Amr Nabil/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.In a recent piece in The Washington Post, Marc Lynch argued it’s wrong to say that the Arab uprisings have failed. “Success or failure”, he contends, is not a helpful way to understand these ongoing societal and political processes. “Let’s not talk in these binary terms”, he concludes, noting that after five years new political systems have taken shape that must be understood on their own terms – which by the way is a correct though not a novel finding.
We have seen this before as is shown by ample research on regime transitions since WWII, and more in particular after the end of the Cold War. Here, we may refer in particular to the work of Barbara Geddes and her team and to Steven Lewitsky’s and Lucan Way’s work. It was found that more than half of regime breakdowns were transitions from one autocracy to another. Fewer than one-quarter of leadership changes resulted in “democratization” or a move towards democratic governance (but in a majority of cases remaining short of achieving a consolidated “democracy” as commonly understood).
So nothing new here. There is no linear “transition” towards democracy, which is very much against the school of thought of those scholars, both inside and outside the Arab World (and – perhaps more understandably – among many activists), who may suffer from what the Germans call Zwangsoptimismus (translated as “forced optimism”). Of course other scholars have been more cautious, emphasizing the implementation of inclusive political and socio-economic policies as pre-requisites for a successful transition to democracy.
