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Mubarak family’s attempt to turn Egypt into a family possession. The Army has ruled Egypt since the overthrow of King Farouk, playing liberals and religious conservatives off against each other. It looks set to go on doing that for some time to come. In Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, the counsel of the idealists seems dark and confused. US policy overall seems to have found the ‘sour spot’ that is the particular curse of the Obama administration: too friendly to the revolt to earn the trust and gratitude of the despots, too cautious and compromising to win many friends on the street.
Overall I am more cautious than optimistic about where the Arab Spring is headed. There is little prospect for the kind of rapid economic growth that could improve the prospects for young unemployed and underemployed Arabs. Foreign investment and tourism have already been badly hit by the unrest of the last six months, and the Arab regimes are turning to aid donors and organizations like the IMF and the World Bank in increasing desperation.
Culturally, many of the necessary preconditions are not in place. The poor quality of most Arab universities, the limited access to serious political history and discourse among all but a handful of Arab intellectuals, the suppression of political life under past dictatorships, the weakness of Islamic political thought in recent centuries and the absence of a robust and deeply rooted tradition of Islamic democracy all work against the rapid widespread development of stable liberal democracy in the Arab world.
Putting the dark economic outlook together with the problematic cultural and political situation makes optimism a tough position to hold. Without in any way scanting or minimizing the idealism, dedication and vision of the democrats rising in the Arab world today, they still seem a long way from winning. They remind me still of the Marquis de Lafayette during the French Revolution: they
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