Is Tunisia the New Poland?

How the overthrow of Tunisia's dictators could spark revolutions across the Arab world, and why that might not be a good thing.

The popular protests that ousted Tunisian dictator Zein el-Abidine Ben Ali “may prove to be the historic turning point that many in the Arab world have been predicting and anticipating for decades,” writes Rami G. Khouri in the Toronto Star, “the point at which disgruntled and often humiliated Arab citizens shed their fear and confront their leaders with demands for serious changes.” Khouri envisions Tunisia’s revolt as a potential Arab version of the overthrow of Poland’s communist regime in 1980, which prompted copycat revolutions across Europe that eventually collapsed the Soviet Union. This is a tempting way to interpret events in Tunisia, but the major difference we can see from The Newsroom is that the breakaway Soviet states had a common oppressor in Moscow, whereas the diverse politics across the Arab world suggest Tunisia’s revolt may not be as exportable.

Khouri pops up again in the Globe and Mail with an excellent article comparing Tunisia’s revolt, attempts to rebuild Lebanon’s collapsed consensus government, and Sudan’s independence referendum. The three cases represent Arab countries attempts to activate “the principle of ‘the consent of the governed’” Khouri writes. “Of the three, Lebanon is the most complex and troubling, while Sudan is the most sophisticated and heartening. Tunisia is the most dramatic and universal, and thus most likely to be copied in other Arab countries.” He cautions that it’s too early to tell if any of the three will be ultimately successful, but it is clear that “the existing political and economic order in the Arab world is unstable and unsustainable, because it is unsatisfying to a majority of citizens.”

In the National Post, Daniel Pipes throws cold water on Khouri’s optimism by arguing that the collapse of Arab regimes could open the door for Islamist extremists to come to power. “For all his faults, Ben Ali stood stalwart as a foe of Islamism,” he writes. “ … What Franklin D. Roosevelt allegedly said of a Latin America dictator, ‘He’s a bastard but he’s our bastard,’ applies to Ben Ali and many other Arab strongmen, leaving U.S. government policy in seeming disarray.”