Thus, the moderators propose to introduce questions relevant to current events with the notion that scholars who study revolutions throughout the globe will comment. Postings must be under 250 words and conform to scholarly norms.

Let me consider the French case as I know it much better. In fact, the revolutionary uprising (July 12-14, 1789) that led to the capture of the Bastille already revealed that some of the royal army had, in fact, absorbed the rising tide of revolutionary spirit. The troops called up largely refused to intervene. The effective fighting force that actively favored the revolution proved to be poorly armed citizenry, but taking the Bastille was accomplished less by armed assault than persuasion. When the revolutionaries got around in succeeding months to organizing the army, they installed elections by the troops as a way of peopling the officer rank.

These elections did not last as the army professionalized. But importantly, the Army, though increasingly organized around hierarchy, did not for several years much develop politics independent from civilian politics. In fact, as society divided along various lines in 1792 , the military reflected much more than created these divisions. From the perspective of the recent past, this historical development, little discussed in the scholarly literature, deserves more attention. The revolutionary American situation might simply be a general hostility to standing armies, but the French case is more enigmatic. Napoleon’s role in this is worthy of future discussion.

From the outlet of the Arab spring, drawing parallels with 1848 in Europe has offered potential insights. Here are two situations in which revolution spread quite rapidly across a region, though of course not uniformly, and in which claims about human rights and political representation loomed large.

Other connections now suggest themselves, two years into the process. Most obviously, the 1848 revolutionaries, in centers like Berlin, failed (like their counterparts in Egypt) to secure the military or provide reliable alternatives to it. This would haunt the revolution then, as it is doing today. 1848, again in centers like Prussia, was also bedeviled by tensions between social and political goals, on the one hand, and other ideologies (nationalism then, Islamism now?), which ultimately hampered revolutionary drive.

1848 also had complex social dimensions, among classes and between rural and urban; comparable contemporary analogies might, or might not, be interesting. By 1848 standards, most current Arab spring analysis seems inadequately focused, though it’s admittedly easier to do social assessments after the fact. Overall: there are enough ongoing parallels between 1848, particularly in centers like Berlin or Vienna, and the Arab spring to stimulate further discussion and possibly some additional research. Of course the fit is inexact: there was no 1848 Syria, to take an obvious case. But if some parallels hold up, they invite further inquiry. In an immediate sense, the 1848 revolutions failed, again because the bases of the old regime were not really overcome; though also because of social divisions and ideological distractions. But in the aftermath, as in Bismarck’s Germany, several revolutionary goals actually were partially achieved, creating a different (though not really revolutionary) state and society. Is this a pattern to anticipate down the line, in Egypt and elsewhere? And compared to current uncertainties, is it a hopeful or discouraging prospect?

Whatever the outlook, analogy-shoppers should keep 1848 offerings in mind, and centers in addition to France. The history warehouse is well stocked.

Before addressing some complex factors, we must disembody the notion of the “Middle East” or even the “Arab World,” as we often speak of the uprisings across the region in monolithic terms. But “Arab World” should not be the unit of analysis. True, there are enduring cultural commonalities that created the demonstration or domino effect, and limited such effect to the Arab world, but this is where the commonality ends. To develop a deeper understanding of the uprisings, we must address them on a case-by-case basis, starting from the historical and proceeding to the social, political, and economic factors. 

[See part two here and part three here. Portions from this series have been published in previous papers the author has written]

Cross-posted from Dissent.

On July 17, Deng Zhengjia, a Chinese watermelon seller, got into an altercation with chengguan (para-police) officers. The chengguan allegedly struck Deng in the head, delivering a fatal blow with a weight from his own handheld scale. Local police claimed that Deng “unexpectedly fell to the ground and died,” a statement quickly mocked online for its absurdity. Deng’s case sparked an outcry against the blatantly abusive actions of chengguan on Weibo, the popular Chinese micro-blogging platform.

The government recognizes that Deng’s death cannot go unaddressed. Chengguan officers involved have been detained on criminal charges and Deng’s family offered substantial compensation. The authorities seem determined to settle the case quickly, treating it as a local matter resulting from the actions of wayward individuals, so that they can skirt a more comprehensive examination of chengguan misdeeds.

Although some journalists and online commentators have compared Deng’s death to that of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor whose self-immolation helped usher in the Arab Spring, we shouldn’t expect a similar outcome in China. Chengguan violations generate disgust and denunciation, but this public outcry often quickly subsides. Most in China still feel their lives are on an upward course, and the Party works hard to remind citizens that it deserves credit for three decades of economic growth and improvements in living standards. While netizens and activists may condemn the thuggish tactics employed by chengguan, there is not enough cohesive or sustained citizen outrage to make an Arab Spring–like movement likely in China.

Like most historians, I tend to analyze events based on particular historical contexts. And yet, after twenty-five years of studying eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revolutions (and watching new ones erupt in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries), I cannot help but notice certain patterns that recur in almost all revolutionary situations.

One is that revolutionary situations are inherently messy. In a society ripe for revolution, there are multiple groups who are unhappy with the existing regime, each for different reasons. What distinguishes a successful revolutionary situation (where citizens succeed in overthrowing their government) from more ordinary social protests often has to do not only with the strength of an existing regime, but also with the extent of dissatisfaction. In a successful revolutionary situation, opposition groups have generally agreed on a core common principle: the existing regime must go!! Groups which do not normally see eye to eye (i.e., socialists and liberals in France and Germany in 1848; secularists and Islamicists in Egypt in 2011) unite temporarily to overthrow a hated regime.

But once they have succeeded in ousting that regime -- and eliminated their common external enemy -- then what?

If a revolution was made in the name of “the people,” who exactly are these people? What happens when there are numerous groups in society with diametrically opposed visions for the future? How can the will of “the people” be measured? After toppling the common enemy, former allies compete ardently with each other to assume control of the new regime. As they struggle to define what the revolution was about, and who should lead the country, these tensions frequently become violent. Sometimes they develop into full-blown civil wars.

For a student of comparative revolutions, the current violence in Egypt is thus distressing, but not at all unexpected. Egypt is experiencing the near-inevitable growing pains of a revolution’s subsequent stages. The revolution seemed finished once Hosni Mubarak was chased from power in February 2011. And yet -- what did the revolution mean? Was it a secular revolution or an Islamicist one? In the wake of the unity and national euphoria that accompanied the overthrow of Mubarak, the people successfully pushed for elections. Yet in elections, there are winners and losers. Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood won the Presidential runoff in 2012, but with only 51.7 percent of the vote. A sizable plurality of citizens were opposed to his rule, and the number increased over the course of his first year in office. As the one-year anniversary of his assuming the presidency arrived in late June 2013, millions of Egyptians began protesting in the streets; in their view, he had betrayed the revolution they had risked their lives for in 2011. In the name of this growing opposition, Egypt’s army overthrew Morsi on July 3, 2013. After this coup, the Muslim Brotherhood’s supporters have themselves flocked to the streets, furious that their election victory has been thwarted. In their view, the revolution is being hijacked. To quell their angry and impassioned protests, the army has begun killing Morsi supporters.

As difficult as it is for any nation to overthrow their government, it often proves even harder to build a stable new regime on the ruins of the old one. Unfortunately, it is more the exception than the rule that a revolution finds stability instead of descending into violence.

1) Places where the revolution “succeeds,” in the sense of the old regime being swept away, but successive leadership changes and even mini-revolutions and regime changes occur before things are stabilized in a new order, as in France after 1789 and Russia in 1917.

2) Those (rare?) instances where the original revolutionaries successfully sweep away the old regime and replace it by something genuinely new that is reasonably stable and permanent, such as Turkey with Ataturk.

3) Instances where revolutionaries have temporary success but the old regime soon reconstitutes itself in slightly altered form (“Revolution of 1905” in Russia, 1848 in Central Europe).

And, of course, one would need to provide for “hybrid” cases where elements of each type exist, as well as distinguish between what defines a revolution as against a coup d’état. I suspect that the many political upheavals around the world of the past few decades fit into one or another of these categories. It does raise the tantalizing question of whether Egypt today is a case of a revolution being followed by a military coup d’état or some other combination of types?

In the Russian Revolution of 1917, for example, both officers and men were unhappy with the tsarist government of Nicholas II as the year opened, with discussion of palace revolution emerging among high-ranking officers by the end of 1916 while rank-and-file soldiers (and lower level officers) were alienated by the ongoing war (World War I). Both immediately supported the February Revolution -- indeed a rebellion of rank-and-file soldiers in the capital city garrison played a critical role in toppling the regime-- and the new liberal provisional government.

That unity quickly dissolved, however, not just over the paramount issue of continuing the war but also over social, economic, and cultural matters. It proved impossible for the new (civilian) leadership to use the army to contain growing popular grievances and the rise of extremist parties, and to prevent the revolution from spinning out of control in increasingly radical directions. An unsuccessful attempt at military counter-revolution in July 1917 only worsened things. A second (Bolshevik) revolution followed and civil war soon resulted, during which new armies created along new lines had to be formed (the old one having disintegrated). Putting the issue of the role of the military and military service in broader perspective, Joshua Sanborn has written a fascinating book on the transformation of the Russian army (armies) in the broader revolutionary era of the late 19th century to about 1925: Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, total war, and Mass Politics, 1905-1925. The book raises many fascinating issues about the interrelations of universal (or broad-based) military service, nationalism, notions of citizenship, and politics that apply to many societies, not just Russia.

Instead of telling us why it had been a good thing that the fall of the old regime had led to reunification, Bohley argued that reunification had destroyed a nascent and in her view, authentically democratic political culture that was in the first stages of development in the DDR in the months that led up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. As one of the founders of the Neues Forum, the main opposition group in the DDR in 1989, Bohley played a key role both in bringing down the old regime and in trying to shepard that nascent political culture from an inchohate protest to a way of living and governing.

Instead, the West German political system essentially rolled out across the territory of the DDR and the vast majority of the political actors signed on to one or another of the pre-existing parties from the West. Instead of a new form of politics as envisioned by Bohley, East Germans were simply absorbed into the political culture of West Germany.

When the revolts in North Africa, the Middle East, and perhaps in Iran end, as they surely will, many of those who fought to bring down the old regimes will likely find themselves feeling much as Bohley did. Yes, it will feel wonderful to be free of the oppressive hand of the old regime and much will be better. But the new states that emerge from revolutions rarely match up with aspirations of the revolutionaries. How those new states manage the disappointment arising from this mismatch invariably becomes one of their first big tests.

The abbé Henri Grégoire, a French revolutionary who was the subject of some of my past work, is a prime example of this phenomenon. Grégoire was one of the leaders of the French Revolution in 1789, and he gloried as the Revolution succeeded. The overthrow of the king was a dream come true for him (“On this September 21 [1792],” he wrote after the French Republic was declared, “we have annihilated the throne of this crowned monster. Since yesterday, I have been suffocated by joy to the point of being unable to eat or sleep.”) Unfortunately, Grégoire also lived to see the French Republic replaced by Napoleon’s Empire in 1804, and then the Restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy in 1814-15. Grégoire became disgusted with how quickly his countrymen forgot the ills of the past and abandoned the fight for a new society. Though he became pessimistic about human nature (he wrote an associate in 1817 that one needed to have spent two decades in politics “to understand the extent to which the majority of public figures... in France are weak, ungrateful and vile”), he continued to hold fast to his revolutionary ideals and to seek other ways to channel them. One way in which he directed his frustration was to export revolutionary ideals abroad, to countries still under monarchies; he also supported young republics like the United States and Haiti, who struggled to avoid being conquered by their former rulers. (Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism [UC Press, 2005])

After the Arab Spring, there has been similar disillusionment among former revolutionaries. While scholars and journalists have examined the Arab Spring’s aftermath mainly in Egypt, similar disenchantment has set in elsewhere, such as in Tunisia, the birthplace of the movement. How much, citizens there ask, has really changed?

The New York Times has a fascinating article today on this topic (“Tunis Journal: A Café Where the Spirit of the Arab Spring Lives On”). The article examines the viewpoint of actors, artists and others who hoped the Arab Spring would transform the region. It focuses on Noureddine El Ati, a Tunisian actor director with an international reputation, and his disenchantment with the revolution there. (“‘People were radiant,’” he said. But the euphoria lasted only about three weeks. “Now we are in a black tunnel…. I thought the people would come to power, and society would move towards more transparency, equality, a good work ethic, but it is exactly the opposite.”)

How frequently does this phenomenon happen elsewhere? What will happen to frustrated revolutionary fervor as the Arab Spring does not result in immediate change? (Readers: Man your keyboards and head for the comments section!)

The history of modern Atlantic revolutions provides, perhaps, a few answers to these questions. We have indeed forgotten how long and difficult “our” revolutions have been. In very different times and for different reasons, occidental revolutionaries of modernity have dealt with such complex dilemma: how is it possible to create and preserve democracy in the context of revolution, civil war and military conflict? In America and in Europe of the end of the eighteenth century, many liberals and/or revolutionaries pragmatically justified political repression (of the Irish revolutionaries by British troops in 1798), massacres (the American “Indian Wars” of the 1790s), exceptional laws and even dictatorships (the French “Terror” between 1793 and 1794).

Despite the liberal legend, occidental revolutions have never been beds of roses, but typically violent political transitions and civil wars. Our fragile democracies were born in bloody nurseries. They are much more the daughters of difficult compromises than pure political ideals. That is why what happens now in Egypt both deals with a civil revolutionary process and a military counter-revolution.

In fact, this little book is an apologetic for the Terrorists in the French Revolution. And its value is that in associating herself so clearly with her subject, she does see them much as they saw themselves. In short, Wahnich argues that the Terrorists were motivated by the “dread” that they felt after the assassination of Marat. They then had acted to protect the purity and integrity of the “sacred” revolution that they had made to affirm the political equality of all. More originally, Wahnich also claims that the mechanism of the Terror led to more incarcerations than executions and that its organizational existence at least put limits on popular “enthusiasm.” In sum, the Terrorists were justified and their leadership contained excesses.

Why do I find this interesting? In fact my own characterization of these people would be extremely different. But she may help explain not only the outlook of the Terrorists of 1790s but also of our day. Obviously, religion was not a factor for the French as it often is now and technology is far different, but her analysis helps us to understand the intransigence and determination of some current revolutionaries. It is especially useful because the eighteenth century Terrorists held these views in power, and so we might look at modern governmental as well as popular action through this prism. And, in short, Wahnich’s book, while wholly without a necessary distance or any critique, may get us pretty close to understanding the assumptions behind radicalism of many types.

I spent a good deal of the summer writing about how the Haitian Revolution and Caribbean slavery have been depicted in film. Many films depicting these subjects are disappointing, which inspired me to read some of the foundational scholarship on film and history, such as Robert Rosenstone’s. As Rosenstone has argued, historians are almost inevitably disappointed when they watch the events that they study depicted on screen. Scripts call for narrative structure that real history does not present.

Fiction films on revolutions illustrate Rosenstone’s principle well. Real revolutions proceed haphazardly, with more monotony than viewing audiences will tolerate. Moreover, there are often so many actors involved in a real revolution that simplifications become necessary. Filmic revolutions often present characters who are composites, so that viewers will have only a few characters to follow (see Fiction and Film for French Historians [link at http://h-france.net/fffh/tag/french-revolution/ ] for recent scholarly analyses of films on the French Revolution).

I do have one favorite revolution movie – not necessarily for the accuracy of its portrayal, but because it is great fun: Sherman Edwards’ and Peter Hunt’s 1776 (made in 1972). The music is catchy, and the script is filled with witty gems. The film appeals to all age groups (I watched it this summer with an enthralled group ranging from small children to septuagenarians).

Of course, many details in the movie could not pass the scrutiny of American Revolution specialists. The film papers over the subject of slavery, portraying it as a Southern issue while implying that northerners were all abolitionists. The film also oversimplifies Abigail Adams’ political interests, turning her correspondence with John into one chiefly concerned with love and sewing. One would also not know from the film that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were close friends (“You’re obnoxious and disliked; that cannot be denied/…Mr. Adams, you are driving me to homicide!” Jefferson sings in “But, Mr. Adams!”).

Despite these simplifications, 1776 offers many useful lessons on revolutions. One is how hard it is for people in real time to decide to raise arms against their government. Often today, the public imagines the American Revolution as clear-cut or even inevitable: “we” (Americans) decided to oppose “them” (the British) because they were being unfair. And yet….it was a wrenching decision for the Britons of North America to opt to wage war against their own countrymen, including their crowned King. “Sit Down, John” - in which members of the Continental Congress shout at Adams as he exhorts them to “vote for independency!” - is a fantastic song in this regard. In addition to sharing vivid truths about summer in Philadelphia (it is “hot as hell” and there are often “too many flies!”), the song illustrates how uncomfortable many delegates were with a radical notion like independence.

The film also shows the critical roles of contingency and human factors in revolutions. Delegates sometimes had to leave the Congress for illness or family reasons, and votes could have gone in different directions depending on who was present on a given day and how they felt inspired to vote based on others’ decisions.

Watching social movements explode on TV today reminds me, however, of one great shortcoming of 1776: it leaves out the violence that accompanies almost all revolutions. Soldiers in the film sing about the battle dead in Washington’s army, but such losses are off screen and bloodless. Moreover, when we hear about the physical harm inflicted by pro-independence forces against loyalists in 1776, it is as a joke. The stalwart advocate of independence Benjamin Franklin is delighted to hear that his son William (the loyalist governor of New Jersey) has been captured and ill-treated because of his pro-British beliefs.

Today, fiction films are not our only option for watching revolutions unfold on screen. Journalists capture live footage on stations like CNN and Al-Jazeera, and participants can upload their own videos and pictures to sites like YouTube and Twitter. Even though they are not scripted like fiction films, we cannot forget that these glimpses of revolution are mediated in their own way; journalists are still making choices of where to go and what to film, and participants show only their own vantage point at any given moment. Perhaps violence is overemphasized in how we understand revolutions today, since the more boring parts of revolutions are less exciting to film (and also may take place in private spaces rather than public squares). With new media will come new ways of understanding revolutions, which in turn will offer us fresh perspectives on revolutions of the past. Nevertheless, it is critical to remind our students – and others - that whenever we see a revolution on screen, we are getting only a partial glimpse into revolutionary reality.

I recently returned from a workshop at the University of Pretoria, organised as part of the project The Comparative History of Political Engagement in Western and African Societies led by a team at the University of Sheffield. As well as enjoying a very hospitable welcome, I also had a very stimulating series of discussions, which have given me much food for thought about further extension of the debate on ‘revolution’ in the modern world.

While recent events have made us focus attention on ‘bottom-up’ revolutionary upheavals, the role of spontaneous interactions and technology in popular mobilizations, and the general question of ‘crowds’ and their agency, a closer look at African examples reminds us that ‘top-down’ modes of revolutionary activism also continue to have a strong role to play.

Henning Melber offered us an excellent overview of the extent to which African liberation movements into the present continue to use the rhetoric of liberation as closure, of the achievement of a sort of ‘end of history’ through the movement’s leadership, and necessarily alongside that, the closing-off of possibilities for dissent. Such movements demonstrate simultaneous abilities to use, for example, laws established in the colonial period to repress opposition, and rhetoric that brands such opposition as neo-imperialist conspiracy.

Lloyd Sachikonye observed how electoral processes in ‘liberated’ African nations were routinely undermined by violence, over 80% of which came from ruling parties and their affiliated organisations, and Brian Raftopoulos offered a vivid case-study of the steady destruction of an autonomous labour movement in Zimbabwe through its subordination to the demands of a ‘National Democratic Revolution’, that was in practice technocratic and authoritarian – and prejudiced against urban workers in general through its political powerbase in land-hungry war-veterans.

David Anderson presented chilling evidence of the example that systematic persecution of Mau Mau soldiers by the British authorities in the 1950s gave to the essentially anti-Mau Mau governments of independent Kenya. Torture and shameless violence continued to mark politics throughout the late twentieth century. This included the astonishing story of Nyayo House, an office-block in Nairobi, completed in 1984, and later exposed as having purpose-built torture-chambers in a sixth-level sub-basement.

Like many African conflicts, that in Kenya tangled the concept of ‘national’ identity within colonial boundaries with that of ethnicity, and lived senses of community. Baz Lecocq showed us how in Mali the ‘black’ Mande ethnic leadership took the post-independence lead in defining the supposedly egalitarian features of their agricultural traditions as Malian national identity, while treating the ‘white’ Tuareg of the north of the country as a deviant, lazy, backward-looking feudal remnant. Policies of forced settlement alongside continual cultural humiliations were a systematic effort at cultural delegitimisation, and at the heart of a movement towards open revolt from the Tuareg as socio-economic conditions worsened towards the end of the century.

Finally on Africa, Emma Hunter offered a stimulating series of questions about how, outside mechanisms of overt violence, different mechanisms of public engagement could work with and across post-colonial governments. The tensions that result are illustrated in the history of Tanzania’s Ujamaa under Julius Nyerere – despite governmental claims, Swahili did not provide the common language to overcome tribal divisions, and movements to ‘villagization’ cut coercively across claims about cooperation and consultation. Nonetheless, organs including the press remained open as routes of dissent, even if having to tread a careful line of framing loyalty.

What, for me, was most striking about all of these analyses was the extent to which parallels with the French revolutionary experience could so easily be made. It would be trite to rehearse these here, ‘as if’ the earlier merely fed unmediated into the later, but the discussions in and around these papers clearly showed that there is a wider comparison, and structural analysis, to be made. The various models of ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ revolutionary mobilization have clearly had a recurrent influence across the centuries of modernity – and indeed are a substantial constituent of ‘modernity’ as a concept itself. A global perspective shows us that we never did reach the ‘end of history’ so vaunted a generation ago, and for historians, there is much more reflection to be done on the cycles of hope and dread packaged as ‘revolutionary’ progress.

Some revolutions do not seem to have this occur. For example, Iran still awaits a counter-revolution; likewise the Chinese did not have one either as long as Mao was alive. The Russians experienced the NEP in 1921 and then turned back from the market and the revolution resumed, not to abate in a thoroughgoing way until Gorbachev took power. It’s too early to tell for sure, but Egypt raced to counterrevolution very rapidly.

These ruminations suggest that counter-revolution needs some definition and that world history can give us some idea of what are general factors in creating such a retreat.   

We need to separate the question of causality into two parts, in the Syrian and other cases: 1) What caused the uprising? And 2) What perpetuates the uprising? The answers are different. The first deals primarily with local factors and the second with a combination of factors tilting towards external ones.

Even in dealing with the first question of causes, we must separate the structural from the circumstantial, by separating between the large structural reservoir of causes that built over time and the immediate causes that instigated social mobilization on a large scale.

Syria, is a good case here.

Herein, I will address the question of structural causes. The question of what instigated the uprising is less complex, and merits a detailed treatment once more information is available, though the facts are not too controversial. Inspired by the Tunisian and Egyptian experiences just one to two months prior, the narrative of the young kids who called for the regime’s fall on the walls of their school in Der`a constituted the first flame that ignited the heap of hay accumulating for decades. Surely, the local strongmen’s brutal response guaranteed the wider mobilization there at first, but it was bound to happen after a few such dissenting attempts. The same incident, if it had occurred one year prior, would have fizzled out within days, if not less. However, the regional domino effect and the continuing collective focus on the broader context gave that incident prominence while changing the calculus of individuals vis-à-vis the risk and potential success of taking to the streets en mass, especially in the more rural areas and small towns. The rest is bloody history.

The set of structural causes that I would like to highlight, beyond the constant factor of repression, relate to political-economic factors that have engulfed Syria since 1986, when the regime effectively began shifting its social and political alliances from labor to business. Namely, I am referring to the growing relationship in the past few decades between the political and economic elite in Syria, and its continued policy implications for nearly twenty-five years. This new nexus of power pervades most global political economies but produces deleterious effects to the extent that the context allows. In many developing countries, including Syria, it is associated with the protracted process related to the unraveling of the state-centered economy, which also constitutes the rolling back of redistributive policies on which the masses increasingly relied in the absence of economic growth. I must caution in the same breath against the emphasis on such factors as singular causes for the uprisings, in Syria or elsewhere. Instead, I address this factor as a central one, not the only, one. Thus, this cannot be a comprehensive account of structural causes.

Politically, the new nexus of power between the political and economic elite in Syria seems to have buttressed authoritarian rule in Syria over the past two decades, whether or not other factors contributed to this outcome. This is not simply a function of “support” for the status quo by beneficiary elites, for this is the norm nearly everywhere. It is also a form of legitimation of a changing status quo because the corollary of this particular nexus of power involves various forms of “liberalization” or state retreat: this includes a “budding,” “growing,” or seemingly “vibrant” civil society that may be considered a sign of political “opening;” a “freer” economic environment in which the state gives up its monopoly over some sectors of the economy; and a large “private” sector that purportedly grows at the expense of the state-run “public” sector, giving way to a broader dispersion of resources with economically democratizing effects. Though these outcomes are pleasing to some external actors (including that amorphous conception, “the international community”), they are not felt in any positive manner by the overwhelming majority of the population, who must fend for themselves as public provisions, jobs, and welfare dwindle. Quite the contrary, the majority of the Syrian people have seen their fortunes decline with the deepening of this alliance between state and big business since the mid 1980s.

[See part three here]

 [Map of Syria and Military Deployment, 2011]

This is the third part of a series addressing the Arab Uprisings. Here i discuss the impact of the new elitism that developed in various parts of the Arab world (with parallels beyond the region) in the past two to three decades. See part one here and part two here. 

Economic Policy, Economic Structure, and Social Impact

The apparent social effects of the new elitism and the policies they engendered are even deeper, affect the lives of most Syrians, and were all too clear before January 2011. Discussed elsewhere in greater detail, the impact of this alliance had a tremendous polarizing effect on Syrian society, one that approaches, if not matches, the pre-Ba`th era. The effects proceeded at three levels: economic policies, economic structure, and social impact.

It is not too challenging to demonstrate that the policies supported by this new nexus of power are responsible for unduly removing or destroying various forms of social safety nets (e.g., welfare, subsidies, job provisions) that kept populations afloat or barely above water for decades. If these provisions were not removed altogether then either their quality has deteriorated significantly (e.g., health, education) or rations have shrunk (e.g., bread, flower, sugar). Such drastic changes contributed to two dangerously related phenomena: first, increasing poverty (including absolute poverty) and thus social polarization, whereby societies are increasingly losing their middle classes; and second, economic exclusion from the “market,” a phenomenon contributing to a dramatic increase of the informal sector, or those who are functioning, and living, almost completely outside the market, most of whom inhabit rural areas, small towns, and smaller cities. 

Meanwhile regime policies that emphasized the growth of the “private” sector by providing investors with privileges, distinctions, and exemptions did so without exacting reciprocity in practice in terms of added value, employment, and exports. More important is that the most lucrative new economic opportunities were monopolized by regime loyalists, relatives, or partners, all part of the same state-business networks that developed in the 1970s and 1980s and matured in the 1990s. The striking proximity of policy makers to policy takers made rent-seeking and structural corruption extremely efficient, producing a plethora of tailored policies that weakened, fragmented, and taxed the national economy.     

The broader societal impact was hard-felt in some important sectors. The incremental—and not so incremental—goring of workers’ and labor interests in the private and public sectors is another outcome that can be easily traceable to policies and political decisions associated with the new elitism. The shifting of effective alliances from labor to business was part and parcel of the unraveling of state-centered economies. Rights, rules, and regulations increasingly favored business at the expense of labor as time went by, starting in the 1970s (officially or unofficially). Trade/peasant unions and labor organizations were co-opted around that time by corporatist authoritarian systems of representation, but continued to enjoy some privileges. It is true that the political elite started this process of shifting alliances and privileging capital long before business actors became prominent, but the sort of change that took place in the past three decades has a different character. Earlier, such stripping of labor rights was considered a function of problematic authoritarian arbitrariness, something that is frowned upon socially and viewed as a departure from a social (developmental) contract of sorts. More recently, and before the wave of protests and revolts, the incremental stripping away of labor rights was carried out in the name of “investment,” “growth,” and "modernization." 

The ideological context in times gone by was one of a socialist-nationalist coloring that provided a basis for judgment and norms. Hence, social polarization, poverty, and developmental exclusion were considered “wrong” and unacceptable. Today, such disturbing effects have become the new norm, a means to a “better” future, a legitimate station along the way to prosperity and efficiency. All such designations were short-circuited by the uprisings, but it is too early to sound the death-knell for growth formulas that are zero-sum in character. In part, it was this “positive”-sounding narrative of the new policies that camouflaged the deep discontent and resentment among the essentially voiceless.

Perhaps most significant were the developmental implications of a new elitism that vehemently emphasized urban development (at the expense of the neglected countryside and its modes of production) and non-productive economic activity, characterized primarily by consumption. The increase in shares of the tourism and service sectors at the expense of manufacturing and agricultural production (associated with land re-reform laws and other regulations) produced different kinds of needs in society. For instance, there was significantly less need for skilled labor, and the educational systems and institutions that would be required to train skilled labor. 

Whatever emerged in terms of the “new economy” and information technology fields lagged far behind other countries, was too small and too underdeveloped to substitute for losses in other sectors, and was certainly not competitive internationally. Employment of hundreds of thousands of yearly new entrants became increasingly a pipe-dream, pushing masses of disenfranchised youth to oblivion and circumstance. 

An interjectory note is in order, even if unrelated to “policy.” Since 2003, Syria has experienced an unprecedented drought that caused the internal migration of more than 1.2 million people, by conservative estimates. Tens of thousands of families migrated to the cities where they joined the ranks of the unemployed, especially in smaller towns/provinces like Der`a, Idlib, Homs, and elsewhere. This displacement exacerbated discontent on all those affected, directly and indirectly, and increased the social and regional polarization to levels Syria had not seen since the middle of the last century. Though this was a natural disaster, the government’s chronic poor planning and mismanagement of water resources since the 1990s was one opportunity cost of the myriad of polarizing policies pursued during the same period.

The problem of development is not simply about rules and markets and will not be resolved as such. Nor is the panacea of “democracy” sufficient to treat the basic ills. Whatever else is at work, the most egregious problems stem from various and continuing forms of political and economic disempowerment and denial of self-determination at the individual and collective levels. Most of these problems were/are being exacerbated by a new nexus of power that was as unrelenting as it is/was essentially unchallenged (depending on the case). This new elitism and the policies that came with it were not the only source of discontent and dissent, but a guarantee that they will fester if alternative agencies, institutions, and social contracts do not develop, even under changed regimes. For our purposes here, we cannot underestimate the contribution of these resultant social effects on the structural reservoir that fueled the uprising’s origins, notably in the rural areas and small towns. 

In the next post, I shall resume my discussion of the general causes of the uprising by addressing the factors, or areas of research, that should be included in any comprehensive study.