Rewriting the narrative of the 2011 Arab uprisings

Five years after the start of the Egyptian uprising, Alan Philps thinks about ways to rewrite the narriative of the Arab Spring

An Egyptian protester waves his national flag as tens of thousands gather for a demonstration at Cairo's Tahrir Square on April 8, 2011. Misam Saleh / AFP

On Monday, Egyptians will mark the fifth anniversary of the start of the uprising that toppled the 29-year regime of former president Hosni Mubarak. Given what has followed throughout the region, the start of the so-called Arab Spring is hardly likely to be an occasion for full-throated celebration.

In the West, the narrative arc of the Arab revolts goes something like this: it begins with a “Facebook revolution” fronted by graduates of the American University of Cairo with fluent English. The revolution loses its way, and Tahrir Square protests continue as the Muslim Brotherhood is elected and tries to consolidate its hold on power. The army returns.

In Libya, the death of Colonel Qaddafi leads to civil war among rival militias. In Syria, protests against the regime of Bashar Al Assad are drowned in blood, leading to a war between proxy forces which tears the country apart and forces half the population from their homes. In Iraq, a few thousand ISIL fighters burst out of the desert and take over Mosul, humiliating the Iraqi army and establishing a self-proclaimed “caliphate” of head-choppers on the Syrian-Iraqi border which attracts the confused youth of Muslims lands and beyond.

This is not a true narrative – just a scrapbook of the TV images that are burnt onto the consciousness of outside observers. But it is worth pulling them apart to get closer to the real issues. To start with, the notion of a “Facebook revolution” is deeply suspect. The Egyptian authorities switched off mobile phone coverage and the internet to try to stem the protests, but this only drove people out of their homes to swell the numbers in the square.

This is not to deny the role of social media as a catalyst and medium for shaping the narrative. According to Google, more minutes of video about the Syrian war have been uploaded to social media than the actual duration of the war in real life. Mastery of social media has allowed ISIL to project a digital footprint far out of proportion to the area it occupies and its true level of support among Muslims worldwide.

Second, religion should not be seen as the only or even the main force in the collapse of Arab states. Libya, with no appreciable religious minorities, has collapsed into regional fiefdoms no less comprehensively than Syria. Where multi-sectarian countries fall apart and people lose their loyalty to the state, it is to religious identity that they fall back on, as happened with the break-up of Yugoslavia. This process is exaggerated when a regional power struggle involves a country like Iran with an overt sectarian view.

Third, every country is different. Egypt is one of the oldest civilisations in the world, with a history going back to the Pharaohs. By contrast, the borders of Libya, Syria and Iraq are modern constructs, put together by the colonial powers. The chances of Egypt breaking apart are minimal. Rather, the events of the past five years should be seen as the latest in a series of struggles for dominance since the 1950s between the army and Islamist forces, a contest which so far has always been won by the military.

There is, however, one issue that unites all these countries. How can Arab states become countries of all their people? To secure this loyalty they need to provide employment, security and hope for all, rather than for the benefit of a well-connected and self-perpetuating elite.

The reasons why this loyalty does not exist are varied: Iraq was held together by Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, under whose rule technological progress was spurred by a flood of oil revenue. But the bonds of the state were destroyed by the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, with the result that Iraqi nationalism was replaced by sectarian and ethnic identity.

In Syria, the bloodline of the Al Assad family ran out of talent and ideas. A combination of years of drought and the greed of the president’s family and cronies in creaming off the profits of economic liberalisation was bound to set alight the fires of protest.

As for Libya, after Qaddafi was killed it became clear the state did not exist beyond the leader and his family. With no outside power to hold the ring, militias carved up the country, with Qaddafi’s old jihadist opponents finally able to find a safe haven where they could raise the ISIL banner.

It is easier to collapse a state than to rebuild it. If the goal is for Arab states to become countries of all their people, then there need to be new ideas on the relationship between state and people. It may be too late to reconstitute the broken states. But the omens are not good for breakaway states: South Sudan is at war with itself; Kosovo, once part of Serbia, is the neglected orphan of Europe; Eritrea, once part of Ethiopia, is a country its residents just want to escape from.

The alternative is some federal structure, which recognises the different aspirations of different communities. The Americans, in trying to put Iraq back together, call for “functioning federalism” – in contrast to the federalism which is a way station on the road to self-rule such as the Kurds of Iraq have seized.

Even in the most mature democracies federalism is not a panacea, as can be seen in Scotland’s aspiration for independence from Britain and Catalonia’s from Spain. These are the issues that Arab states will need to resolve for themselves.

As for Egypt, the novelist and political activist Alaa Al Aswany believes that the 2011 revolution, despite its clear failure, will change the relationship between state and people. “The Egyptians today are no longer the Egyptians who lived under Mubarak. Everything has changed. We have not achieved the political goals of the revolution, but it continues.” If that is the case, it is up to the Egyptians to lead the way to redefining the Arab state.

Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs.

On Twitter: @aphilps