Western newspapers and television programs are now full of articles and commentaries on what they have termed “The Arab Spring” — the growing democratization of Arab governments.
The thrust of this media campaign is to justify to their reluctant Western audiences that the US administration is correct in its thesis that military force is the best way to lead the Arab peoples to the path of democracy and virtue.
The media as well as the US administration are being disingenuous at best.
The developments we are observing in the Arab world today are a result of the interplay of many complex factors going back decades rather than years. These factors are both sociological and technological.
One of the sociological factors is the fact that over the last 50 years or so Arab society has transformed from a mainly rural, agrarian or pastoral, post-colonial society to an urban industrial one.
The politicization of the Arab masses was a natural result that corresponds to the experience of other societies undergoing a similar change.
The spread of mass literacy throughout the Arab world is another important factor that enhanced Arab political consciousness at a mass level and made them susceptible to political thought such as Marxism, for example, or its rivals — Arab nationalist philosophies like Nasserism or Baathism.
Technological developments had and still have an important role in developing and shaping Arab political consciousness at the mass level.
The most influential development is the rise of television that brought the world into the Arabs’ living rooms.
People were suddenly able to see, with an unprecedented immediacy, the unfolding of events from the four corners of the Earth and could learn from other people’s experiences, especially in the political field.
This effect was enhanced with the spread of satellite television that bypassed the stifling state censorship in many Arab countries.
The advent of Arabic satellite stations such as Al-Jazeera allowed for media that spoke in the same language as the Arabs and expressed their own point of view and accelerated the transformation of Arab societies.
The Internet was another technological innovation that greatly affected Arab society because it created a cheap and almost instant form of communication over which Arab states had little or no control.
The organizational capacity of this technology cannot be overstated, especially as it is coupled with another technological factor — the mobile phone and SMS.
Take the last municipal elections in Riyadh as an example of how these technologies were and are being used in the political arena.
The upshot of all of this is the political transformation in the Arab world and this transformation is due to a complex interplay of different factors over a long period of time. To this you can also add the manifest failure of many repressive Arab regimes to fulfill even the minimum needs of their people.
What form will these developments take?
No one can be certain, but for sure it will be different in each Arab state and will probably lead to governments more in tune with the aspirations of their people than the current regimes.
In conclusion, it is important to note here that these developments are by no means unique to the Arabs; rather they are common to most modern societies. The West itself is undergoing a period of political transformation as its regimes become moribund and their people become increasingly alienated from the political process.
