In recent months, the international, particularly the American, media have stuck to a particular narrative when analyzing developments in the Middle East. Following the Iraqi elections in January, the subsequent revolt against Syrian hegemony in Lebanon after the February 14 assassination of Rafik Hariri, and, in the middle of this, the announcement by President Hosni Mubarak that Egypt would conduct a multi-candidate presidential election this year, many a media outlet posited that the region was witnessing an “Arab democratic spring.”
How true was this plot line? For the Bush administration and its supporters it provided a convenient canopy over a series of individual developments starting with the Iraqi vote. Convenient, because it suggested that the invasion of Iraq had finally started to bear democratic fruit, both inside the country and in shaping regional demands for freedom. Naturally, what ensued was a notion, perhaps even a conscious policy spin, that the transformations in the region were organically related, and that the United States was largely responsible for this.
Against this was another narrative, advanced by the Bush administration’s critics, suggesting the first narrative was poppycock. Proponents of this argument insisted that regional democratic change was no more than the reflection of indigenous and disparate Arab desires, for which the U.S. was only marginally responsible. Moreover, there was some doubt as to the authenticity of the democratic urge in each country: while the Iraqis were indeed sincere, they voted, the doubters insisted, to get the Americans out. In Lebanon, there was a desire to see the Syrians withdraw, but until March 14, when an estimated 1 million people descended on Martyrs Square, the same doubters suggested the protests were largely a Christian effort, hence vaguely illegitimate, amid palpable Shiite dissent. And in Egypt, they again averred, Mubarak’s election move was designed merely for him to stay in power or bring his son into office.
Both broad narratives were used in what became an ideological boxing match, where the reality on the ground was mostly irrelevant. Indeed, in any narrative, concocted by the media or picked up by partisan interest groups, the key is simplicity. And just as the Bush administration’s detractors sometimes legitimately mocked the “Arab spring” story line, their own riposte was equally simplistic, downplaying the mobility of cultural examples, where the democratic movements in each Arab country were deconstructed, broken off from similar manifestations elsewhere, and considered solely in mechanical terms.
Culture, particularly the capitalist culture of openness and free markets, is never easy to quantify. Events in Lebanon did not require Iraqi elections to take off: the Lebanese have been voting in relatively free (if flawed) elections since Independence. Similarly, Mubarak did not pick up on the anti-Syrian rebellion in Lebanon to plot his strategy. Hovering above each development was undoubtedly U.S. power, but it also brought pressure to bear differently in different places.
However, there was also little doubt that what happened in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, but also in Saudi Arabia, where municipal elections took place for the first time in decades, and in Kuwait, where women have just been given the right to vote, was part of a same regional trend. There is little doubt, too, that the impetus for this was the Bush administration’s democracy-based policies and rhetoric and the presence of U.S. soldiers in the Arab heartland. One need not agree with what Washington is doing to recognize that Arab peoples, sensing the opportunity for change around them, have precipitated – and their regimes, to avoid losing power, have pretended to precipitate – democratic change, in the latter case unintentionally opening doors to greater modifications in the future.
But more interesting is that the existence of a democracy narrative, whether accurate or not, often influences political actors in mid-action. For example, the Lebanese had never used the label “Cedar revolution” before the America media inflicted it upon them. However, it was soon picked up by demonstrators, as were the comparisons outside being made between Lebanon, Georgia and Ukraine, so that there was interaction between how Lebanon was being perceived outside and how the Lebanese used this to perceive themselves. The idea that they were participating in a “revolution”, that they were part of a wider campaign for freedom that spanned the region and globe, was soon echoing loudly in the minds of youths, whether it reflected reality or not.
That’s a surprise history, through culture, often pulls. Beyond material considerations and demonstrable realities there are unruly ideas, vaguely stated or crystal clear. Amid the clashing narratives over whether an “Arab spring” was in the making, the direct participants wrote their own story, different from the Bush administration’s or that of its critics. The media may have played a role, but only the actors themselves, protestors or voters, could (or ever will) put it to good use.
