Spring is normally followed by summer, but the Arab Spring went cold in most places, skipping summer and fall altogether. In The Arab Winter, Noah Feldman offers an insightful exploration of what happened and why.
A professor at Harvard Law School, Feldman had a walk-on role in some of the events he describes. He was (briefly) an advisor to the American occupation authority in Iraq. Feldman argues well that by winning the war but losing the peace, the U.S. destabilized the entire region, creating conditions that allowed for the Arab Spring, the Syrian Civil War and the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS). More happily than in Iraq, he also served as constitutional law advisor to the Arab Spring’s lone success story, Tunisia. He gives himself no credit but praises the country’s citizens for their “political responsibility” and its politicians for their willingness to compromise.
Libya, Yemen and Bahrain were also sites where the Arab Spring was crushed or devolved into civil war, but Feldman focuses instead on the Islamic State, Egypt and Syria. In the latter case, the understandable calls for regime change from Sunni Muslims protestors were complicated by the regime’s identification with Syria’s religious minorities, whose members felt threatened by the specter of ethnic cleansing if Bashar al-Assad lost.
Egypt’s Arab Spring began more hopefully. The protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square (2011) eventually forced out the long-ruling dictator, Hosni Mubarak. The second wave of Tahrir Square protests (2013) directed anger against Mubarak’s democratically elected successor, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi. In both cases, the uproar enabled the army to act; the second time they placed one of their own in the president’s seat.
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Throughout The Arab Winter, Feldman gives a balanced account accompanied by a perceptive analysis of the events and their actors. His conclusions on Egypt are controversial and provocative. According to him, the protestors knew what they didn’t like yet most had no clear idea of what they wanted instead. Many who took to the streets in Egypt (and elsewhere) sought social and economic justice, not necessarily democracy. In all cases, Feldman understands the protestors as expressing the will of “the people.” His stance will sound radical but travels on the same train of thought found in the American Declaration of Independence. As Feldman writes of Tahrir in 2013, “the people can repudiate any form of government they do not want—including democracy itself.”
Feldman concludes The Arab Winter with the happy ending of Tunisia, yet even here, he warns that the social and economic issues behind the Arab Spring have not been solved by that nation’s constitutional democracy.
