Revolutions in Review

From the Mahgrib…

…to the Persian Gulf

The revolutionary time is over and – the furor over the movie notwithstanding – things generally move at the slower pace of domestic politics. It’s becoming clear that the demonstrations were organized and carried out by counter-revolutionary elements – at least those that were not spontaneous, and only to the extent they were not. They bothered some people more than they bother me. How can a revolution expect to get rid of spontaneity? Counter-revolutionary spontaneity is just one price a revolution pays for its own spontaneity.

It’s also becoming clear that they (the counter-revolutionary elements) haven’t gained any real traction against the revolutions this way. They (the demonstrations) are dying out, aren’t they? Nothing of any importance was gained against the United States of America either. Though today the perpetrator is under arrest, I believe, because how he made the movie involved a probation violation. That’s justice!

At any rate it’s now possible to proceed with a review of what the revolutions have achieved, the reaction on the side of Salafism, etc., having proven, if persistent, comparatively weak.

One could say metaphorically that the face of the Arab world has changed. But speculative philosophy can do better. It can say that the prospects of the Arab world have changed. And so by way of summary, with an individual post projected for each of the bullets in the list:

·         Tunisia. Last I heard, they managed to write a constitution without institutionalizing the Sharia. So this is possible to be done in the absence of a secular despotism.

·         Libya. Represents, like Yemen, an instance to prove that strongmen can successfully preserve the national existence of countries that would otherwise come apart at the seams. Not that the strongman has come forth again, but that the seams are bursting. Yet in late news, the revolution has used its strength against provincial and fundamentalist militias. Even if central government cannot be restored on the same footing (but absent the strongman), there is nothing profoundly undemocratic about federalism.

·         Egypt. President Morsi behaves as though he’s already gained control of the state, in both its inward and outward aspects. Who’s to say he hasn’t? It’s far too early to say whether he will betray the revolution either for personal aggrandizement or for Islamic fundamentalism. Yet there’s been no sign whatever he’s tried. On the contrary, he has kept a politic balance. So why worry?

·         Palestine. Ever notice that the Arab Spring never seemed to touch Palestine? To me this means it was already an effective democracy. A nation in arms can still be a democratic nation.

·         Jordan. More constitution, less monarchy. The Hashemites have not tread this path at a revolutionary pace, but they’re not free to leave it either. The King really ought to provide a better example to the aristocracies and monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula.

·         Syria. Did you know that military science, like the theory of revolutions, is also a dialectical science? I could explain that in another post, but to analyze the civil war as such might be out of scope for this blog.

·         Lebanon. Like Palestine, relatively untouched by the Arab Spring, and also possessing beforehand a discernable, if tumultuous, political life. The abasement of the Assad despotism can only strengthen democracy in this country.

·         Iraq. You could ask the same question about al-Maliki that some would like to ask (prematurely) about Morsi. But the American people didn’t spend blood and treasure to set up a despot in Iraq they way they did once or twice in Vietnam.

·         Bahrain. Where agitation for democracy is still a criminal act. The successes of the Arab Spring seem to have stopped at the headwaters of the Gulf and the geographical (and political) frontier of the Arabian Peninsula.

·         Yemen. Both like and unlike Libya. The new president Hadi has restored the former authority of the government without perceptibly making a revolution in the state. Reforms only, but reforms that seem to enjoy a measure of popular support. Meanwhile, Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has been reduced to making war on Moslems.

The decision lies with Egypt and Iraq, the one wealthy in population, the other in oil. (Both of which, by the way, have verbally aligned themselves against the current regime in Syria.) If these centers of gravity are shifted permanently to democracy, the rest are that much more likely to continue in that path or to follow. If that happens in this generation, what will happen in the next? and where?

…Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Answer: It’s Not That Different

The extent to which the Gulf States really are aristocracies, and whether and how they’ve co-opted the rest of the citizens. All is silent except in Bahrain. So why is Bahrain different?

You know a revolution if over when News Hour’s Margaret Warner interviews a country’s foreign minister about it, and he makes it a virtue that the revolutionists will, in the main, suffer only relatively modest, but still criminal penalties. I wasn’t paying terribly close attention, but it didn’t seem to me that Margaret asked, and certainly she didn’t force, the question about what the Bahraini regime intended to do about the revolutionary values that up to then had been at stake. At any rate, the answer, had it been honestly given, would have been “Nothing,” and that is how matters stand.

I looked very briefly into the demographics, and even more briefly into the dynastic history, of Bahrain, and found little enough to show that the revolution might have been successful, or have become strong enough to compel the regime to listen to its demands. The law against forming political parties belies the official claim that the form of government is constitutional monarchy. If it really were constitutional monarchy, a revolution would not be required to change political, social, and economic conditions, nor would the government be compelled to treat demonstrations as if they represented a revolution. The regime is really an oligarchy in which all the ministers (the ones I know of) have the same last name, but that just might happen to be, or at any rate pretend to be, on the way to constitutional monarchy.

For one thing, the proportion between foreign-born to native-born populations is roughly equivalent to that between the industrial and service economies in Bahrain: 40/60%. This indicates the proletarians there as elsewhere in the Arab world are not citizens, and thus they have no standing to revolt, nor would they be likely to gain adherents from the other (citizen) classes if they tried. It’s the functional equivalent of slave revolt, which historically has never been, and probably in principle can never be, directed toward the overthrow and reformation of the state.

As for the middle classes, it’s clear that, to run the Bahraini service economy, the skills of many professionals, including financial professionals, are required. The export agricultural economy has actually shrunk since they found oil, so there can be no petit bourgeois peasantry. Yet on the whole, the weight of numbers favors bourgeois revolution there.

So why did it fail? Or, it might be more pertinent to ask, how did it get a start, however feeble, in Bahrain, when nothing at all happened in any of the other, similarly situated, Gulf States?

I don’t have a principled answer.

Then last month, with the revolution well over, and King Khalifa having decided there was no more emergency, the people, permission restored, rallied again, proving there still is revolutionary, or at least democratic, energy in Bahrain.

And, by all applicable principles, there should be. It’s just that in a country that geographically small, these energies are easier to contain and control than to extinguish. Saudi troops and the Fifth Fleet, the one by their presence and the other by their absence, had something to do with the result so far. If the opposition who still want to rally can hold strictly to non-violent tactics, better to say, if the people who want to rally could form covert parties and formulate specific programs of demands, more can be looked for in Bahrain…

…and if in Bahrain, why not in the other Gulf States? They also must have numerous, if not politically self-aware, middle classes. Yet despotism, whether lodged in a monarch, in a family, or in a close oligarchy, is easier to maintain if it has a lot of money. As Baron de Montesquieu observed, the tendency of despotism, because it governs through fear, is to make the people poorer. Fear or not, that does not apply in the Gulf States now, nor will it in the foreseeable future.

It probably safe to say: the more oil, the less revolution, in states, particularly geographically small ones, where the oil economy pays the salaries of the middle classes. But seemingly Bahrain has the least oil of all.