What had been started in Tunisia went to the Egypt before shaking one of the most so-called stabilized dictatorships in the world, the one of the Colonel Khadafy, in Libya. Other tyrannies would be going down, from Yemen to Bahrain, from Algeria to the Morocco and even the theocracy of the Mullahs in Iran. What is happening in this part of the world will surely affect the faked democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan as well. But, what are the reasons of this historical earthquake?
There are several: First the effects of the globalization. The economies of these countries had been affected tardily by the global crisis that emerged in 2008 and hurt the economy of the Western countries for more than 3 years. The Europe and the USA paid a high price for this crisis that seemed being more a structural one than a conjectural one. A new economy is emerging that needs a new logic too; managing the new economy with the old logic can be a source of permanent conflicts in the capitalistic economies. The countries that are going through the political crisis at present are those that were in a third zone of the global economy; the second one being those of the south-Asia.
This means that we should have been expecting for the appearance of this wage of troubles in this region. High prices of food and the increasing cost of life besides of the huge rate of unemployment put an end to the drawback that the people could have to defy the respective governments in these countries. But the damage was done and the people realized that without a costly movement nothing would change by their corrupted governments. But, the poverty is not the only cause of the protests in the Middle-East and the North Africa. The poverty dominates the Africa but we don’t have as much as the revolt over there. Some other elements are playing a role in this issue.
The second reason that is related to the first one is that the crisis management in a society needs employing the maximum of the intellectual resources, i.e. the collective wisdom. But because of the clogged political system of these countries, the important social layers had been banned from any kind of intervention in the political sphere. On the other hand, the old oligarchy that ruled Tunisia or Egypt was not at all able to give any hope about a solution. As a result, society reacted by getting them off and taking back its fate. The revolutions that are taking place in these countries represent, sociologically, the historicity of them, in the Touranian sense of this term[1], the capacity of the society to take care of its destiny. Even though for some of them it seems very tardy, like the Libya, after 42 years of the dictatorship of Khadafy, but we should admit that each society put time enough to constitute this capacity, its historicity. This constitution, it is true, had been delayed by the repressive regimes of these countries through censorship, closing newspapers and putting the writers and intellectuals in jail…
The third reason that follows the second one is then the new tools to found the historicity. The knowledge that is necessary for the people or a part of the people to get ready to act. While in the past years this knowledge could only had been constituted by a very long march and through a lot of the historical events for awaking the consciousness of the people, in these times, the Internet becomes an instrument to shrink the history, to compact the knowledge and to make it operational. The youth get the information as soon as it is produced in any part of the world and use it as its ease. The Internet overcomes not only the geographical but the historical limits between the countries. The space is no more a barrier, nor is the time. What took years to be translated and maybe one day available for a minority of the underdeveloped countries is now immediately available for all those who can get to Internet, any article, any analysis, any TV program or even and somehow any book.
The fourth reason, that can be a synthesis of the three first ones, is related to the social complexity of these societies. The dictatorship is a simple structure by definition since it is based on a limited expansion of the things or even on the non-development of them. But the new openness of Information and communication brings these countries to a kind of the virtual complexity that enters rapidly in conflict with the minimalism of their political structure. The information needs freedom to be digested, and the absence of the freedom creates an accumulation of the information that cannot circulate or operate without stinting and then becomes a source of frustration. This latter comes from the impossibility of using the acquired knowledge and information for a creative life. If the young people cannot produce freely, the graduate people cannot use their knowledge and nobody can express his views on this stalemate, then nothing can move forward and the paralyzing state will dominate. Under these circumstances the people are just waiting any opportunity to express their anger, whatever is its cost.
In conclusion we can say that nobody hence can dominate a society with a restrictive approach if the society can get freely to the sources of information like Internet and also satellite TVs and Radios. The freedom is becoming not a luxury but an evident necessity for all societies. That’s why the combination of the economic crisis and the access to the Internet can easily arrange the ground to overthrow any tyrannical regime, even this one of the North Korea. Any economic growth is unimaginable without the development of the new technologies of Information and Communication (NTIC) and the paradox is that with Internet, enters knowledge and the establishment of the historicity.
This means that today, the absence of the freedom becomes an equivalency for the poverty and insurrection of those who want bread; this is no more choice between giving or not giving the freedom to the people by the government, the choice is just to give it voluntarily or by force of a revolution. These changes, even without revolutions, will influence the international commerce because of the shifts in the sources and resources of energy and will bring long waiting serious changes by environmentalists and human activists to the Western countries, perhaps bigger than the experience of the 1960’s. The more serious question than the changes in Middle East will be whether the Western democracies will have enough the figures like Tourine and the historicity to welcome a new era of human development. The humanity is changing; those who will refuse to go along with will just fade away. #
[1] Alain Touraine’s theory of historicity: “the symbolic capacity of social actors to construct a system of knowledge and the technical tools that allow them to intervene in their own functioning, act upon themselves, and thereby produce society”.