The Arab Spring (a partial collection)

[TheCurmudgeon]

In places like Afghanistan, where we cannot even succeed in meeting basic needs, you will never activate the need for autonomy on a wholesale level. Survival will be the predominant need and survival needs produce a different set of values - values based in collective survival.

An example of my argument from a non-Arab country. In the current Kenyan elections

NAIROBI, Kenya — Uhuru Kenyatta, a Kenyan politician who has been charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity, was leading by a wide margin in the Kenya election on Tuesday, with nearly half the votes counted.

Mr. Kenyatta, who comes from one of the richest, most powerful families in Africa and has been accused of bankrolling death squads that killed women and children during the chaos of Kenya’s election five years ago, was leading 54 percent to 42 percent over the second-place candidate, Raila Odinga, Kenya’s prime minister.

He is preferred over candidates that are actually running on issues.

But in the end, the presidential candidates who tried to gain momentum on issues-based campaigns, like Peter Kenneth and Martha Karua, got almost no votes. It seemed that most voters still felt the leader from their ethnic group was the best one to protect them — especially in an edgy environment where many fear a replay of post-election violence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/wo...s&emc=rss&_r=0

In the end, what the people want is security and stuff. It is a patron-client system that does not have the economic stability - Kenyan per capita GDP in 2011 was $808 US according to the World Bank - to activate autonomy needs. They are not interested in knowing what their government does, they just want their government to provide them what they need to survive ... and they think they are more likely to get that if a member of their ethnic group is in charge.

[TheCurmudgeon]

While the international media loves to focus on secular, liberal protestors, they are not representative of the general population of Egypt: neither their will, their values, nor their interests. Nor were they responsible for the transition in Egypt; in fact, many of the current protestors against Muhammad Mursi were in favor of the Mubarak Regime. The recent protests have been relatively small; the opposition movement is divided and disorganized; there have been constant counter-demonstrations in favor of the President, sometimes larger than those against him.

For years, labor movements and Islamists represented the primary opposition blocs to the Mubarak regime. Accordingly, the narrative that the Islamists "hijacked" the revolution seems problematic.

Egypt is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim; culturally, the society is very conservative. Consider this: in one of the first scientific polls following the fall of Hosni Mubarak, a plurality of respondents (41.4%) identified Saudi Arabia as their ideal model of government to replace the regime (four times more votes than the runners-up, being the U.S., China, and Turkey, with 10% each). Saudi Arabia, of course, is extremely conservative, religious, and authoritarian; clearly, the will of the Egyptian people seems to diverge drastically from their portrayal on Western media.

These respondents did not get what they wanted, despite electing Islamists to parliament by huge margins – including a number of representatives from ultra-conservative salafist Nour Party (they ranked 2nd, behind the Muslim Brotherhood; these two parties alone garnered nearly 72% of the total vote). In total, 54% of the electorate turned out at the polls.

http://www.yourmiddleeast.com/opinio...mocratic_13232

My only disagreement is when the author claims that liberals were not responsible for the transition. If they were not, then the Islamists would have succeeded years ago. It was the liberal catalyst that pushed the people over the edge. None-the-less, it is not a united front, and a large number of the people who possibly remained on the fence during the revolution support a more conservative Islamic government.

As long as this level of division exists in the population it is likely that instability will be the order of the day.