Why the Arab Spring Failed, and the Hopes Its Failure Seeded

“In 2021,” wrote Marc Lynch, the American political scientist who gave the Arab Spring its name, “there may be few beliefs more universally shared than that the Arab uprisings failed.” His statement sums up the conventional wisdom of observers in the West. And as someone who was not only present in Egypt during the uprising, but was among the throngs of young people in Cairo’s Tahrir square demanding change, I can hardly say that I look back on those days with anything but disappointment. Nor do the stories of other Arab lands caught up in the wave of revolutions invite more optimism. But simply to see the Arab Spring as having given way to an “Arab Winter” is to miss something crucial about what has happened to the Middle East over the past ten years.

The conventional story of the Arab Spring’s failure goes something like this: in 2010 and 2011, people across the Middle East took to the streets en masse, standing up to their despotic and corrupt rulers after decades of submission. Suddenly, there was hope for democracy, or at least some less authoritarian form of government. In most places, however, the protest movements either were smothered in their cradles or led to bloody civil wars. But most tragic of all is the case of Egypt, which held the first true democratic election in its history, only to see the winner removed by a military coup, and then replaced by an even more brutal version of the status quo ante. Hope for Arab democracy has been quashed, and the prospects for political reform in the Middle East are worse than ever.

While none of this is, strictly speaking, false, it is misleading, and what has ossified into the conventional history of this last decade ignores some of the good that has come out of the Arab Spring. These benefits are hardly what anyone in the West or in the Middle East hoped for, but neither are they to be dismissed. “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made,” Immanuel Kant once wrote. Here, I’ll focus on the case of Egypt, which I experienced firsthand. Despite the many real disappointments, it’s my contention that the events of the past decade have had some positive outcomes for that country, and for the rest of region as well.