By Rami G. Khouri
 

The ongoing dramatic developments in half a dozen Arab countries where regimes have been overthrown or are being challenged by their own people continue to captivate the world.
 
In the first months of the uprisings, many observers expressed amazement at the sight of Arab citizens daring to peacefully challenge their own authoritarian governments – and evicting them from office in some cases. Then came a phase when regimes responded with military force to quell the revolts, as in Libya, Syria and Bahrain, leading to conflict or warfare. Now we are in the third phase of analyzing the Arab uprisings, focusing heavily on achieving stability and looking to what the future holds.
 
Nobody knows how the transitions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya will turn out in the end, as the citizens of these countries engage each other and try to build a new system of governance. A hopeful sign is that we no longer hear many people across the Western world openly express total rejection of Arab Islamist groups taking part in the reconfiguration of Arab power structures and governance systems. This triumph of the legitimacy of elected parties has been a long time coming, perhaps because the world has learned that it was a big mistake to boycott and try to bring down the Islamists who won elections fairly in Palestine and Algeria starting in the early 1990s.
 
Islamists now routinely engage in political contestation and have won elections in several Arab countries, to the point where they dominate governing institutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco, and promise to do so in other countries when they have the chance to compete fairly in free elections. This exaggerated focus on what will happen when Islamists gain or share power has now been replaced by equally exaggerated speculation about whether these countries in transition will ever be able to form stable new governments and respond to the pressing needs of their people, especially in terms of creating jobs and improving living standards.
 
I say these are exaggerated views because I feel that they misdiagnose the nature of the transitions, and consequently make the situation look much more hopeless than it really is. Two specific dimensions of the current situation cause this pessimism to take hold: the number of actors who are involved in the political battles under way for control of the government through democratic means; and the speed with which changes are occurring, especially in Egypt.
 
A more accurate and hopeful view, in my opinion, would see the many actors as a positive development, especially that new actors continue to enter the political stage on a regular basis. These actors across North African states in transition now include the Muslim Brotherhood, the more hard-line Salafist Islamists, the armed forces, traditional political parties, new parties that are mostly secular or leftist, some nationalist groups, revolutionary youth, football fans, hired or independent thugs, tribal groups, militias, civil society groups, some businessmen or business groups, religious bodies not linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, occasional cultural figures and media organizations, and foreign groups of various kinds, whether governments or nongovernmental organizations.
 
The fact that all these groups emerged from within these societies and did not come from abroad clarifies the important point that this dynamic array of political actors accurately reflects the wide range of views and interests in Arab societies. It is healthy, not dangerous, for the indigenous political identities and forces within any country to emerge from the shadows and engage in politics in the open air. We should hope that others that remain underground or in the shadows similarly emerge into the sunlight and take their place in the marketplace of political ideas and interests.
 
The second reason I am hopeful is that political dynamics in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt are overwhelmingly nonviolent and are operating within a consensus political framework that is renegotiated and validated every week by the many groups of citizens engaging with each other. They do so in an array of arenas also, making the political scene in transitioning Arab states appear dangerously chaotic, when in fact this is also a sign of vigor and health. These arenas include elections, referendums, parliament, media, the armed forces, civil society, the courts and the government structures themselves.
 
This process appears chaotic because in fact it is not a single process, but rather a series of nation-building dynamics that are happening simultaneously, when in most other countries in the world they happened sequentially. So what we have been witnessing in Egypt in the span of the last 14 months is the equivalent of what happened in the United States over two centuries, including the War of Independence, the constitutional conventions, the civil war, the civil rights movement and the struggle over state rights versus federal power, to mention only the most important political events.
 
What we are seeing in Tunisia and Egypt is not dangerous turmoil or chaos, but rather a very complex set of nation-building and nation-defining dynamics compressed into a ridiculously short time span.
 
Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly by THE DAILY STAR.