Trying to ascertain the current state of the Arab Spring is a task uniquely vulnerable to the age-old accusation of idealism. To place any meaningful hope in a democratic, sustainable outcome, as I continue to do, is immediately subject to attack.
This week's issue of The Economist ran a feature on the uprisings.
Given that The Economist has, on a number of occasions, drunk from the idealist chalice, its overall optimism about the Arab world is perhaps not itself encouraging. It does, however, have a solid track record for promoting broad strokes, big-picture frames of discussion, and, as such, puts a crucial detail in perspective: the fact that the Arab Spring is bigger than the five states that dominate the news.
If Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Yemen predominate the public imagination, it is due only to their uprisings' having a more overt and recognizable character. But while pundits extrapolate from Egypt's struggles an overall breakdown in the pace of reform, a swelling protest movement in Morocco persuaded King Muhammad VI in March to draft a new constitution, that was overwhelmingly improved on July 1st. Jordan, too, has implemented democratic reforms. And while the Gulf States, minus Yemen, have so far succeeded in keeping their populations quiet through bribery and cash-showers, their actions are, by definition, a response to the mood of the people.
Constraining the aspirations of an entire region of humanity to the struggles of select states in their midst is much like limiting the breadth of, say, Egypt's revolution to the toppling of Mubarek.
The moral of the story is to reject myopia. Only from that basis can skepticism, for good or for ill, be properly fostered.
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