Turkey, the Arab Spring and Beyond by Bulent Aras & E. Fuat Keyman

Author:Bulent Aras & E. Fuat Keyman [Aras, Bulent & Keyman, E. Fuat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138643062
Goodreads: 29525076
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Contextualizing the Dynamic of Change

It is impossible to deny ‘change’, incremental or radical, in the context of the ‘Arab Spring’. No other event has rocked the Middle East to its foundation as much as has these uprisings. Its impact is equal to the discovery of oil in Iran (1908) and Saudi Arabia (1938), the founding of Israel in 1948, Egypt–Israel Camp David Accords (1979), the Declaration of Principles (1993), 9/11 (2001) and the sacking of Baghdad (2003). Many Arab observers are therefore validated in thinking that only independence from the yoke of colonialism shares historical parity with the Arab uprisings of 2011. Both represent emancipatory moments separated by decades of postcolonial misrule by indigenous elites, of which the likes of Ben Ali, Mohamed Hosni Mubarak and Mu’ammar Gaddafi were quintessential examples of dictators swept from power by the 2011 protest movements—unprecedented politically in the Arab Middle East (AME). Hence, a good departure point is to contextualize, as well as reflect on, the still unfolding fervour spawned by the ‘Arab Spring’—not as yet possessing the hindsight of historical longue durée.

The postcolonial ‘story’ of political power unfolds through a hegemon, that is, the ‘over-stated Arab state’.3 Ayubi uses this term to record how the Arab state has historically invested itself with all the attributes of power (coercive, financial, legal, tribal, ideological, informational, social, etc.). It has left society with little shared space for normalizing state–society relations, and even less space for societal contests of state power. Since its emergence into territorial existence, the Arab postcolonial state’s design of this brand of statecraft fulfils what might be called ‘total politics’—the practice of ‘totalizing’ political activity hindering the rise of potential rival centres of power. That is, a field or margin of civic and oppositional existence with a notable blind spot: societal autonomy. This is the space where society strikes back to invent the vocabulary of self-recognition and self-existence, as well as the attendant thought-practice congenial to speaking back and engaging political power. Therein lies the promise of negotiating the substance of change, its terms and its strategies. In their struggles to effect change, Arab societies have historically capitalized on the space vacated by state power. In every retreat/absence by the state, there emerges the potential for advancement/presence by society, as if (state) ‘zero-power’ equates with (societal) ‘positive power’, at least potentially.

One key idea advanced here is that the postcolonial political organization that preceded the Arab Spring became too ossified: elitist, exclusionary, reliant on distribution or coercion as means of reproducing power. In this regard, the only distinction to be noted is that republican systems’ reliance on coercion far outweighs that of monarchies, especially GCC member states. Integral to political organization was the absence of serious safety valves that allow society channels of venting anger. ‘Explosion’ was a matter of time. For example, in December 2010, a Tunisia fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, became the trigger.4 Thus, any narration of the context of the Arab Spring would be incomplete without accounting for the state of political organization in the pre-Arab Spring political setting, as argued below.

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