Ambassador Bodine discusses patterns and implications of Arab Spring

Ambassador Barbara Bodine, former U.S. ambassador to Yemen and lecturer in the Wilson School, discussed patterns of the Arab Spring in Whig Hall on Sunday. Bodine is also the director of the Wilson School’s Scholars in the Nation’s Service Initiative.

This lecture, titled “The Winter of Their Discontent: The Arab Spring Faces Reality,” is the first to be held by the International Relations Council in this year’s weekly Sunday evening series.

According to Bodine, the events that comprise Arab Spring, the recent and ongoing wave of demonstrations and revolutions in the Arab world, have three important “common threads.”

The first thread Bodine identified was the young sector of the Middle East, where over half of the population is under 25. Bodine compared this youth bulge to the similar age demographic that created American social upheaval in the 1960s.

“The youth of the Arab world are realizing, as the postwar baby boomers did back in 1968, that they are the dominant generation, and that they are not content with what their parents and grandparents were content with,” Bodine said.

A second common thread that Bodine discussed was the economic problems that the Arab world is facing, where young graduates are unable to find jobs or, if they do find jobs, are paid less than they were in the past.

“The economic prospects are very dim, and this makes marriage prospects dim as well. There is a population of young, very impassioned, very broke people who are facing nothing but a wall — and that’s a political wall,” she said.

The third theme that Bodine traced was the one of new technology — specifically communication technology. Until the mid-’90s, state media largely controlled the spread of news. Bodine recalled watching the news on Baghdadi television and seeing nothing but “the glorious leader shaking hands — there was no news.”

But with the advent of Al-Jazeera, the first satellite television broadcast in the Middle East in 1996, the world became much less circumscribed.

“Suddenly everyone was connected with region-wide news, seeing what’s happening and able to compare and contrast what was happening in their country to what was happening in others’. There was a much larger picture,” Bodine said.

In light of the current events taking place in Yemen, Egypt and the rest of the upheaved Arab world, Bodine stressed that frustration will accompany the aftershock of revolution.

“The economy isn’t going to suddenly improve, jobs aren’t going to be suddenly created and democracy is a long, hard process — it is difficult to change the fundamental structures of government,” she said.

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However, Bodine added, “[In the Middle East,] the social contract — the relationship between the rulers and the ruled — has fundamentally changed since Jan. 1.”

In the Q-and-A afterward, Bodine expressed the opinion that the new democracies of the Middle East will be willing to accept help from the United States and the U.N., despite not having wanted outside military to “do their revolutions for them.”

She also stressed that in addition to creating democratic governments, economic structures must also be reformed.

“These countries need to create jobs and prevent corruption. You can’t mistake democracy for addressing economic problems. A really nice election is like a really nice wedding: It doesn’t tell you anything about the marriage,” she said.