Bodine discusses common threads in Arab Spring

The sudden birth of the Arab Spring took even the most seasoned State Department diplomats by surprise, former U.S. ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine said in a lecture titled “A Time for Every Season: Assessing the Arab Spring” in Jadwin Hall on Saturday morning.

Around the world, people followed the progress of the Tunisian Revolution on television, Twitter and Youtube, and “every other despot, dictator, monarch and mullah” has had to question whether a similar movement might soon overtake their country, Bodine said. Noting that few organized protests had taken place in these regions before the Arab Spring, she explained that now “the Middle East seemed to be making up for decades of ‘nothing.’ ”

Subsequent movements in other countries were better organized and more democratic than those of Tunisia, but all suffer from contested leadership, competing interests and a difficult transition from protest activity to political reconstruction, she said.

Though each movement is driven by its own local grievances and idiosyncrasies, she explained, all countries engulfed by the Arab Spring have “significant common threads” that can explain why protests erupted there. The demography of the Middle East has been critical: Over 50 percent of the population is younger than 25 years old, and such a disproportionate number of youths is highly correlated with civil instability. Younger populations also tend to put greater pressure on a society’s education, healthcare and employment institutions, a phenomenon apparent in current civilian calls for reform, she said.

Bodine added that today’s Middle Eastern generation has few ties with the world of its grandparents — it is highly educated, highly nationalistic, well-connected to the outside world and in possession of high expectations for change. And because young Arabs have only ever known Israel’s existence as a fact of life, they don’t hold the same grievances as previous generations did, she said.

“This is a clash of generations, and in many ways it’s a battle of generational succession,” Bodine explained.

One might consider today’s Middle Eastern population “pre-democratic,” Bodine noted, in light of its calls and demonstrations for representative governmental procedure.

Technological advances, such as satellite TV, the Internet and new social media, have powerfully contributed to the emergence of protests, Bodine added. With the debut of the news network Al-Jazeera and its subsequent competitors, “a new public space and identity began to emerge” that “created a transnational consciousness” uniting young Arabs throughout the region, Bodine said.

According to Bodine, the greater availability of information enables young populations to evaluate whether the promises made by their leaders have been kept or quietly swept under the rug. Perhaps more importantly, governmental crackdowns on particular groups are publicized instantly through a web of social media, contributing to the resentment of existing regimes and closeness to fellow Arab civilians. This behavior has led to young people feeling “remarkably empowered” by technology, Bodine noted.

Economic woes have also driven much of the Arab Spring’s collective action, she explained. Rampant unemployment and underemployment plague many of these nations’ economies in part because young people are graduating from universities with skills that don’t match those required by available jobs. In Yemen, Bodine noted, combined rates of unemployment and underemployment among the population exceed 60 percent.

Though the Arab Spring movements have demographic, technological and economic similarities, they do not constitute “a pan-Arab movement in the traditional sense of the word,” Bodine said. No universal ideology drives these individual movements — all draw heavily upon local problems and reflect the degree to which prior regimes were already open and responsive to protest.

Nonetheless, “a fundamentally changed Middle East” has emerged in recent months, Bodine said, though new regimes face years of development. Likening revolution to conception and state-building to gestation, Bodine jokingly added that the revolutionaries already “had the fun part, and now there’s all the work” of building a stable political regime ahead of them.

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The former ambassador urged patience by Western powers, given that democracy or even liberal reforms can’t be generated overnight. Alluding generally to the U.S. government’s attempt to impose democratic government in Iraq, Bodine added that such spontaneous development doesn’t work — rather, democratic state-building is a “long, slow, evolutionary process.”

The democratic regimes that will eventually emerge from these revolutionary nations may look structurally different from our own, Bodine explained, but they will embody similar fundamental principles.

This lecture was the last in the Alumni Association’s Fall Football Lecture Series.