‘To me it feels like a time of change.’ That was my theme for January’s ‘Last Word,’ but back then in the innocent early days of the year, I could have had no inkling of the burst of revolutionary zeal that would erupt just days later. Who knows where today’s events in the Middle East will eventually take us? Possibly it is worthwhile to look back to see what has happened in the past in other areas of the world (but possibly not). As Mark Twain was once supposed to have said, ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.’
Fall of the Wall
Following the Russian Revolution, the USSR set up an enormous ‘sphere of influence’ which swallowed the whole of Eastern Europe. The USSR ruthlessly suppressed its people and political dissent was almost invariably met with a death sentence. Following the disastrous incursion of Soviet forces into Afghanistan, a series of old, ill and ineffective leaders, and incipient economic collapse, new leaders came to the fore, equipped with new thinking. Gorbachev may have instigated some of the new laws (multi-party elections, press freedom, free speech reforms) but events quickly overtook him. Republic after republic declared independence (some replacing Soviet dictatorship with local dictatorship), including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. In some former republics the revolutions passed off quietly, and in some there was violence. Not all of them are yet stable after the seismic upheavals of the early 1990s. The Berlin Wall was torn down, the former East Germany was ‘freed’ from Soviet shackles and was reunified with the rest of Germany.So it seems that the apparently impossible can come to pass and in a relatively short time: The USSR collapsed and these newly-independent countries came into being within two years.
Springtime of the Peoples
Europe underwent a series of revolutions in a short period, starting in 1848 in France, and spreading to much of Europe. In turn France, the pre-Italian states, the pre-German states, ‘Austria,’ Hungary, Denmark, Switzerland, Poland, Belgium and various other pre-European states and regions underwent riots and uprisings. The upper classes were complaining about the power of the regents and kings, the middle classes were complaining about lack of reform and the working classes were complaining about their working conditions (and much else). Alexis de Tocqueville remarked in his Recollections of the period that “society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy, and those who had anything united in common terror.”[1]The revolutions largely failed in their immediate objectives, with tens of thousands being killed or wounded, and with dissenters being brutally suppressed. However, political reform did accelerate throughout Europe in the decades after the revolts, leading to the formation of Germany and Italy and eventually leading to widespread constitutional reform. Those states that did not progress as far as others were those that were ‘bought-off’ with piecemeal but insubstantial reforms.
Revolutionary waves...
You might be familiar with the revolutionary waves described above, but there have been many such waves throughout the world in the last 200 years, including the Atlantic Revolutions in the late 1700s, the Latin American Wars of Independence, the Revolutions of 1905-1911 and the revolutionary fallout from the First and Second World Wars. Although the aims of the revolutionaries have varied over time (apart, perhaps, from wanting more freedom and easier working conditions), they have been united in one way: they have been inspired and enboldened by the actions of their fellow-revolutionaries in countries both near and far. They seem to have said to themselves, ‘If they can change things, why can’t we?’
What does it all mean for us?
Mr Obama’s call for an orderly transition in the Middle East will be balm to the ears of business people throughout the region: no-one wants uncertainty, since that is anathema to profitability. From the bread-bakers on the corners to the cement makers in their factories - and all of their customers - we all need certainty to be able to try to plan our lives and to try to live a little better than we did last year.I don’t know what will happen in the Middle East in the coming months and years, but I suspect that throughout the region would-be revolutionaries of all shades are looking at Egypt and Tunisia and thinking to themselves, ‘If they can do it, we can too.’