Ewan Harrison

Conclusion: A Global Spring

Twenty-five years after the Cold War ended, the world is experiencing an explosion of human liberty on a scale unprecedented in world history. The revolutions of 2011 manifested not just an Arab Spring, but a Global Spring. As Kishore Mahbubani reminds us, the American and Western projects are succeeding around the world like never before. More progress has been made in the last 30 years than in the previous three hundred.2 Like Mahbubani, we want readers to finish our book “drowning in optimism” about the future. We sincerely hope for the people of the Arab World that their societies can realize the democratic demands of the protestors in 2011, and we emphasize that there is a meaningful prospect that some of them may reach their goals over the coming decades. Yet whatever happens in the Middle East, overwhelmingly the developing world has already embraced modernity. In India, Brazil, Turkey, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, and Indonesia, people are getting on with the larger and more difficult long-term challenge of reforming their societies and making their lives flourish.

Global Democratic Futures: The Clash of Democratizations

The emerging order represents a dream come true for the West. The global spread of democracy opens unprecedented opportunities for the expansion of peace, cooperation, prosperity, and freedom. However, as the democratic community expands and prospers, frictions are likely to develop within it.1 Conflicts between established democracies will occur, as during the Iraq War and the Euro crisis. However, these conflicts will be contained at manageable levels, and will not undermine the democratic critical mass. As a result, pressures for democratization will continue. As the balance between established and emerging democracies shifts, conflicts between them will become important as emerging democracies seek the power and moral status associated with the democratic fraternity. Rather than the global spread of democracy representing the “triumph of the West,” a post-Western future for democracy will generate a distinctive type of inter-democratic politics—a “clash of democratizations.” History has in a sense ended with the global ideological triumph of Western liberalism, but no good story finishes without a twist. The twist at the end of history is that the clash of democratizations will come to define world politics.

The Arab Spring and Democratic Socialization: Transnational Influences

The Arab Spring was not a unique historical event to be understood in relation to circumstances within individual countries or the Middle East. Instead, it reflects a larger systemic trend. The fundamental dynamic in the international system is a process of socialization through which democracy is spreading worldwide. This process of socialization has been taking place since the American and French revolutions, and it is far from new. With the end of the Cold War, however, the pace and intensity of global democratization has accelerated. What began with a small cluster of states in the West has now become a globally salient force. Before 2011, the Middle East remained the only region of the world unaffected by the spread of democracy. The Arab Spring demonstrated that this is no longer the case. The revolutions of 2011 are the most recent manifestation of a global pattern through which authoritarian systems are being delegitimized. To understand the Arab Spring, it is necessary to situate it within this general trend.

The Worldwide Crisis of Authoritarianism

The Arab Spring is merely the tip of a colossal iceberg in world politics. If the Middle East—which provides relatively infertile ground for democracy—is experiencing change, this reflects a pervasive process of democratization that has gathered momentum worldwide. As Carl Gershman, the President of the National Endowment for Democracy, notes: “the Middle East revolutions have already had a larger global impact than the… revolutions of 1989. This is because they were carried out by non-Western peoples who were once colonial subjects, so people throughout the world can identify with them.”2 Like 1989, 2011 represents an intense moment of global reflexivity or growing consciousness about the spread of democracy. In turn, this is a major factor encouraging further demands for democratization. Even if the Arab Spring fails to produce a single new stable democracy in the Middle East, which is unlikely, it has massively intensified already strong pressures encouraging democratization on every continent.

Introduction: The Arab Spring in Global Perspective

The Arab Spring has reopened fundamental questions about global political change that have been salient since the end of the Cold War. The events of 2011 in the Middle East were strikingly reminiscent of the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe. Like the 1989 revolutions, they were almost entirely unanticipated and occurred in a region assumed to be a bastion of unshakable authoritarianism. Like the 1989 revolutions, commentators had been so focused on questions of military security that they failed to notice how deeper changes in technology and the global economy were undermining authoritarian states. Like the 1989 revolutions, the Arab Spring spread rapidly through regional contagion and toppled a series of brutal regimes. Moreover, as with the revolutions of 1989, the Arab Spring triggered a swathe of democratic transitions which will have major ramifications for the future of the region and of the world. Just as Francis Fukuyama criticized commentators in 1989 for failing to relate unfolding developments in Eastern Europe to a larger historical pattern, the same argument can be leveled at discussions of the revolutions of 2011.2

A Post-Western Democratic Global Order

Paradoxically, democratization has taken hold in the developing world at the moment that the West is experiencing decline. The balance of power is shifting in favor of newer nations. Samuel Huntington was therefore correct in his prediction that with the end of the Cold War, the West had not triumphed, and that future dynamism in world politics would come from the non-Western world.2 The West “failed to see that the moment when … [it] was basking in the glow of Cold War triumph was also the moment when Confucian, Islamic, and Hindu civilizations (among others) were … stirring.”3 However, Huntington was wrong in thinking that this dynamism would be associated with the rejection of capitalism and democracy by developing countries. On the contrary, “the rise of the rest” is being driven by the embrace of these historically Western institutions by the rest of the world. Rather than the universal spread of capitalism and democracy representing the “triumph of the West,” these changes represent the beginning of a post-Western future for the global democratic project.

The Expansion of the Global Democratic Community

Authoritarian regimes around the world face a wholesale and systematic crisis of legitimacy. However, a second route for developing countries is for them to become emerging democracies. Examples exist today on every continent, most prominently Brazil and India. In emerging democracies, there is less need for a bourgeois revolution against the government by the emergent middle class.1 The growing salience of emerging democracies in world politics is producing the expansion of the global democratic community. Asia is at the epicenter of this trend, and Africa has taken great strides. In Latin America, democracy has consolidated its strong position, and democracy is seeping further into Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The Arab Spring heralds a fourth wave of democratization.