I just listened to a podcast of an Economist special report on the Arab Spring from July of this year…an interview with the Economist’s Middle East editor Max Rodenbeck…the interviewer asked him about the causes of the Arab Spring..this is what he said:
“I think you really have a lot of convergent factors. I mean you can’t pick out one thing. I think probably the most important thing in a way is just big changes; slow changes in demography, urbanization, the number of youth that are out there who don’t have jobs, who don’t have prospects, and who want a different kind of relationship with their government. There’s a sort of general feeling that these old patriarchies are no longer what people want. They want a different kind of government, a different kind of model. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what triggers things. It’s something that accumulated over time and then sort of caught on like a virus and spread everywhere at the same time.”
OK. This is the official myth. It just sorta happened. No real explanation. No mention of any real economic factors…no IMF…no structural adjustment programs..no slashing of subsidies on staple goods…no disenfranchising land reforms..no. It just kinda happened. The closest he comes to even mentioning something about the economic suffering of the people is the bit about unemployed youth…but he seems to imply that their joblessness is just a consequence of demography and urbanization.
The most dangerous thing for us is if we start to accept this interpretation of events…and that is a real danger, because it all sounds vaguely and abstractly accurate, i.e., ‘the people got fed up.’ But we cannot afford abstraction.