Occupy Wall Street Is the Arab Spring for Dilettantes
Around this time last year, foreign-policy pundits, including me, were writing about the WikiLeaks cables. That was the big story of 2010: the truth of how U.S. diplomacy actually operated in the world. We could not have imagined — well, I could not have imagined — that the great story of 2011 would have absolutely nothing to do with U.S. actions, good or bad. That story, of course, was the struggle by millions of people in the Middle East to throw off generations of tyranny. It may still end badly, but the Arab Spring has been the most thrilling spectacle since the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1991, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
But where does that leave the United States, the center of global events, the indispensable nation? Are we just spectators of the glorious theater of liberation, as we are spectators of so much else in this new world of emerging, non-Western powers? That just doesn’t seem fair. In recent months, a new narrative has arisen that sees the Arab Spring as only one, regional instance of leaderless mass protest against political and economic injustice — a global movement that began in Tunisia, spread across the Arab world, leaped to Europe and then landed in the United States in the form of Occupy Wall Street before finally moving onto Russia. “This year,” as my friend Kurt Anderson wrote in an adroit essay introducing Time magazine’s choice of “The Protester” as Person of the Year, “do-it-yourself democratic politics became globalized, and real live protest went massively viral.” That’s true, as well as consolatory from the point of view of American national vanity, but I’m not convinced that it’s as important as Time thinks it is.
The Arab Spring was a revolution, not in the classic sense of an upending of the class system, but in the distinctly modern form of a whole people rising up against a corrupt and autocratic leader and his cadre, as happened in the Philippines in 1986, or the “color revolutions” in the Balkans and the former Soviet states more recently. Those leaders had so effectively walled off the Middle East from the democratizing forces sweeping the globe that Arabs appeared to be unable or unwilling to seize their own destiny. In fact, as Jean-Pierre Filiu writes in The Arab Revolution, “Arabs are no exception, but the resilience of their ruling cliques has been exceptional.” The revolution — again, no matter what the ultimate outcome — put a dramatic end to the Arab exception, and rejoined the Arab sphere to the world around it. That is an event of supreme importance.