Demonstrators in Tahrir Square anticipating Mubarak's speech. Shawkan/Demotix. All rights reserved.
“The people want the downfall of the regime”: the famous slogan that erupted during the Arab Spring unified the Arab world. It is now enshrined in the mythology of an organic national unified “people” against the autocrats, creating an “imagined community”, as Benedict Anderson phrased it, where people located within the boundaries of nation states are unified in an organic whole, with no stratification.
Ironically, this followed a notion promoted by Arab autocrats themselves; that all power is disseminated from a central figure, usually the head of state, and all the ills of society are concentrated in the hands of this one man. All state institutions follow his every whim. This created the illusion that once the head of state had been removed, the struggle would be over.
