David Fromkin: No, 2005 Isn't 1989 All Over Again
[David Fromkin, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, is the author of"A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East."]
BLISS was it in that dawn to be alive," sang William Wordsworth of the French Revolution of 1789, which, insofar as laws, customs and politics were concerned, promised to wipe the slate clean and offer the human race a fresh start. A similar exhilaration seized the Western world in the autumn of 1989, when cheering crowds dismantled the Berlin Wall - and with it, soon enough, the Soviet empire. Now many analysts are suggesting that the rumblings we hear from the Middle East presage an eruption of that sort. Is the old order in those lands about to be exploded?
Certainly there have been changes from Cairo to Kabul, and portents of more to come. More to the point, they have been in the direction of democracy. When this millennium was ushered in, few would have dared to predict that in just a few years elections of any sort would be held or announced in Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Palestinian territories.
So in 2005, along with the bad news - the continuing deadly insurgency in Iraq, Osama bin Laden remaining at large, terrorists regrouping from Syria to Pakistan - there are welcome surprises all across the Arab-speaking Middle East. Moreover it is at least arguable that, taken together, these events may amount to something big, that they might constitute the cracks in the concrete that signal the impending collapse of the building.
But without depreciating the value of these halting first movements toward democracy, we should be aware of how limited - for a variety of reasons - they are. They may go in the right direction but are just at the beginning of the road, and most can be expected to encounter strong opposition before they move much further.
A distinctive feature of the events of 1989 in Germany that is not found in the Middle East in 2005 is that those who manned the Berlin Wall were no longer willing to defend it. The Communist regimes had lost faith in communism and in themselves; they offered no resistance when the crowds pulled down the barricades.
That is not true of our adversaries, or even many of our friends, today in the Middle East. The jihadists believe in their cause with a fanatic ardor. Taliban raiders continue to harass the democratically elected regime in Afghanistan. It is not clear whether armed groups will respect the Palestinian truce. And even if Syria should withdraw from Lebanon, the dictatorial regime in Damascus is not dissolving itself, as Moscow's did after 1989; on the contrary, any withdrawal would be part of a larger plan to consolidate its hold on domestic power.
Nor are the forces on our side necessarily fighting for democracy, as they were in Berlin. The demonstrators in the streets in Beirut were not demanding democracy, but asking for independence - which is rather a different thing.
In turn, what the men in the presidential palaces offer is closer to a hesitant gesture than to a radical break with the past. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who has held power essentially unopposed since 1981, now proposes to amend his country's Constitution to allow opposition candidates in presidential elections. But the best guess is that anyone who runs will be a mere token candidate. And in Saudi Arabia, where voting was decreed and did occur in February - for the first time in its history - the election in question was merely for municipal councils, and the voter turnout was low. Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia are close allies of the United States, and it is difficult to resist the conclusion that their reforms are merely cosmetic, instituted to satisfy Americans and to appease foreign critics.
The contrast could hardly be greater with what happened in the Iron Curtain countries in 1989 and the 1990's, or even in Ukraine a few months ago, when the people refused to accept half-measures and demanded instead full and honest elections and real democracy.
But of course the lands of the Arab Middle East - as is often pointed out - have had no significant experience of genuine democracy. Even the promise of democracy that has been held out to them has not been of the real thing.