Reasons for anxiety and optimism in the Middle East

Nelson Mail editorial, February 5, 2011
For those who cherish the sight of their fellow humans rising with determination and fearlessness against oppression and deprivation, this week's events in Egypt and the wider Middle East have been golden - a historic occasion to inspire and excite, tempered as it is with alarm at how things might yet unfold. For those who value Western-centric certainty and control in international affairs, it will be a time of dread.
Suddenly - and in a manner which few outside the region would have fantasised about even two months ago - the future of the Arab world has been turned on its head. Stereotypes of moribund societies sullenly accepting that their place in the modern world is under the yolk of toxic dictatorships are crumbling by the day. So too, it seems, are the West's expectations of odious regimes serving as a bulwark against Islamic and anti-Israeli militancy.
It goes without saying that the outcome of the Egyptian uprising has the potential to profoundly reshape the world's most volatile and strategically- charged region, maybe dangerously for the West.
The enormous uncertainty, and the inspiring twists and alarming turns of the week's events in Cairo, mean speculation about what might yet emerge is futile. But however the future may be moulded, it is undeniable that the Arab world's established order, with its corruption and client states, is on its ear; that a genie has been unleashed which can never be forced back into the bottle.
Among the most remarkable of the many extraordinary aspects of recent events - triggered by a backblocks uprising in Tunisia, and spreading across the Arab world at a runaway pace - has been the demonstration of the power ordinary people can grasp with nothing more than a mobile phone and a social media account. The state has been left flat-footed as the man and woman in the street have realised the effectiveness with which they can alert and mobilise others to a cause; the normal weapons of censorship have been hamfisted and clumsy in comparison. It is this almost anarchic spread of rebellion that has been so effectively detonated.
It will surely not be a wholesale upheaval across the Middle East. It would be too fanciful to imagine the police states of Syria or Libya, for instance, allowing a public uprising to get beyond the point where some state terrorism was unable to knock it back down. Nevertheless, the longer and bolder the Egyptian revolution proves to be, the more irresistible the comparisons with the domino-like collapse of the Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s will become.
As much as the week's events invite anxiety, there are causes for optimism too, and the clearest of these in Egypt is the revelation to the West that the millions who have joined the drive against Mubarak are not a faceless mass of the cliched bogeymen of Islamic militancy, but ordinary people with familiar aspirations of security, freedom and prosperity. Perhaps the best outcome that could be hoped for is that the secular, liberal inclinations obvious in elements of the protest movement will prevail in the uncertain times ahead.
But the real point is that while the outside world, and especially the United States, might have helped create the mess which is now boiling over in the Arab street, this is not the West's rebellion, nor an anti-Western display. Unpredictability and volatility may be more dangerous in the Middle East than anywhere else on the planet; and yet now that it has been unleashed, it is hard to avoid the feeling that it has been a long time coming.