organized in our times largely through the landline telephone network and word of mouth. Moreover, when Wael Ghonem was released on 7 February, he said in his first interview with the Egyptian Dream TV, ‘I was asleep for 12 days [ . . . ] what happened to me made me regret that I was not with the people’.16 Yet, according to the dominant view, cyber protesters are ostensibly beyond the reach of the state, while more traditional forms of protest are not. There is no doubt, of course, that information networks like ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’ played an important part in instigating the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. Evidence, however, suggests that older technologies, like mobile phones, SMS, satellite television, landline phones and word of mouth were 15 Roger Cohen, ‘Facebook and Arab dignity’, New York Times, 24 January 2011. 16 Wael Ghonem, Interview to Mona Al-Shadhli, Al-‘Ashera Massa’an, Dream TV2, 7 February 2011.  The ‘Anger Revolutions’ in the Middle East 147 probably more important. For example, on the eve of the revolutions, ‘Facebook’ penetration stood at 15.8 per cent in Tunisia and only at 5.1 per cent in Egypt, while in the latter country mobile phone penetration was estimated at 77 per cent and satellite television at close to 90 per cent.17 Moreover, several Facebook messages reveal that each group member was usually assigned with the task of informing 10 individuals outside the group about forthcoming demonstrations and events through conventional means. A revealing insight into the workings of the communication networks during the Egyptian revolution can be obtained from the following message, sent through Ghonem’s Facebook page ‘Kulluna Khaled Saeed’: Within an hour.. the call for the Friday of Anger received a response from 7,000 persons and reached 200 thousand.. I wish we could make signal to all our friends and I wish we could send SMS messages and Blackberry and on the chat and print paper calling all the people to demonstrate after the Friday prayers and unite in the main squares.18 As historian Robert Darnton has shown in a classic study of the communication networks in the French Revolution, it is pointless to seek to isolate one medium as the dominant mode of disseminating news during a popular uprising. As he put it, ‘it makes no sense, I think, to separate printed from oral and written modes of communication, as we casually do when we speak of “print culture”, because they were all bound together in a multi-media system’.19 This is precisely what the Facebook message quoted above illustrates; in order to coordinate a mass uprising successfully, the leading activists must set in motion a complex system of multi-media communication in which both the latest and most primitive modes of transmitting news constantly feed into each other. This method enables messages to reach more potential supporters, but it is also the best way of ensuring that news will continue to flow if state censorship begins to restrict the use of certain media. For instance, the chief coordinators of popular ‘Facebook’ pages, like ‘Kulluna Khaled Saeed’, exchanged usernames, passwords and other vital information about their page not via the Internet, but through the much safer method of sealed paper envelops.20 Much of the mythology about the power of ‘Facebook’ has faded away during the media reports about the Libyan Revolution. Since its third day, Internet communications across the country have been considerably disrupted as a result of the Qaddafi regime’s effort to isolate the opposition forces. Nevertheless, the Libyan National Council continues to sustain a powerful resistance, while many demonstrations were organized in Tripoli, Zawiya and other Libyan cities without any significant coordination from the Internet. As the leading Egyptian cyber activist, Gigi Ibrahim, has aptly remarked, ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’ are useful tools, ‘but at the end of the day, if people don’t decide to go to the streets 17 Internet World Stats, ,http://www.internetworldstats.com/africa.htm#eg . (accessed 15 February 2011). 18 From the Facebook page ‘Kulluna Khaled Saeed’, 27 January 2011. 19 Robert Darnton, ‘An early information society: news and the media in eighteenth-century Paris’, The American Historical Review, 105(1), February 2000, p. 30. 20 Mike Giglio, ‘The Facebook freedom fighter’, Newsweek, 21 February 2011, p. 25. 148 Alexander Kazamias . . . nothing will happen’.21 The cases of Egypt and Libya show that Ibrahim’s point is valid both ways. ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’ are useful tools, but if the state disrupts access to them, people will still go to the streets if they decide to do so. The Revolutions that Caught the West by Surprise Commentators are still debating the parallels and contrasts between the East European revolutions of 1989– 90 and the events of the last winter in the Middle East. As Noam Chomsky points out, the most striking contrast is that ‘no Mikhail Gorbachev exists among the great powers that support the Arab dictators’.22 Indeed, the collapse of the East European dictatorships resulted from a sudden withdrawal of support by the region’s hegemonic power, the USSR, following Gorbachev’s decision to end the cold war. By contrast, the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and elsewhere were not reactions to a similar policy shift by the hegemonic power in the Middle East. On the contrary, several weeks after the outbreak of protests in Tunisia and Egypt, the USA and its European allies were still maintaining a vital level of support for the regimes of Ben Ali and Mubarak. In particular, three days before the Tunisian dictator fled his country, the French Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie offered to send him counter-insurgency experts to aid his security police in crushing the revolution,23 while the US administration, despite considering the option momentarily, decided not to revise its $1.5 billion of annual aid to the Mubarak regime. For such reasons, the popular revolutions in the Middle East were far more difficult, risky and, according to some, more daring than those which swept across Eastern Europe in 1989—except perhaps for Poland, where the domino began, and Romania, whose dictator was also a close US ally. For decades to come, historians of the Middle East will be still looking for answers to the question of how the unarmed and leaderless people of Tunisia and Egypt managed to challenge so decisively one of the world’s most solid systems of regional hegemony. For the time being, it seems that the USA ended up writing itself off as an influential actor in these developments because of a chain of events which forced it to settle for the contradictory policy of siding both with the dictators and with the protesters in the streets. Eventually, as the balance tilted in favour of the latter, Washington sought to champion the protesters’ cause; but this should not overshadow the fact that in the earlier stages of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, its policy was supportive of the dictators and, in the crucial stages, became dualist and attentiste. The first link in the chain of events that led to the adoption of this double- track approach was the relative speed by which the Tunisian revolution unfolded. Although the protests had been going on for four weeks, it was not 21 Tony Rogers, ‘Citizen journalist Gigi Ibrahim uses tools of the web to spread news of Cairo protests’, About.com—Journalism, 28 January 2011, ,http/journalism.about.com/b/2011/01/28/ citizen-journalist-gigi-ibrahim-uses-tools-of-the-web-to-spread-news-of-cairo-protests.htm .. 22 Noam Chomsky, ‘It’s not radical Islam that worries the US—it’s independence’, The Guardian, 4 February 2011. 23 Le Monde, ‘Tunisie: les propos “effrayants” d’Alliot-Marie suscitent la polémique’, 14 January 2011.  The ‘Anger Revolutions’ in the Middle East 149 until the eve of Ben Ali’s departure on 14 January that the governments of Paris and Washington started to realize how deeply they had shaken the regime. Indeed, when Foreign Minister Alliot-Marie was criticized at the French Assembly for mishandling the crisis, she replied: ‘We have been surprised by the speed of this revolution. [ . . . ] France, no more than other countries, did not see these events coming.’24 This statement, of course, included the US adminis- tration, which appears to have deferred the matter to Tunisia’s former colonial masters until it became clear that France had failed to help Ben Ali crush the Jasmine Revolution. As a result, the first statement made by Barack Obama on Tunisia came on the day of Ben Ali’s flight from the country, by which time the US president had nothing else to say but ‘I applaud the courage and dignity of the Tunisian people’.25 The second link in this chain of events was the failure of the US administration to realize that, in trying to champion the Tunisian revolution, it was opening the floodgates of popular revolt everywhere in the region. So strong was Washington’s false belief that Tunisia was a one-off case, that four days after Bin Ali’s departure and a week before the eruption of the Egyptian revolution, the White House announced that President Obama had spoken to Hosni Mubarak and that both presidents agreed to support the new Tunisian interim government and demand ‘free and fair elections’.26 After such joint statements, of course, it would have been deeply embarrassing for the USA to suddenly appear to be turning its back on the protestors in Egypt, who started demanding the same things a few days later. The third factor which made it even more difficult for the US administration to appear to be supporting the Mubarak regime after the start of the Egyptian revolution was the unexpectedly dramatic shift in American public opinion. While the Israeli government and many of its lobbyists in Washington still feared that democracy in Egypt will threaten Israeli security, a Gallup poll conducted during the second week of the uprising showed 82 per cent of adult Americans to be ‘sympathetic to the protesters in Egypt calling for a change of government’. Moreover, of those who claimed to be following the situation closely, 87 per cent were expressing sympathy to the protesters.27 With such staggering rates of support, it would have been unthinkable for any US president to simply ignore these sentiments and appear to be backing the Egyptian regime. Despite not wishing to appear to be supportive of the Mubarak regime, for most of the 18 days of the Egyptian revolution the Obama administration continued to endorse the Egyptian dictator’s preferred solution of staying in power until September. Although in public the White House displayed sympathy for the protesters, the US president sent Ambassador Frank Wisner to Cairo to advise the Egyptian president to stay in power for eight more months, despite the fact that his armed thugs were killing protestors in the streets. Nevertheless, the fourth factor which ultimately forced the US administration to 24 Valérie Gas, ‘Le gouvernement français critiqué sur son peu de réaction à propos des événements en Tunisie’, Radio Francde Internationale, 18 January 2011. 25 The White House, ‘Statement by the President on events in Tunisia’, Office of the Press Secretary, 14 January 2011. 26 The White House, ‘Readout of the President’s call with President Mubarak of Egypt’, Office of the Press Secretary, 18 January 2011. 27 Frank Newport, ‘Americans sympathetic to Egyptian protesters’, GALLUP, 7 February 2011, ,http://www.gallup.com/poll/145979/Americans-Sympathetic-Egyptian-Protesters.aspx .. 150 Alexander Kazamias distance itself from that policy was Ambassador Wisner’s gaffe to reveal the real purpose of his visit to Egypt. Although the impression was that the president’s special envoy had gone to Cairo to advise Mubarak to step down, Frank Wisner appeared on 5 February in a television interview in which he said ‘I believe that President Mubarak’s continuing leadership is critical—it’s his opportunity to write his own legacy’.28 Not surprisingly, after such a long chain of contradictions and debacles, even a liberal magazine like Newsweek would feature on its cover the damning headline: ‘Egypt: How Obama Blew It’.29 Some Republicans, of course, have tried to extract political capital out of these failures, claiming that the recent uprisings somehow vindicate the Neoconser- vative vision of a democratic Middle East. Elliott Abrams, deputy National Security Advisor in the previous administration, has recently argued that events in the Arab world confirm George W. Bush’s view that the people of this region are ‘beyond the reach of liberty’. As he put it, ‘the massive and violent demonstrations underway in Egypt, the smaller ones in Jordan and Yemen, and the recent revolt in Tunisia [ . . . ] are exploding, once and for all, the myth of Arab exceptionalism’.30 These assertions, however, are both arbitrary and misleading. First, in his speech of 6 November 2003, which Abrams quotes extensively, George W. Bush was not developing an academic thesis about whether Arab societies are capable of becoming democratic or not, a question which many others before him have answered with a categorical ‘yes’. His aim in that speech was to present a new policy premised on the USA’s commitment to intervene in the internal affairs of the Middle East in order to promote democracy and liberal values. As he made it clear on that occasion, ‘the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before.’31 Consequently, to be able to claim now that recent events in the Middle East have vindicated the former US president’s views, the Neoconservatives must demonstrate first that these changes resulted from George W. Bush’s interven- tionist policy in the region. Thankfully, however, not even Elliott Abrams has thought of making such a preposterous proposition. Second, the former NSC advisor’s claims are also motivated by an attempt to mask George W. Bush’s scandalous record of supporting and cooperating with virtually every Arab dictator while his administration sustained a zealous propaganda campaign about promoting democracy in the region. In February 2004, for example, the former US president hosted Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Washington and presented him as nothing less than the hope of liberty in the Arab world. ‘Tunisia’, he said in Ben Ali’s presence, ‘can help lead the greater Middle East to reform and freedom.’32 Throughout his presidency, George W. Bush also continued to provide the Mubarak regime with $2.3 billion of 28 Geir Moulson, ‘Envoy: Mubarak has to lead Egypt to transition’, Associated Press, 5 February 2011; Robert Fisk, ‘US envoy’s business link to Egypt’, The Independent, 7 February 2011. 29 Newsweek, CLVII(8), 21 February 2011. 30 Elliott Abrams, ‘Egypt protests show George W. Bush was right about freedom in the Arab world’, Washington Post, 29 January 2011. 31 George W. Bush, ‘Remarks by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy’, Washington, DC, 6 November 2003. 32 Anver Vensi, ‘Tunisia and the USA’, Special Report: Tunisia and the United States, IC Publications, Middle East, March 2004, p. 32.  The ‘Anger Revolutions’ in the Middle East 151 economic and military assistance every year, making Egypt one of the highest recipients of US aid worldwide. Moreover, during her visit to Egypt in May 2005, First Lady Laura Bush praised Mubarak’s constitutional acrobatics and brutal treatment of protesters prior to the presidential election of that year as ‘a very bold step [ . . . ] to open up the elections’.33 This support was maintained later when, despite extensive reports of ballot rigging and voter harassment, the State Department hailed Mubarak’s re-election with 89 per cent ‘a historic departure for Egypt’.34 Finally, it is worth stressing that far from reversing the realist policy of his predecessors with an ethical commitment to democracy, George W. Bush was the first American president to establish good relations with the Libyan dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. According to the Washington Post, he was also the first US president since Richard Nixon to agree to speak to the Libyan dictator, while former Secretary Condoleezza Rice, rather than expose his deplorable human rights record, praised his ‘excellent cooperation in response to common global threats faced by the civilised world’.35 Therefore, instead of discussing whether the Neoconservatives are justified in claiming credit for the recent Arab uprisings, it would be more appropriate to ask the more serious question of whether their record in office should not be seen as an obstacle against an earlier advance towards democracy in the Middle East. The End of the Postcolonial Arab State The revolutions which erupted in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and the continuing uprisings in Yemen and Bahrain are all different political events whose circum- stances are in many respects unique. At the same time, however, it is impossible to overlook the striking similarities connecting these developments, which clearly extend beyond the fact that they are all happening at the same time, in the same region, by populations sharing the same culture and against dictators closely allied to the West. Beneath these obvious shared characteristics lies another important common feature which is the generalized crisis of the postcolonial Arab state. The Winter of Anger in the Middle East is both a product of the prolonged degeneration of this type of state and the historic event which signals the beginning of its end. As several scholars have argued since the 1970s, the states which emerged in Africa and Asia after independence continued to display many characteristics inherited from the colonial era. Like its predecessor, the postcolonial state was highly centralized, authoritarian and dependent on external powers, although in contrast to the colonial state, it also became highly bureaucratized in an effort to promote development.36 Notwithstanding their important local variations, the 33 Dina Ezzat, ‘Looking to Laura’s laurels: did the recent exchange of high-level visits between Egypt and the US bring the two nations closer? Not particularly’, Al-Ahram Weekly, No. 744, 26 May–1 June 2005. 34 Christine Lagorio, ‘Mubarak wins Egypt vote’, CBS News World, 8 September 2005; Mariam Fam, ‘Egypt. A historic vote for president, but balloting marred by fraud charges’, Associated Press, 8 September 2005. 35 ‘Bush speaks with Gaddafi in historic phone call’, Washington Post, 18 November 2008; Scott MacLeod, ‘Why Gaddafi’s now a good guy’, Time Magazine, 16 May 2006. 36 Hamza Alavi, ‘The state in post-colonial societies: India and Pakistan’, New Left Review, I/74, July–August 1972, pp. 61– 62; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1993, p. 15. 152 Alexander Kazamias one-party states which emerged under Bourguiba in Tunisia, Nasser in Egypt and Qaddafi in Libya, all displayed many of these features.37 In his analysis of the demise of the postcolonial state in Africa, Crawford Young has argued that since the early years of independence the rulers of the one-party states which spread across the continent, gradually began to conflate their largely bureaucratic power with patrimonial networks of family members, friends, cronies and clients, which by the 1980s degenerated into personalized autocracies.38 Although Young argues that since the 1990s many of these patrimonial regimes began to disintegrate in the face of the rising tide of globalization and Huntington’s ‘third wave of democratisation’, in the case of the Arab world this has not been the experience. The patrimonial regimes which emerged under Ben Ali, Mubarak and Qaddafi—all rather conspicuously marked by their reversion to a semi- royalist, familial type of rule—turned out to be considerably more adaptive to the changes brought about by the growing globalization of the 1990s and by George W. Bush’s campaign of ‘democracy promotion’ in the region. In reality, the survival of the postcolonial Arab state in its degenerate, patrimonial form has been the outcome of a determined Western effort to sustain it after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as the only alternative to the rise of political Islam. This was very obviously the case across the Persian Gulf, including the toleration of Saddam Hussein’s regime until 2003—where the political economy of oil was also a crucial factor—but it was certainly the case, too, across the states of North Africa, where other important interests were at stake, like Israel’s security and the protection of its strategic treaty with Egypt, also concluded in 1979. As a result, political experiments in democratization, like those attempted in Algeria in 1991, or popular uprisings, like those which broke out in Bahrain in 1994, were brutally crushed with the support of Western governments in order to prevent Islamist parties like the Front Islamique du Salut or the Shi’a Al-Wefaq party from ever rising to power. The inevitable outcome of this policy was to prolong the life of a moribund postcolonial state beyond the completion of its historical role by several decades. Of course, throughout the next 35 years, the West has been at pains to reinvent the postcolonial Arab state through various IMF and World Bank neoliberal reforms, but these did little more than replace the cherished sense of community from the early independence years with a new class of nouveaux riches millionaires and mass youth unemployment. Meanwhile, the very essence of the postcolonial Arab state, that is, its highly centralized, repressive and dependent nature, remained practically untouched. To understand the macro-historical factors which led to the recent revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya it is essential to grasp the fundamental difference between the bureaucratic/developmental nature of the early postcolonial state and the patrimonial/neoliberal character to which it degenerated since the late 1970s. For Nasserite writers, like Mohammed Heikal, the main difference is one of legitimacy; Nasser and the early Sadat allegedly enjoyed it, but in more recent decades, Heikal stressed, ‘there is a crisis of legitimacy, as most regimes in the 37 Emma Murphy, Economic and Political Change in Tunisia: From Bourguiba to Ben Ali, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1999, pp. 80– 102. 38 Crawford Young, ‘The end of the post-colonial state in Africa? Reflections on changing African political dynamics’, African Affairs, 103, January 2004, pp. 23 –49.  The ‘Anger Revolutions’ in the Middle East 153 Arab world rule through de facto power’.39 Be that as it may, what is far more obvious to us today is that the latent historical tensions between the bureaucratic backbone of the early postcolonial state and the patrimonial networks of its later period have suddenly surfaced in an apocalyptic way during the revolutions of 2010– 11. It is vitally important to remember that if the protesters in Tunisia and Egypt were ultimately successful in removing their tyrants from power, this was largely because the armies in both states also decided to abandon their political leadership and side with the revolutionary movements. A similar response was also decisive in limiting Qaddafi’s authority to western Libya, but in contrast to its neighbouring states, the loss of army support by the ruling dictator was only partial. Of course, political decisions of such magnitude, especially when they involve large hierarchical organizations like the army, are never taken momentarily. They usually demand years of dissatisfaction and estrangement from the political leadership of the state, a problem that cannot be simply removed, as Ben Ali, Mubarak and Qaddafi thought, through extensive appointments of senior officers to top government positions. Although research is needed to reveal the more specific causes of the Arab armies’ long estrangement from their political leaders, it is nevertheless obvious that a major conflict grew between the culture of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and nepotism at the high levels of government and the disciplined, nationalist and puritanical ethos of the middle and lower officer ranks. Nowhere perhaps was this clash of values more clearly epitomized than in the long ‘crises of succession’ which emerged in all three states for nearly two decades. As early as 1994, Heikal observed that ‘succession’ was a generalized problem across the Arab world and pointed out specifically Ben Ali, Mubarak and Qaddafi as three of six Arab rulers whose regimes were facing an uncertain future.40 In the next few years, the crisis of succession deepened further, especially for the armies, as it became apparent that the military authority of the ruling regimes was seriously challenged by the emergence of ‘heirs apparent’ whose sole claim to power was their blood relation to the ruling dictator. Therefore, in contrast to Ben Ali, Mubarak and Qaddafi, who all rose to power as distinguished military officers, the dominant succession scenarios involved either the cousins of the former Tunisian ruler and his wife, Leila Al-Trabulsi, or the sons of the Egyptian and Libyan dictators, all being individuals who lacked an organic relationship with the military corps. In this regard, the revolutions of 2010 –11 came exactly at the moment when the nepotistic structures of the ruling patrimonial regimes were threatening to eradicate the last vestiges of authority still retained by the armies. Although this crisis of authority within the structures of the state did not itself engender the widespread sense of political disillusion shared by most Arabs for years, in countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen it nevertheless played a decisive role in creating out of this mass dissent an advanced revolutionary situation. Equally importantly, however, the inner conflict between the army and the patrimonial structures of authority proved no less decisive in splitting the repressive state apparatuses during the popular uprisings and thus enabling 39 Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, Misr wa al-qarn al-wahed wal-‘eshrun: Waraqa fi hiwar, Dar el- Shuruq, Cairo, 1994, p. 46. 40 Ibid., p. 46. 154 Alexander Kazamias the revolutions to achieve significant outcomes. In both Tunisia and Egypt, this split was vertical, with the security police and parastatal elements on the one hand spearheading the counter-revolutionary offensive on behalf of the patrimonial power system, while on the other hand, the armies, discretely but decisively, protected the revolutionary movements. In the case of Libya, however, this split took place inside the army itself, with the units located in the west siding with the security forces and staying loyal to the Qaddafi family, while those which sided with the revolutionary movement declared allegiance to the Libyan National Council. Conclusion: Why Revolution Succeeds where Liberal Reform has Failed Throughout most of the 20th century, liberals and conservatives alike have turned to three main objections in order to reject revolution as a viable method of bringing about political and social change. The first was that revolutions are by their very nature violent, in contrast to the orderly and peaceful character of reform. The second criticism was that, in order to defend their unconstitutional claims to state power, successful revolutions were obliged to turn into dictatorships and, by implication, betray their own original ideals. The third criticism, famously advanced by Edmund Burke, is that all revolutionary change is artificial and therefore doomed to destroy the organic unity of society. As the Whig philosopher famously remarked, revolutions ‘leveled and crushed together all the orders which they found’.41 It was precisely for such reasons that ‘fear of revolution’, as Hannah Arendt observed in the 1960s, developed into ‘the hidden leitmotif of American foreign policy [ . . . ] with the result that American power and prestige were used and misused to support obsolete and corrupt political regimes’.42 Fifty years on, the failure of the Obama administration to acknowledge that the momentous events currently taking place in the Middle East were brought about by revolution, is continuing proof that Arendt’s diagnosis still remains as valid as it had been during the height of the cold war. Nevertheless, the recent changes in the Arab world, much like those which took place in Eastern Europe 20 years ago, have once again confirmed that the long-standing ideological objections of mainstream Western opinion towards the notion of revolutionary change are difficult to sustain. First, the perception that the regimes which follow a pro-Western reformist agenda, like those of Ben Ali and Mubarak, are somehow less violent than the revolutionary crowds which brought them down is totally unfounded and misleading. This is evident not only in the dreadful record of deliberate killings carried out by the official regimes during the days of the 2010– 11 revolutions, but also from the less well-known history of their security forces’ activities over the past decades, which involved thousands of cases of extra- judicial detentions, torture, rape, secret deportations, killings and mysterious disappearances. Second, the impression that orderly reform should always be regarded as a more democratic form of effecting political and social change than revolutionary action is also seriously challenged by the recent developments in 41 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, [1790], Kessinger, Whitefish, 2004, p. 152. 42 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, [1963], Penguin, London, 1990, p. 217.  The ‘Anger Revolutions’ in the Middle East 155 Tunisia and Egypt. Never did the peoples of these countries enjoy as much freedom in determining their own affairs as they have done in recent weeks and few—if any—Tunisians and Egyptians are willing to forsake it in return for more IMF, World Bank and US-guided reform packages. Moreover, all indications hitherto suggest that as long as the momentum of revolution stays alive, the prospect of a successful transition to genuine democracy remains considerably more realistic than it had ever been under the political reforms of Ben Ali and Mubarak. Finally, concerning the objection that revolution disrupts the organic unity of society, two points are in order. First, the recent revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were all turned against regimes which did not evolve organically over a long period of time, but drew their constitutional legality either from fairly recent coups or self-proclaimed ‘revolutions’. In Tunisia, the toppled regime of Ben Ali emerged from the bloodless coup of 7 November 1987, which led to the rewriting of parts of the country’s Constitution; in Egypt, the toppled Mubarak regime evolved from President Sadat’s ‘Corrective Revolution’ of 15 May 1971, which led to the adoption of the country’s present Constitution; and in Libya, Colonel Qaddafi also rose to power after the ‘Green Revolution’ of 1 September 1969, which replaced the Constitution of 1951 with his well-known Green Book. In this regard, the revolutionary wave of 2010– 11 found little in terms of long-established institutions and traditions to damage. To be more precise, the structures which organically evolved in these societies, in so far as they ever existed, were ‘levelled and crushed’ during the period of their administration by French, British and Italian colonialist reformers who, rather ironically, read and admired Burke. The second point which merits attention is that the Burkean critique of revolution has been the sort of discourse which the beleaguered Arab dictators resorted to on the eve of their fall from power. ‘The events taking place in our country are not part of us. Destruction is not part of the Tunisian traditions’, cried Ben Ali in his last televised address to the Tunisian people on 13 January 2011.43 ‘If I resign today, there will be chaos’, was Mubarak’s last line of defence shortly before he stepped down.44 As it turned out, it is not Ben Ali’s regime, but the Jasmine Revolution which will forever be a part of Tunisia’s best traditions; and several weeks after Mubarak’s fall, it is not chaos, but freedom and hope which now prevail throughout Egypt. Of course, there will be always some, especially in the West and Israel, who will continue to doubt the virtues of revolutionary change, particularly for societies like those of the Middle East. Nevertheless, if they were ever earnest in justifying wars, invasions, occupations and neoliberal reforms as means of ‘promoting democracy’ in the Arab world, then they must now concede that where their militaristic and reformist methods have failed, popular revolutionary movements are succeeding. Alexander Kazamias is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Coventry University and a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies. He has written several articles and book chapters on Greek foreign policy, Greek– 43 President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s address to the Tunisian People, TV7 Tunisia, 13 January 2011. 44 Hosni Mubarak, interview with Christiane Amanpour, ABC News, 3 February 2011. 156 Alexander Kazamias Turkish relations and the modern history of Egypt. He is the author of the forthcoming book Greece and the Cold War: Diplomacy and Anti-Colonialism after the Civil Conflict (I. B. Tauris, London). Address for correspondence: Department of International Studies and Social Science, Coventry University, Priory Street, Coventry CV1 5SE, UK. E-mail: a.kazamias@coventry.ac.uk