Fourteen years ago, on January 14, 2011, Tunisians filled Habib Bourguiba Avenue, the main thoroughfare in Tunis, with cries of freedom and dignity as they celebrated the overthrow of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. He fled the country and announced his resignation after 28 days of sustained civil disobedience expressed by the “occupation” of public squares in almost every city in the country, sparked by the suicide by burning of fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi in the town of Sidi Bouzid.
The victory of the Tunisian people against their oppressors and their corrupt, stifling regime was so remarkable and stunning that it inspired a wave of Arab uprisings across the region.
In major cities from Yemen to Morocco, millions of freedom-thirsty residents joined the Tunisian “occupiers” of Bourguiba Avenue to celebrate the overthrow of their ferocious authoritarian regime and call for their liberation. With the clear achievement by the Tunisian people of the principles of “dignity” and “freedom,” a new movement was born that put the entire region on a revolutionary path toward “liberation.”
More than a decade later, the legacy of these uprisings, which have come to be known as the “Arab Spring,” is mixed at best. One of the Arab countries, Syria, began its revolutionary journey immediately after Tunisia on March 30, 2011. Armed rebels managed to overthrow the dictator Bashar al-Assad only last month, after 14 years of devastating war and losses. In other Arab Spring countries, including Tunisia, revolution came more quickly but was short-lived, with tyranny, repression, and conflict returning to the picture soon after the initial successes of the revolting masses.
All of this, of course, does not detract from the moral and political courage of the 2011 uprisings. The moral symbolism of these revolutions – like the remarkable victories won by once-silent peoples against some of the most coercively policed states in the world – has lasting power.
The new social and political patterns of public life that emerged against the backdrop of these revolutions continued in Tunisia and the rest of the Arab region. Before 2011, the state body politic was dominated by political dissolution of rulers who had lost their legitimacy, and was undermined by excessive coercion, executive power, and exclusionary practices. These revolutions have encouraged the peoples of the region to demand a say in the nature of their rule, and have permanently changed the way we talk about and analyze relations between the state and post-colonial Arab society.
To this day, January 14, 2011, it still represents a historical moment that ignited a moral flame, a cry for freedom, as it were, for the masses inhabiting the Arab geography. It took root in the hearts, minds and imaginations of Arab youth who were caught up in the hustle and bustle of a better future. The Tunisian revolution and the revolutions that followed in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen drew inspiration, confidence, and moral strength from the collapse of entire authoritarian apparatuses that had previously been thought immune to the sudden overthrow of people’s power.
But it cannot be denied that the banners of freedom and dignity that rose on the ruins of fallen regimes soon gave way to counter-revolutions.
After the overthrow of autocrats in 2011, the appeal of revolution quickly lost its luster in most Arab Spring countries. This did not happen as a result of the idea of revolution itself falling out of favor with the Arab masses, who were “occupied squares.” It was certainly not because the revolution’s ideological rivals, including those advocating electoral democracies (or even those promoting “Islamic democracy,” such as Rashid Ghannouchi in Tunisia), had enough time to prove or refute their value. Rather, the swings in the pendulum of the counter-revolution from Tunisia to Egypt forced the “revolutionaries” to take a defensive position and pressured them to abandon their “revolutionary” demands. Indeed, with the passage of time, revolutions and revolutionaries are gradually deteriorating everywhere.
In places like Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen, with their newly acquired freedoms, political parties have begun to deviate from the original purposes of their democratic beginnings. The revival of old forms of political polarization, economic and social divisions, armed militias, and systemic tensions involving deep state actors and civilian actors is what has led to this deviation. At the same time, the wealth gap between the haves and have-nots that shaped the original cries for freedom and dignity has remained intact. This multifaceted crisis has sounded the death knell for true revolutionary transformation, that is, a complete break with the deposed authoritarian regimes.
The result was the formation of so-called Arab Spring quasi-democracies that are said to be “hybrid regimes,” with mixed types of power, and having very few of the ideals called for by the Arab street during the Arab Spring uprisings.
Today, the prisons of some of these “democracies” are populated by political activists accused of “conspiring to subvert state power” – coercive charges that many believed were consigned to the dustbin of history after the 2011 revolutions. The rule of law, which was one of the basic demands, has been abandoned. For uprisings, the law itself is mobilized against actors who should contribute to the nation from an open public square, if not from a democratic parliament. Instead of using their knowledge for the benefit of the state, they rot in prison cells for the crime of intimidating the powers that secured control of the state after the revolutions. These purges raise doubt in people’s minds as to whether a revolution that would lead to a complete break with the traditional authoritarian practices of the past would ever be possible.
In light of these democratic setbacks, where freedom of association, participation, challenge, and expression are under constant threat, the elections themselves inevitably lose their credibility. The low voter turnout is evidence of this democratic decline in the elections held in places such as Algeria, Egypt, and Tunisia.
In many Arab Spring countries, the political opposition suffers from the same democratic shortcomings and weaknesses as the ruling authorities, leading many voters to believe that elections are useless, no matter how fair and free they appear on the surface. Democracy within parties remains weak, if not absent. Those who lead political parties and civil society organizations tend to cling to power and reject democratic rotation of leadership positions. As a result, those who made the 2011 revolutions possible – the people – have begun to lose interest in the electoral process.
Of course, responsibility for democratic declines since the 2011 revolutions should not be placed on deep states or local political leaders alone.
Arab tyranny and the suppression of revolutionary fervor have been revitalized in more than one case over the past fourteen years by agreements concluded by Arab governments after the uprisings with Western powers and institutions, from the United States and the European Union to the International Monetary Fund. . For example, in countries like Lebanon and Egypt, the IMF played a key role in keeping authoritarianism alive by supplying governments with money, cutting off any hopes their peoples might have had for new leaders or long-term revolutionary solutions to their economic and political problems. .
The Arab street has not forgotten August 2013 I want a massacreWhich witnessed the security forces killing hundreds of supporters of the deposed President Mohamed Morsi, who was democratically elected. Nor are they indifferent or unaware of the West-facilitated Israeli genocide in Gaza, and the inability of Arab states to put an end to it for 15 long months.
The Arab peoples are fully aware that their countries, led by experienced tyrants or would-be tyrants, are now no more than mere guardians of terrorism or immigration. They protect borders and seek to ensure the elusive “stability” that is a common interest of regional and Western leaders.
This is perhaps the most important and enduring legacy of the Tunisian Revolution and the broader Arab Spring. The “Emperor” was certainly not defeated. But it is exposed. As with the arrogant emperor in the famous Danish folk tale, it has become impossible to hide the nakedness of Arab countries and their rulers. There are no clothes. There is no cover. There is no “democracy,” no compromise politics, no power-sharing, no free citizenship. The uprisings succeeded in building a new relationship between the state and the people in the Arab world, and let the cat out of the bag: the emperor has no clothes.
Fourteen years after the Tunisian revolution, democracy is still missing in Tunisia and in the Arab world more broadly. But so are all the clothes of emperors, and the Arab peoples paid attention to that. The legacy of revolutions is still alive.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
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