The Arab Spring: Why the Surprising Similarities with the Revolutionary Wave of 1848?

Abstract

Prominent scholars have highlighted important similarities between the Arab Spring of 2011 and the “revolutions” of 1848: Both waves of contention swept with dramatic speed across whole regions, but ended up yielding rather limited advances toward political liberalism and democracy. I seek to uncover the causal mechanisms that help account for these striking parallels. Drawing on my recent analysis of 1848, I argue that contention spread so quickly because many people in a wide range of countries drew rash inferences from the downfall of Tunisia's dictator. Applying cognitive heuristics that psychologists have documented, they overrated the significance of the Tunisian success, overestimated the similarities with the political situation in their own country, and jumped to the conclusion that they could successfully challenge their own autocrats. This precipitation prompted protests in many settings that actually were much less propitious; therefore problems abounded. Cognitive shortcuts held such sway because Arab societies were weakly organized and repressed and thus lacked leaders from whom common people could take authoritative cues. The decision whether to engage in emulative contention fell to ordinary citizens, who—due to limited information access and scarce experience—were especially susceptible to the simple inferences suggested by cognitive heuristics.

Surreptitious Symbiosis: Engagement Between Activists and NGOs

“…It has been argued, necessarily heavily stylizing and simplifying world history that 1848, 1968 or 1989 have constituted such moments. We ourselves and others have argued that 2011 is another such moment (Reifer, 2014, Weyland, 2012. One common characteristic of the activists at the heart of such moments is that they agitate virulently against the logics of coercion and materialism, and distance themselves from these logics, relating the legitimacy of their cause to the purity of the ideational logic.…”

Angst springs eternal: Dangerous times and the dangers of timing the ‘Arab Spring’

“…Such claims entail a scientific search for historical comparisons. Which democratic revolution is best for indexing the 'Arab Spring': '1789' , 1848' , 1968' or/and 1989see variously Miller et al, 2012;Weyland, 2012), Latin America (Zgurić, 2012: 418) or Tiananmen Square (Joshi, 2011: 62-63)?…”

Revolutions and the international

“…The lack of legitimacy associated with these policies, added to the neo--patrimonial nature of the Egyptian state and its incapacity to deliver basic public goods, were fundamental to the emergence of a revolutionary situation in Egypt. So too was the revolution in Tunisia, which acted as a stimulus for protest in Egypt and other states in the region, whether this was through demonstration effect, cascades, or deliberate emulation (Patel, Bunce, and Wolchik 2011;Weyland 2012;Hale 2013). 12 Indeed, the protests in Tunisia and Egypt spread around the region and beyond, spurring movements in Mauritania, Djibouti, and Sudan as well as those in Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Oman, Libya, and Jordan.…”