By Lauren Williams
 

BEIRUT: The images are now as familiar as they were inspiring: Chants of freedom, defiant marches toward gunfire, overwhelming frustration boiling over into steely courage to declare a people’s war on tyranny.
 
The Arab Spring was defined by the street.Now, as the dust begins to settle on a momentous year, observers are starting to question the spontaneity of the uprisings, exemplified so beautifully by the iconic image of the young Tunisian fruitseller Mohammad Bouazizi who set himself ablaze on Feb. 17.
 
Arabs are waking up again to find the same ideologies and forces that bred their discontent are lurking on the sidelines of their revolutions, threatening to fill the vacuums left behind. There is an uncomfortable fear that hard-fought progress may be hijacked by old and dormant schisms, axes waiting to be ground, vested interests and opportunism. Leaders have been toppled, revealing the very legacy of their oppression is still very much at play.
 
“There is a sense that the old narratives and overriding forces that have shaped the region are coming back, but what’s important to remember is that here are also new narratives that will not be eclipsed,” Salman Sheikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center, told The Daily Star.
 
Getting rid of the dictators – at least in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya – was the easy part. Ensuring that they are replaced with democratic institutions, secure economies, civil society and genuine independence is the hard part.
 
“Revolutions rarely happen overnight,” said Shaikh, but warned against a false dichotomy comparing an Arab Spring to a “Winter of discontent.”
 
“The essential challenges now are to develop robust political systems as well as more democratic culture, civil society, free media and all those institutions that enhance the role of citizens.”
 
“In other words, we need the software that accompanies the hardware of political systems.
 
“The Arab world is now in desperate need for state builders. In my view these things need 5-10 years. And we will see varying levels of success.”
 
Echoing that sentiment, Middle East expert and professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont, F. Gregory Gause told The Daily Star that while he has no doubt that the Arab Spring is a democratization process, the path to democracy is sure to be fraught.
 
“I think we are seeing democratization in the region. Whether that ends in popular stable governments we just don’t know yet.”
 
Egypt – perhaps the most important and powerful Arab Spring nation – is a case in point.
 
With the army onside, the ejection of Hosni Mubarak and a quick transition to military rule seemed relatively straightforward. But as elections limp on between bouts of violence, with an increasingly repressive military leadership seemingly bent on staying in power, Egyptians are beginning to ask whether they might need a second revolution to achieve their goals.
 
Xenophobia is rife. Minority Christians say they fear an Islamist onslaught. The accusational reaction to the image of a covered woman, her underwear revealed, being beaten and dragged by military forces is a worrying sign of gender inequality. The economy is in tatters, and a critical if not controversial seam in the region – the 1979 peace accord with Israel – hangs in the balance.
 
“I can’t recall anywhere in the world where the military has led a transition to democracy,” Sheikh said.
 
“We are talking about 62 years of an incumbent regime who is still very much in power.”
 
“My worry is that Egypt will see high peaks of violence and chaos while the economy goes in to free fall. We could be at least a couple of years away,” he added.
 
In impoverished Yemen, a hard-won transition deal, brokered with the help of the United States and Saudi Arabia, might finally see the back of 40-year dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is scheduled to hand over power to his deputy. In his wake, pronounced Sunni-Shiite divides are impossible to overlook, Al-Qaeda is reportedly seeking to exploit the security vacuum, and the emergence of a revived northern separatist movement threatens to undo a 1990 unity republican deal.
 
In former pariah state Libya, the spectacular overthrow and death of the most archetypal yet thoroughly atypical dictator, champion of Pan-Arabism (when it suited him) Moammar Gadhafi – broadcast across the globe, marked an exception in drawing in Western intervention.
 
Suspicions abound that Western oil greed may taint the spirit of the popular movement with uncertain results. Now, awash with weapons and with tribal feuds are festering, the country’s future looks anything but stable.
 
Tunisia, the cradle of the uprisings, seems to be the exception. A swift expulsion of French-backed Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali preceded clean elections that have brought in a Islamist majority coalition to power.
 
“Undoubtedly, the biggest political winners over the past year have been Islamist parties, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood movement,” Sheikh told CNN in December.
 
Syria and Bahrain have yet to benefit from that kind of hindsight. There, the Saudi-Iranian wedge is in full play.
 
In the strategic Sunni monarchy of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia acted quickly to suppress a mainly Shiite uprising that shows no sign of abating.
 
In Syria, bordering a rapidly disintegrating sectarian-divided Iraq, allied to Iran and Hezbollah, and facing an increasingly militarized opposition some are calling an insurgency, the regime has shown no signs of retreating from the security option that has left over 5,000 people dead. There is no chance of foreign military intervention, sectarian violence is also on the rise, with a loose-knit and bitterly divided opposition flailing to garner international support.
 
Evidently, each Arab Spring country has its own set of problems on the path to democracy, but Sheikh says it is still correctly viewed as a regional phenomenon. “People in the region have lived under autocratic regimes, with a lack of dignity ad justice, economic stagnation and profound underachievement – there is certainly a link,” he explained.
 
“Tunisia served as an inspiration for Egypt and Egypt very much so in Libya and everywhere so they are very much connected because the underlying conditions were the same.
 
“As to how things play out, their circumstances are very different.”
 
Perhaps surprisingly, the street revolutionaries in each nation have shown little camaraderie. Apart from “inspiration,” inter-Arab support has been limited to ” financial and military support aimed at furthering individual interests – with Qatar sending troops and resources to Libya, Saudi Arabia lending military might to attempt to squash a Shiite uprising in Bahrain and the largely symbolic recognition of the opposition Syrian National Council by the Libya’s transitional government.
 
Importantly, solidarity with the Palestinian cause that characterized the old pan-Arabism, was never adopted by a broader protest movement.
 
Gause describes these linkages as a new kind of pan-Arabism with serious ramifications for the peace process.
 
“I do think this is the birth of a new pan-Arabism; not in the sense of the 1950s and 1960s style unity or even in the sense of any single overriding foreign policy, but in a sense of having a new common political identity.”
 
“None of these uprisings were made in the name of Palestine, but Arab public opinion is going to be harder to contain on that issue down the track.”
 
“You will have the opposite effect in Israel, which is very uncomfortable with what’s happening around them, and will move further to the right.”
 
Democracy, he said, is already taking shape as political Islam.
 
“A more democratic Arab world is going to be more Islamist – that’s not necessarily a threat to the democratization process.
 
“But Islamists are suspicious of the U.S. and the West and the West and Israel are suspicious of Islamists. That will complicate the peace process.”
 
Sheikh says regional developments, especially the course of the escalating Western-Iranian nuclear conflict, could “eclipse” Arab Spring developments, but says on the whole, he is optimistic about the revolutionary path to democracy.
 
“I am still hopeful that the people’s will, that fundamental drive for change, will succeed for the most part,” Sheikh added.
 
Gause agrees. “People tend to take two views of the Arab Spring,” he said, “either as a bottom-up region-wide democratic popular movement, or as a region-wide power grab.”
 
“In fact, they are both true.”
 
“The struggle for power in the Middle East is not new and we can trace it back to any period. But it takes on a new dimension in the face of popular movements,” he added.
 
“One of the main consequences of all of this is that governments are no longer able to ignore their populations. States are going to have to listen to public opinion.”