When I think about the question of ‘What is left?’, I think of the walls of Cairo. They are silent observers of recent years, and at the same time they speak. Speak? Perhaps ‘whisper’ is more apt. It is winter 2011. We are teenagers out on the streets, in the thick of the crowd, scared, but pretending to be big and strong, and that we know what we are doing. We didn’t understand everything, but it felt right – in fact, like the only right thing. What we did know well, though, was graffiti: spray cans, markers, stencils. Back then, the walls shouted with us: quotes, slogans, the faces of those killed. Since then, it has all been painted over, but the messages still shine through. The white paint, now greying from the smog, eerily highlights what is written beneath it, and in places you can still make out the silhouettes of the words and colours. Like ghosts painted by children, figures beneath a white cloth, but with eyes wide open. Eyes that whisper: I still see you.
Laboratories of democracy
These spectres continue to haunt not just Cairo down to this day. The 2010s were marked by a wave of protests greater than any seen since the Russian Revolution of 1917, perhaps greater even than that. It all began with an act of self-immolation. On 17 December 2010, the young street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, in protest at the daily harassment at the hands of the police. The fire on his body went out when he died, but the flames of protest spread to the streets of Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Libya, Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon. After decades of oppression, corruption and mismanagement, the masses rose up against the ruling elites in their countries. Alongside the now historic cry ‘The people want the fall of the regime!’, people from Rabat to Baghdad demanded dignity, freedom and social justice. The widespread mobilisations, which included the urban middle classes, industrial workers and the rural population alike, shook the regimes to their core.
Large public squares became laboratories of grassroots democracy. Their occupation became a striking symbol of a new consciousness that inspired many social movements throughout the world in the early 2010s. Protests increased across the globe and new movements were born. There were transnational feminist movements like ‘ni una menos’, protests against austerity policies in southern Europe, Occupy Wall Street, the anti-racist ‘Black Lives Matter’ uprisings and many more. The five largest demonstrations in US history to date all took place in that decade. So the Arab uprisings were not a regional exception, they were an ‘almost vertical turning point, when two decades of relative calm abruptly gave way to multiple years of heightened global unrest’, as one study puts it. In the first two decades of the century, the world was gripped by a revolutionary dynamic.
Then things went quiet, in one country after another. Movements faded away. But it’s not that revolutions simply fail, but rather that counter-movements gain the upper hand. Alliances emerge that stabilise or reshape the existing order. This is what happened in Egypt, and in part in Tunisia and Morocco, in the Gulf states, and in a more extreme form in Syria, Iraq and Sudan. The backlash didn’t just impact individual states, though, it hit progressive movements the world over. In this sense, today’s war regimes can be seen as an expression of a globalised counter-movement. What followed the uprising for dignity, freedom, self-determination, a different life and a different world was nothing other than a kind of counter-revolution.
The role of the US post-2011
The role of the US stood out. When the uprisings broke out in the Arabic-speaking world, contrary to widespread expectations, they were not really supported by then US President Barack Obama. What was clearly articulated, though, was the fear of ‘failed states’ and in turn of the loss of the resilience of authoritarian systems that protected and helped enforce the interests of the US and its alliances. This stemmed from the experiences during the Iraq War: the collapse of the Iraqi state in the wake of the US occupation in 2003 resulted in chaos that both strengthened Iran’s influence over the Shia majority and fuelled an anti-American uprising amongst Sunni groups, from which the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’ (ISIS) would later emerge.
Against the backdrop of this experience with Iraq, the Obama administration – rather than pursuing ‘regime change’, as the neoconservatives had advocated during George W. Bush’s first term – focused primarily on securing its influence over existing governments – irrespective of whether these were democratic, authoritarian or dictatorial. It was the precursor to what we are now seeing with renewed aggressiveness and, as such, also clarity. During Trump’s second term, the US is using a modernised form of the 19th-century ‘gunboat diplomacy’, where powerful states impose their interests on weaker ones through the threat or use of military force. The type of government plays no role; what counts is solely the undisguised will to enforce imperial interests. A form that political scientist Gilbert Alchqar calls Trump’s ‘old-new imperial doctrine’.
Little has changed in terms of the aims. It is all about spheres of influence. Primarily, though, most of today’s wars – like so many in the past in the Near and Middle East, North Africa and West Asia – continue to be sparked by oil, the most important resource of fossil capitalism. As David Harvey puts it: ‘Whoever controls the Middle East controls the global oil spigot. And whoever controls the global oil spigot can control the global economy, at least for the near future.’
What is left?
If I were a teenager today, it would not be revolutions that would socialise me politically. It would be military violence and wars: Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and also Venezuela and Cuba. Add to this ubiquitous rearmament and an ever-advancing militarisation of societies, all while education, culture and social policy are being slashed. It is no coincidence that, following the wave of uprisings, an age of violence now prevails. The Arab countries are the scene of wars, because here it is a matter, inter alia, of the ‘hard politics’ of securing resources. In contrast to the movements in the capitalist centres, violence is currently still manifesting as a call to order, to safeguard the system’s ideological dominance.
The link between revolution and crisis is not an unknown phenomenon, as the history of the ‘Atlantic Revolutions’ of the late 18th century or the Russian Revolution of 1917 demonstrate. But the storm that broke out in and from the Arab world in 2011 happened within a global order that had become accustomed to seeing this link as a thing of the past. The very fact that new revolutions were taking place came as a surprise, but it was now expected that they would happen largely peacefully, be resolved through negotiation, and welcomed rather than opposed by the states of the international system.
Looking back, the Arab uprisings of 2011 appear to be the moment when this expectation collapsed. The dynamics of mass mobilisations and counter-movements broke free from the simplified model of political transitions that had been hoped for. The Arab revolutions ushered in a global trend of protest, foreshadowing what would shape the decade to follow. In this sense, the emerging war regimes can also be seen as an expression of a globalised counter-revolution.
But it was not just the interests of the Empire that held the revolutions back; it was also, and still is, their own shortcomings. Back in 1939, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his War Diary: “I always thought that something, in 1920–25, was almost born: Lenin, Freud, Surrealism, revolutions, jazz, silent films. All this could have come together. And then each followed its sporadic destiny. Isolated, they could all be strangled. It is only in my memory that they made up a world.” In the 2010s, too, events and new beginnings remained largely separate from one another, even if they created a whole world for the observer. Comics, memes, new music, a transnational feminist wave, the golden age of postcolonial theories, movements critical of capitalism, the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street, social media, new left-wing political parties like Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, and later also parts of the Sanders and Corbyn movements: many parts, some connected at times, but never becoming a whole or at least something shared – and for that reason also nothing that was to last?
What is left are the experiences and traces of those revolutionary moments, albeit more in the form of collective memory than as an institutionalised political force. On this note, Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd el-Fattah writes: “But one thing I do remember, one thing I know: the sense of possibility was real. It may have been naïve to believe that our dream could come true, but it was not foolish to believe that another world was possible. It really was. Or at least that’s how I remember it.” And the walls remember it; and our bodies remember it.