The Arab Spring has failed. Angry crowds ransacked the offices of Egypt’s democratically elected President, Mohamed Morsi, this week just as they once forced their way into the marble palaces of the region’s dictators. The mob set the place on fire and if there had been a statue of the president they would surely have toppled it.
What is happening in Egypt is not just part of a global revolt against austerity or a protest against the yawning gulf between rich and poor. It marks the death of an idea: that greater political choice and free speech could swiftly transform the Middle East. That turns out to have been a Western mirage in the desert. None of the European points of reference, from the uprisings of 1848 to the toppling of communism in 1989, really applied to the modern Arab world, not to the teeming urban poor of Cairo, nor the frustrated medical students of Bahrain nor the warlords of Libya.
We wanted a different outcome. We wanted dictatorship to be replaced by democracy. Instead it was replaced by the escalating collapse of nation states. In the squares and streets of Cairo we can watch this tumbling-down in real time. There are plenty of men with weapons in the mob; guns have been flooding in from the Libyan surplus stockpiles and amateur armourers make improvised ones, called fards, that fire birdshot. These were fired at President Morsi’s HQ this week. Because the police are all but invisible, because there has been a twelvefold increase in armed robberies since the 2011 “Spring”, because the murder rate has increased 300 per cent, the small arms market is booming.
In all other respects, though, the economy is shrivelling. One quarter of the population are struggling to live below the very low Egyptian poverty line. Unemployment has soared. To keep fuel and food subsidies — and thus head off further unrest — President Morsi has dipped into foreign reserves, which have plunged from $36 billion before the Spring to $13 billion last March.
You could put this down to Mr Morsi’s incompetence, or at least to the failure of his Muslim Brotherhood to reinvent itself as a governing class. More charitably, you could blame the huge corruption and wastefulness of his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak. But it is a more general malaise. The Egyptians were rightly proud that they (like the Tunisians before them) were able to unseat their dictator themselves rather than by a Western invasion in the manner of Saddam Hussein.
That brief satisfaction has now given way to fury that the State can no longer meet expectations of security or prosperity — and a gathering sense that the Islamists are actually afraid to govern, or to accept the consequences of leadership. Thus Mr Morsi eagerly accepted $4 billion from Qatar and Saudi Arabia this year because it was easier to be in hock to Arab oil-producers than to swallow the conditions of an IMF rescue package.
Across the region the State is only just functioning. In Libya the Gaddafi-enforced consensus among tribes has given way to outright rivalry. In Syria few still believe that Bashar Assad will be able to rescue even the shell of the state that he inherited from his father. Rather, the to-and-fro of the fighting, seemingly random to Western outsiders, seems to reflect Assad’s determination to establish a secure Alawite enclave connected through a land corridor to Hezbollah-controlled areas of northern Lebanon.
Much blood has still to flow but the Syrian outcome may well be two dysfunctional states, one controlled by Assad or by Alawite generals who have displaced him, and the other by a Western-backed rebel administration.
Nobody in the region is getting what he or she wants. Minorities feel threatened. Women are more marginalised than before the Spring. Justice is as corrupt. In Egypt official courts have virtually withdrawn from the Sinai, replaced by Sharia justice. And according to some estimates 80 per cent of the secret police were previously employed by Mr Mubarak.
Is that what the West wants? Probably not, but nobody is really asking us: two years after the Arab Spring, the West is even more helpless than it was. The Army may soon become a pivotal force in Egypt again.
Yesterday it gave the Government of President Morsi 48 hours to satisfy the (unspecified) demands of the people, otherwise it would take over the reins. The military high command says that the swirling crowds have now become a matter of national security (code for a putsch that would probably throw its weight behind a transitional government of technocrats until parliamentary elections later in the year).
So the West’s dilemma is more or less the same as it was two years ago: do we accept a military takeover that brings a semblance of stability to a strategically important country? Or do we speak out for a democratic process that is in part the product of our imaginations? My bet is that, in our funk, we will accept the Army as the least-worst option and pretend to believe its self-portrayal as the guardian of the people.
But here’s the rub: you can’t have a coup d’état without an état. And there just isn’t much of a state structure left, not in Egypt, not in Libya, not in Syria.
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