By Maryanne Koussa
The difficulties of characterizing a revolution are often thwarted by history’s ability to emphasize a sense of hindsight bias that often overshadows the tribulations that led to its final success. Steven Cook, in his book False Dawn, falls into this trap by asserting that the uprisings during the Arab Spring were inevitably going to fail without fully analyzing the importance of each of the protests to the Arab people and by only truly consulting the perspectives of Washington policymakers, think-tanks, and commentators.
In the wake of excitement and hope for a more democratized Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring, False Dawn attempts to answer one question: why didn’t democracy unfold after these rebellions like people expected it would? The Arab Spring is a series of uprisings against oppressive regimes that took place in 2011 across the Middle East. As a senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, Cook brings the perspective of analysts and policymakers in Washington DC to the streets of Cairo, where he blends the conflicting viewpoints to struggle to find a solution to his question. In this book, Cook focuses on Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Turkey. He begins by outlining the reasons that he believes led the Arabs to begin protesting, mainly focusing on economic grievances, the yearn for freedom in the form of democracy, and social justice to ensure dignity. In the second half of the book, Cook asserts that the Arab Spring didn’t lead to democracy because of the continuity of politics, institutions, and identity. His main argument states that the Arab Spring was not a revolution because it did not bring about social change and that there was no resulting shift in the structural elites or in the economics. He also states that the authoritarian institutions, such as laws and the military, are difficult to remove, or as he says, “sticky.” His last argument focuses on the complexity of the identities in the Middle East and how it was difficult to find a cohesive one to govern the people under. He explains this lack of solidarity by turning to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, who benefitted from the instability. At the end of the book, Cook thinks that the United States is greatly responsible for the instability in the Middle East, thus, instead of reattempting to place a liberal leader in charge to promote democracy, it should focus on encouraging economic growth by implementing development-based programs in the area.
By only focusing on a subset of places, creating cyclically-structured arguments, and focusing on the Washington perspective to these events, Cook loses his ability to answer his overarching question. In spite of his expertise on the Middle East, Cook only decides to focus on three Arab Spring countries and Turkey, a non-Arab state. While he goes into great detail about their political, social, and economic situations to draw similarities among them, by focusing causation on such a limited range of places, it’s difficult to apply his findings beyond the cases he examined. For each of the rebelling countries, the protests started differently and led to different outcomes for each one, yet by focusing only on the failure to become democracies, he ignores what changes came from the Arab Spring, undermining the political shifts and improvements that did come from it. Including an analysis of Turkey while trying to explain the Arab Spring also seems misplaced. His analysis of the economic grievances of the area also seems to be clouded by the perceptions of Washington, rather than those in the Middle East. Cook emphasizes the macro-economic struggles of these countries as the turn to privatization and a shift in exchange rate, focusing on companies rather than the intensely concentrated wealth that the average person cannot gain a share of. By approaching this factor of revolt from an internationalist perspective that favors companies and capital investment, he demonstrates that he is not attempting to view the Arab Spring rebellions from the perspective of the protestors, and instead wants to explain it through the perceptions of Washington. His reasons for the revolts’ failure, continuity of politics, sticky institutions, and disunity in identity, are cyclical in explanation and ignore the influence of colonialism. Cook explains that the lack of economic and social change makes the Arab Spring non-revolutionary, but the politics under the new rulers are the same, as they’re all from the same class of elites. This is essentially the same argument that he continues to make with the institutions, that the social structure makes them hard to change, thus prolonging authoritarian rule and constraining democracy. Another weakness lies in his failure to address Libya, a country without institutions, and thus, contradicting his own argument. He ignores the different ways these institutions affect the country respectively and how their actions shaped the final political state. While he talks about identity as a socially constructed repertoire that makes it difficult to unite the people of a country, he neglects the power of colonialism and arbitrarily drawn borders. The Middle East struggles to form under a government that was enforced on them by overseas powers. Overall, his perspective is so clouded and fragmented by Washington that he only focuses on why the expected outcomes didn’t happen and ignores what did happen. He overlooks what the Arab Spring represented for the Arabs in favor of a negative perspective that detracts from the novelty of uprising against an authoritarian regime in power for decades and bringing about political change, which will likely ring in these areas for decades.
The arguments that Cook gives to explain the lack of democracy following the Arab Spring are narrowly focused on the structures of a few Arab countries, rather than on the actors and events that each of the rebellious countries faced. After the uprisings, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt are vastly different from where they began and from each other yet Cook doesn’t address this. Instead, he gives an incredibly Americanized version of the Arab Spring. He describes the excitement in Washington and why Washington thought it went wrong, but this wasn’t Washington’s battle; that was a damaging theme of the early 2000s.
Maryanne Koussa is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying International Relations and Modern Middle Eastern Studies.
Bibliography
Cook, Steven A. False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East. Oxford University Press, 2017.