Popular revolutions are difficult to predict or, more accurately, easy to overpredict. How often does an opinion piece begin or end by declaring, "The current [repressive, unjust, unstable, dangerous] situation cannot last." Yet in the Middle East it has. Sclerotic, illegitimate, and brutal governments persist and seemingly grow stronger, despite their countries' many problems. Democratic waves swept Europe, Latin America, and Asia, even touching parts of Africa, but the Middle East remained a desert of autocracy.
The scholarly and broader analytic community offers some insights to explain the surprising endurance of regimes like those of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Two works I'll single out are Eva Bellin's "The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective," in Comparative Politics 36 (2004); and Steven Heydemann's "Upgrading Authoritarianism in the Arab World" (Brookings, 2007).
Bellin assesses structural explanations of authoritarianism's strength and dismisses factors such as weak civil-society institutions, poor literacy rates, and the antidemocratic nature of Islam. Other countries have overcome those real (or, in the case of Islam, supposed) barriers to democracy. Instead she finds that "abundant rent," usually via oil revenues or foreign aid, enabled Arab states to develop strong intelligence services and militaries to coerce their populations. Reinforcing that state power is consistent foreign support for the authoritarian regimes, driven by security concerns.
Heydemann takes Bellin's work a step further, explaining how authoritarian regimes cynically use the structures of democracy, such as elections, to cement their power. By fixing the democratic game, they are able to win the trappings of legitimacy and minimize foreign criticism, and indeed draw foreign aid. So Tunisia holds presidential elections and Egypt has a parliament, but those democratic forms are perversely twisted to secure the regimes' hold on power.
In Tunisia, however, that seemingly solid structure collapsed abruptly, and in Egypt, Mubarak's end appears nigh (though another rule for analyzing the Middle East is: Never dismiss the forces of darkness). Scholars have less to say on what seems a bolt from the blue. The social-science community's work on revolution suffers from many shortcomings, both methodological and empirical; none of the major works explain why millions of Egyptians are now risking their lives by demonstrating for freedom when, only weeks ago, activists decried their fellow citizens for their passivity. (And my finger-pointing should start at home: I missed this one by a good mile or so.)
The revolts in Tunisia and Egypt should inject, or perhaps better to say reinsert, two ideas into our discourse. Maybe the more important is the ineffable but vital concept of the force of ideas. Social scientists know this is important, but it is difficult to measure and almost impossible to quantify, leading many scholars to exclude it from their studies.
Yet it is hard to deny that unrest in Tunisia spread like wildfire beyond the small country's borders, and that the protests in Egypt, are, in turn, inspiring domestic opposition in Jordan, Yemen, and other Arab countries. The force of ideology inspired the young and idealistic, while their initial success convinced the prudent that the moment to rise had come.
Another part of the mystery may lie in the mobilization, often via social media, of new political actors. In Egypt, for example, the first protesters did not belong to either the Muslim Brotherhood or the El Ghad party of Ayman Nour. As a result, the regime could not simply round up the usual suspects.
From a policy point of view, Western officials should think of "moments" as well as "conditions" when promoting democratization. The Bush administration hectored Mubarak, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice herself giving a Cairo speech that made the regime squirm, declaring, "The Egyptian government must fulfill the promise it has made to its people—and to the entire world—by giving its citizens the freedom to choose." All to no avail. Obama, on the other hand, de-emphasized democratization in his Middle East policy, but Egypt appears ripe for revolution despite his inaction. Policy planning needs to prepare for these moments, enabling a coherent and far-seeing response even as chaos breaks out all around us.
