Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • TUnisia
What Tunisia Will Mean
for Arab Democracy
BY STEVEN HEYDEMANN
Even as Tunisians struggle to create a new political order, the popular
overthrow of Tunisia’s dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, is reshaping
politics across the Middle East. Arab regimes have often been criticized
as sclerotic and archaic; they are neither. Over the past two decades, they
have confronted and overcome a wide range of challenges that have caused
authoritarian governments to collapse in many other world regions. Arab
regimes have demonstrated their resilience in the past, and they continue
to do so in the wake of the Tunisian uprising. If the United States and its allies
wish to exploit the Tunisian example to widen processes of democratic
change in the Arab world, they will need to adapt as well.
Over the past two decades, Arab regimes have absorbed and survived the
shock of the political transformations of 1989, the democratization of Eastern
Europe, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Through trial and error,
they have developed strategies for managing pressures for political reform
and fending off the democracy-promoters of the West, in part by appropriating
the rhetoric of democracy and turning it to their own advantage.
They have learned how to control Islamist political participation, regulate
new media technologies, and broker new divisions of labor between state
and market in pursuit of economic development. In several cases, including
Syria, they have safely navigated leadership successions that were seen
as moments of vulnerability for regimes that built huge personality cults
around their leaders.
Like their democracy-promoting adversaries, authoritarian regimes too
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