In the last few weeks humanity simultaneously witnessed a terrifying earthquake measuring nine points on the Richter scale that devastated parts of Japan and an elating wondrous earthquake measuring ten points on the political scale as millions of fearless Arabs flocked into the streets and squares of Cairo, Tripoli, Tunis and other Arab capitals risking their own lives in the effort to liberate themselves from corrupt autocratic leaders and overcome the armed guards of their dictators.
The earthquake in Japan commands humility before the overwhelming destructive forces of nature and the limits of human powers. By contrast the Arab revolts, an unexpected awesome eruption of the formidable power of the human passion for freedom and dignity, can only evoke pride and exhilaration.
The success of mass popular demonstrations in undermining authoritarian regimes does not in itself guarantee, of course, the emergence of democracy. In the beginning it was just the forceful stirring articulation of an alternative collective imagination of order propelled by freedom and the release of political energy. That energy can be easily misdirected. It must be properly channeled in order to retrospectively justify the massive breaking of laws, the frequent use of violence, and the disruption of a highly valued, if forced, stability. Following a democratic revolution, it took the French many decades to produce a democracy, and at the end of the last century the breakdown of the totalitarian USSR has yet to produce a viable democracy.
As a system of government democracy requires multiple constraints on the arbitrary use of power: the rise of the individual as a deliberate, self-restrained, political agency and the development of civic ethos, the evolution of a rule of law, the creation of a host of political institutions that reciprocally check and balance each other, a political culture that combines trust and criticism, respect and skepticism, and the expectations that power be both transparent and effective. Most of all it requires a wide commitment to the value and protection of human life and a bill of civil and social rights. Following decades, if not centuries, in which the subjugation of the Arab peoples was secured by docility induced by fear and habit, the current wave of uprisings opens the gate to the long arduous way to establishing a political order based on liberty. If, during the authoritarian Arab regimes, the people have depended on their rulers, successful democratic revolutions will reverse that pattern, making the rulers depend on their peoples. Both must recognize that to found a political order on freedom is to learn to live with the uncertainties and tensions of continual instability, open clashes of ideas and interests, and an institutionalized political conflict. The passion for freedom that produces a democratic revolution is profoundly different from the self disciplined freedom that enables a self governed polity.
Such waves of protests against authoritarian governments in a region where they have been least expected demonstrate again that the quest for freedom is inherent in humanity and that in our time the idea of democracy has been globalized as the universal theory and norm of legitimate political power.
Every person who walks to his or her square of freedom to protest political coercion and overcome the fear of being arrested, tortured, and even killed by the guardians of the autocrat must be driven by the feeling that a person who concedes his freedom is an individual who lost his humanity. Rousseau thought that human slavery was the rule rather than the exception, famously stating that although “men are born free, they are everywhere in chains.” Of course, people have been in chains for many reasons. One of them, highlighted by recent events, has been that, until recently, they did not have access to the kind of contemporary technologies of horizontal communication that have enabled the use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media to share subversive political ideas, feelings, and plans for horizontal political coordination that could more easily escape hierarchical control. Obviously this development actually tilted the unbalanced power relation between people and their rulers in favor of the former. Millions of individuals who internally and informally harbored the ideal of a democratic order needed the internet to discover that it is a growing collective political imaginary in order to begin believing that a revolution beyond the risky defiance of a few politically conscious individuals or the resistance of small groups is feasible. A risk shared by a large number of people is likely to diminish for each individual and enable a new kind of defiant political action. Paraphrasing Emerson’s observation, I would say that insofar as a collective action is the publication of internal thoughts and aspirations, the revolutionary Arab uprising, regardless of its immediate effects, has for the first time in modern Arab political history elevated and partly institutionalized the commitment to a collective imaginary of an Arab democracy as a compelling living standard for legitimating a regime.
Why was it such a shocking surprise for western public opinion? Partly because of the influence of entrenched Orientalists—in Edward Said’s sense—an influential community of Middle East experts who could not entertain alternative imaginaries of the Arab world without undermining the very presuppositions that have underlain their professional authority as well as their status as advisers to governments that seek at all costs to enhance stability and protect their interests. Their general approach has been that the two principal actors in the Arab world today are Islamic fundamentalists, which produce politically ineffective terrorists who can hardly disrupt the established order, and largely illegitimate, western-supported autocrats, which at least effectively deliver much valued stability. They could hardly imagine the sudden dramatic emergence of a new Arab hero that captured the imagination of the Arab masses and eclipsed the heroism of the suicide bomber: the unarmed Arab freedom fighter determined to end Arab dictatorship.
In my country, Israel, in addition to reactionary Orientalists, the growing influence of the political right and the relentless propaganda of the Settlers made the imagination of a potential Arab democracy even less likely. When Netanyahu declared some years ago that he would be ready to sign peace treaties only with Arab states that have become democratic, his statement was widely construed as another rhetorical ploy to indirectly say that peace treaties with Syria, the Palestinians, and other Arab states should be delayed until the coming of the Messiah. Now that a wave of democratization has been suddenly conquering the Arab Middle East, the same Prime minister is unable to spontaneously nod towards the awesome explosion of democratic spirit across the Arab world on behalf of the “only” democracy in the Middle East. He seems only capable of focusing on the blown up danger of a Muslim brotherhood’s takeover. It has apparently been politically impossible for this extreme right wing politician to switch from fear to hope as a means to win votes.
But if the 9/11 terrorist act proved at the time that a mere thirty or so fanatical terrorists with a strong logistical support can produce the effect of a grand war, the recent Arab revolt, especially in Egypt, demonstrates that hundreds of thousands of determined unarmed citizens can march into freedom by toppling repressive systems of subjugation. No western army could dare today to stop such a march by live fire. It is fair to assume that a possibility of a mass nonviolent Palestinian uprising has not escaped the minds of many Arab and Jewish seekers of peace. Perhaps the future holds for us, as an alternative to an imminent war that will result from Netanyahu’s deliberate policy of paralyzing substantive peace negotiations with the Palestinians, a hopeful chapter of a nonviolent progress towards the liberation of the Palestinian people from Israeli occupation in the West Bank and from Hamas’ dictatorship in Gaza. The end of Israeli occupation would also be more compatible with the founding democratic principles of Israel inscribed in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.