Fourteen years ago, on January 14, 2011, Tunisians filled Boulevard Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s central thoroughfare, with cries of freedom and dignity as they celebrated the overthrow of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. He fled the country and announced his resignation after 28 days of relentless civil disobedience marked by “occupations” of public squares in almost every city in the country, sparked by the horrific self-immolation of fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi in the town of Sidi Bouzid.
The victory of the Tunisian people against their longtime oppressor and his stifling, corrupt regime was so extraordinary, so spectacular, that it inspired a wave of Arab uprisings across the region.
In major cities from Yemen to Morocco, millions of freedom-seeking residents joined the Tunisian “occupiers” of Bourguib Boulevard to celebrate the overthrow of their fiercely authoritarian regime and call for their own liberation. With the perceived achievements of the Tunisian people such as “karama” (dignity) and “hurriyya” (freedom), a new movement was born that set the entire region on a revolutionary path of “tahrir” (emancipation).
More than a decade later, the legacy of these uprisings, which have come to be known as the “Arab Spring,” is mixed at best. One Arab country, Syria, which began its own revolutionary journey right after Tunisia on March 30, 2011, armed rebels only succeeded in ousting dictator Bashar Al-Assad last month, after 14 years of devastating war and losses. In other Arab Spring countries, including Tunisia, revolution came faster but was short-lived with authoritarianism, oppression and conflict re-emerging soon after the initial successes of the rebel masses.
All this, of course, does not diminish the moral and political value of the 2011 uprisings. The moral symbolism of these revolutions—as extraordinary victories of once-silenced peoples against some of the most forcibly guarded states in the world—has enduring power.
The new social and political patterns of public life that emerged on the back of these revolutions persisted in Tunisia and the rest of the Arab region. The pre-2011 state body politic was dominated by the political decay of delegitimized rulers and undermined by excessive coercion and executive power and exclusionary practices. These revolutions emboldened the peoples of the region to demand a say in the nature of their rule and permanently changed the way we talk about and analyze Arab postcolonial state-society relations.
To this day, January 14, 2011, it stands as a historical moment that ignited a moral flame, a cry for freedom, so to speak, for the multitudes that inhabit the Arab geography. It entered the hearts, minds and imaginations of Arab youth caught up in the clamor for a better future. The Tunisian revolution and those that followed it in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen drew inspiration, confidence and moral strength from the collapse of entire authoritarian apparatuses previously thought to be immune to sudden popular overthrows.
However, it cannot be denied that the flags of freedom and dignity raised on the ruins of fallen regimes soon gave way to counter-revolutions.
After the overthrow of authoritarian rulers in 2011, the allure of revolution quickly lost its luster in most Arab Spring countries. This did not happen because the very idea of revolution fell out of favor with the Arab public, which was a “square occupier”. It is certainly not because the ideological opponents of the revolution, including those who advocated electoral democracies (or even those who advocated “Islamic democracy”, such as the Tunisian Rachid Ghannouchi), were given enough time to prove or disprove their worth. Instead, swings in the counter-revolutionary pendulum from Tunisia to Egypt resulted in “revolutionaries” being forced to take a defensive stance and pressured to abandon their “revolutionary” demands. Indeed, over time, revolutions and revolutionaries gradually degenerated in each environment.
In places like Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen with their newfound freedoms, political parties have begun to deviate from the original goals of their democratic beginnings. The rekindling of old forms of political polarization, economic and social cleavages, armed militias, and systemic tensions involving deep state actors and civilian protagonists is what has led to this deviation. Meanwhile, the wealth gap between the haves and the have-nots that framed the original cries for freedom and dignity remains intact. This multifaceted crisis led to a truly revolutionary transformation, i.e. a complete break with the overthrown authoritarian systems.
The result has been the formation of so-called Arab Spring quasi-democracies said to be “hybrid regimes”, with mixed brands of government, with very few of the ideals the Arab street sought during the Arab Spring uprisings.
Today, the prisons of some of these “democracies” are full of political activists accused of “conspiracy to subvert state power” – charges of coercion that many thought were consigned to the dustbin of history after the 2011 revolutions. The rule of law, which was one of the fundamental demands of the rebellions, has been abandoned, and the law itself is being mobilized against the actors who should contribute to the nation from the open public square, if not the democratic parliament. Instead of using their knowledge and experience for the good of the state, they are rotting in prison cells for the crime of intimidating the powerful who secured control of the state after the revolutions. Such purges create doubt in people’s minds as to whether a revolution that would lead to a complete end to the traditional authoritarian practices of the past will ever be feasible.
Under such democratic upheavals, where freedom of association, participation, competition and expression is in constant danger, the elections themselves inevitably lose credibility. The low voter turnout speaks to this democratic degeneration in elections held in places like Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia.
In many Arab Spring countries, the political opposition has the same democratic flaws and weaknesses as the ruling forces, resulting in many voters believing that the elections are futile no matter how fair and free they appear to be. Intra-party democracy remains weak, if not absent. Those who lead political parties and civil society organizations tend to cling to power and shy away from democratic changes in leadership positions. As a result, those who made the 2011 revolutions possible – the people – are losing interest in the electoral process.
Of course, the blame for democratic degeneration since the 2011 revolutions should not be placed solely on deep states or domestic political leaders.
Arab authoritarianism has been revitalized and revolutionary fervor quelled in more than one case over the past 14 years through post-uprising Arab governments’ pacts with Western powers and institutions from the United States and the European Union to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). For example, in countries such as Lebanon and Egypt, the IMF played a key role in keeping authoritarianism alive by providing the governments with funds, dashing any hopes their people might have had for new leaders or revolutionary, long-term solutions to their economic and political problems.
Arab street did not forget August 2013 Rabaa massacrein which security forces killed hundreds of supporters of the ousted president Mohamed Morsi, who was democratically elected. They are also not indifferent or unaware of the Israeli genocide in Gaza with the help of the West and the inability of the Arab states to put an end to it for 15 long months.
The Arab public is well aware that their states with experienced or future despots at the head are now nothing more than watchdogs of terror or migration. They protect the borders and seek to ensure the elusive “stability” that is of mutual interest to regional and Western leaders.
This is perhaps the most consequential and long-lasting legacy of the Tunisian revolution and the wider Arab Spring. The “Emperor” was not defeated, for sure. But he was exposed. Just like the vain emperor in the famous Danish folk tale, the nakedness of the Arab states and their rulers has become impossible to conceal. No clothes. No coverage. There is no “democracy”, politics of settlement, separation of powers or free citizenship. The uprisings built a new state-public relationship in the Arab world and let the cat out of the bag: the Emperor has no clothes.
Fourteen years after the revolution in Tunisia, democracy is still lacking in Tunisia and the wider Arab world. But all the emperor’s clothes are like that, and the Arab peoples noticed it. The legacy of the revolution lives on.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
