Eternal Arab Spring

Why Days and Weeks of Anger Will Gradually Turn into Years or even Decades

Events in the Middle East are often treated as something temporary, accidental. Either as a result of a conspiracy of insidious Americans, or as an adrenaline rush of unreasonable Islamists. However, the long drawn-out Arab Spring shows that what is happening there has fundamental reasons. Days and weeks of anger will gradually turn into years, or even decades. Instability will result in high oil prices, which, of course, will not save the Russian economy, but may prolong our next era of stagnation.

The well-studied experience of European modernization in the 19th and 20th centuries gives us a general idea of what awaits the Islamic world in the 21st century. Based on this experience, we will not, of course, predict the further course of events in Egypt or Syria (since there are civilizational and national specifics), but we can understand the scale of the problems of the Arab Spring as a whole.

Modernization is not the introduction of new technologies and not even an increase in production efficiency, as the nestlings of Medvedev's nest believe. Modernization is a change in people's lives associated with production. Cities are growing, factories are being built, capital is being invested, jobs are being created... People leave their traditional village life and go to work in that urban world where everything is different, everything is unusual. They lose ground under their feet there, cease to understand what is happening, begin to frantically search for new meanings, new forms of behavior. They begin to look for teachers who would explain how to live in an urbanized society, where it is no longer possible to vegetate according to the precepts of fathers and grandfathers who did not part with the countryside.

Millions of Europeans have gone through a similar stressful situation in the past. Now millions of Hispanics, Asians and Africans have to go through it. Although the Egyptian of the 21st century is in many ways different from the Frenchman of the 19th century, the essence of the problems of modernization remains the same. In a modernizing society, a whole complex of contradictions is necessarily exacerbated - interclass, interfaith, interethnic, interregional. As well as contradictions that are not so global - between separate interest groups, such as the army, the church, the secular bureaucracy, the westernized technocracy, etc.

In a word, problems arise not because society stands still, but because it develops. A society that stands still can suffer a variety of misfortunes - famine, epidemics, occupation, flight of brains, but not a revolution.

There are many who like to separate the “correct” modernization, in which everyone works honestly, from the “wrong” revolution, in which idlers rebel. But such an idea of development has nothing to do with reality. In fact, however strange it may seem, the more active modernization is, the more it creates grounds for rebellion. After all, the rapid development of society throws an increasing number of people from the countryside into the city, and, therefore, an increasing number lose their old life principles and begin to identify with some new groups.

Someone becomes a socialist, someone a nationalist, someone an Islamist. People who identify with class, nation, or creed are going to smash those who identify differently. And everyone at the same time sincerely believes that he is doing a good deed.

This has been going on (with long breaks, of course) for a hundred or two hundred years, judging by the European experience. France, for example, went through four major revolutions in about a hundred years before settling down. And Russia, which began to seriously modernize in the era of the Great Reforms of Alexander II, has not calmed down, it seems, to this day.

The Arab Spring will not be extinguished by today's fashionable calls for democracy. Although democracy is the best way to solve problems, it does not work in a society torn by violent divisions. In such a society there is only "us" and "them", "ours" and "strangers". And the understanding of common goals is inherent only to the intellectual minority, which is not able to control the general course of destructive processes.