John Lloyd

As we are still touched with the euphoria of the Arab Spring, the Arab winter has crept up all but unnoticed, beyond the forecasts of experts and the calculations of governments. It was only this month, after all, when Libya’s civil strife was cut off by the death in a ditch of Muammar Gaddafi: however regrettable the nature of his end, it removes the main focus of a future fight back. It was only this month, after all, when Tunisia held fair and free and peaceful elections, in which a moderate Islamist party came first. It will, after all, be next month when the three rounds of voting for the Egyptian parliamentary elections begin. Why talk of a failure?

Because if there was a revolution in spring – in fact, a series of quite distinct revolts, animated by something of a common spirit – there is now a counterrevolution. Or rather, once more, a series of distinct efforts to push back, or at least control and turn to group advantage, the gains made by the demonstrators. Power is not won simply by revolt: it is won, and secured, by those interested in the exercise of power, prepared to grasp and hold it.

In Egypt, which provided to the international gaze the most stirring movement and the least ambiguous, largely peaceful, victory in the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, power is still grasped by the organization which has been the deep structure of power for more than half a century: the military. Both its will to rule and its desire to retain privilege appear to be as high as ever: and there are signs that both the Muslim Brotherhood – the only well organized political force – and the regional chiefs are coming to quiet understandings with the military leadership on how the country is to be governed.

Stability – if they can achieve it – would be welcomed by most: the economy and employment have suffered badly, and the promises from the U.S., Saudi Arabia, the World Bank and the IMF of grants, soft loans and debt forgiveness amounting to some $15 billion could stabilize the economy – if a government emerges which both understands how to use the money and how to run the state. But the euphoria of liberation, already dissipated, will not return: that was a moment only.

The strength of the Islamists is growing, and will grow further. The al-Nahda party became the largest in Tunisia’s new parliament, with over 40 per cent of the vote and 90 of the parliament’s 217 seats. It’s in talks with the leftist Congress for the Republic, which came second with 30 seats: but since the first is firmly religious and the second is firmly secular, these are likely to be hard – though, if successful, they will be an early indication of how hard line, or accommodating, 2010’s political Islamism is likely to be.

Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, Libya deposed its dictator in blood – ultimately, his own. And though the rebels have expressed their gratitude to NATO and their desire for freedom to every passing camera, they come to power as a disparate set of armed groups with quite different backgrounds, tribal affiliations and aims. From their ranks is likely to come an administration which must restore a semi-ruined economy and end Gaddafi’s self imposed isolation from and enmity with most of the rest of the Arab world (the reason why, unprecedentedly, the Arab League called on NATO to help depose his regime).

Libya’s National Transitional Council, led by Mustafa Abdul Jalil, faces a task as momentous as deposing the former dictator. The Interim Prime Minister, Ali Tarhouni, has a month to name a caretaker government – which in turn has eight months to schedule elections. The tribal and party differences in a country from which most manifestations of civil society – and thus the habit of social and political compromise – were banned, are wide and deep and likely to be bitter. Already, the Islamists have succeeded in forcing the first interim premier, Mahmoud Jibril, a secular intellectual, to step down. His successor announced that a Gaddafi-era law requiring men to ask a first wife for leave to marry a second would be repealed, saying that “this is not in our Koran: we take the Koran as the first source for our constitution.”

As for Syria, the fighting goes on, with Bashar Assad showing little sign of relenting to pressure, from wherever it may come. Even if he does, and the opposition forces his resignation or defeats his forces, the divisions in a country where independence of organization and thought was little tolerated will make a post-victory settlement a hugely complex and dangerous operation – one reason why western states have done no more than exhort, with no thought of intervention.

In a starkly pessimistic piece in the New York Review of Books, the former Bill Clinton adviser on Arab-Israeli affairs Robert Malley and the Oxford scholar Hussein Agha wrote that “revolutions devour their children. The spoils go to the resolute, the patient, who know what they are pursuing and how to achieve it…the young activists who first rush onto the streets tend to lose out in the skirmishes that follow…the usual condition of a revolutionary is to be tossed aside.”

That is what happening now, in different ways, at different tempos. But a likely common outcome will be some form of stability: how much more blood must be shed to win that, how repressive that will be, how far it breaks some of the old molds, will be the thing to watch. And to watch as well -  how far a fuse has been lit for real democratization, which may burn away, largely underground, before a more extensive liberation… some way down the road.

PHOTO: An anti-Gaddafi fighter looks on during a review of the brigades from the eastern region to commemorate the liberation of Quiche in Benghazi October 27, 2011. REUTERS/Esam Al-Fetori

“Rudeness is just as bad as racism”: thus David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, when he was leader of the opposition in April 2007. It was a remark he should know better to make now: not because it is politically incorrect (usually a bad reason for doing, or not doing, anything) but because it’s crass.

Rudeness is being uncivil. Racism can be murderous.

But there is some excuse for the future Prime Minister’s confusion. The two are linked: the common denominator is respect. Racism is a radical lack of respect for an ethnicity which you have convinced yourself, or brought up, to despise. Rudeness is a milder lack of respect for others you meet in your journey through the day – or through life. Further link: one of the reasons why there’s less rudeness is that, in the past couple of decades, casual racism has largely disappeared from public discourse in most advanced societies — though some of that is because it has gone underground.

Less rudeness? Who says less? Don’t we all know that what’s the matter with kids today – and quite often, with their parents – is that they have no manners?

It doesn’t seem that clear cut. In the UK, where unmannerly behavior – the blast of stereos, the jostling of the elderly on public transport, the drunkenness and worse of young women in city centers on a Friday night – is a daily moan, a new report says it’s improving. It seems as counter intuitive as that other recent claim, by Steven Pinker of Harvard (in the 700-page The Better Angels of our Nature) that violence within and between societies has been falling for more than two millennia – and that we live in unprecedentedly peaceful times. Can we be living in unprecedentedly nice times?

Charm Offensive, from the Young Foundation earlier this month, argued something just as absurd to those who read only the headlines: yes, we are. That’s for a variety of reasons: one of these is that many people no longer express racism, and may no longer feel it: as one East End stallholder told the Young Foundation’s researchers – “we have to be polite because we’re so different”. This is an ideal: others less civilized than the stallholder see difference as an excuse to be rude. But it’s encouraging.

Courtesy – the root of the word tells you much – developed in Europe, in India, in China and elsewhere in part as a way of regulating relationships between often jealous and high-tempered courtiers, and to show respect for the “weaker sex” – women. From these courts developed rituals of manners, elaborate and seriously observed, which paid homage to position, femininity and rank: the masses were, in the main, left out of these ceremonies.

Much of our present definition of civilized behavior lies in the spread of manners over the last two centuries – as the masses received full citizenship and ordinary people saw themselves as equal to those to whom they had once deferred. Mannerly behavior ceased to be an aristocratic preserve – even as it  borrowed substantially from aristocratic tradition. So even if we hate to acknowledge it, the upper classes taught us manners – even if they behaved vilely to many of our forebears.

The decline of racism has been one gain for civility: the fuller equality of women is a more ambiguous revolution. Until our own times, men defined much of their own civility by being gallant: now, its display can offend as much as delight.

My Italian wife, who teaches in a university near Milan, wanted to discuss a professional issue with a male colleague, and emailed to ask for a meeting. The colleague, an older man, emailed back to say that “ladies like to be invited out: let us have lunch”: a response which drew indignant snorts, and a sharp reply that a coffee was fine, grazie. Though this may have been merely a creaking attempt at gallantry spiced with a little Latin machismo, it struck her as condescending, even arrogant, a bid to put her in her subordinate place. For the post-feminist generation, equality is to be assumed: when it isn’t, it’s a cause for anger, or irritation at least. Male-female civility can be a minefield for men who don’t think who meet women who don’t cut them some slack.

Social change doesn’t sum up the pitfalls: the even more rapid development of communications technology demands new efforts to be careful of others. When he was 16, George Washington copied a manuscript called “Rules of Civility”, attributed to a Jesuit priest writing at the end of the 17^th century. More than half of the 110 rules – Jesuits are exhaustive – were about things not to do: number 18 advised you to “read no letters, books or papers in company, but when there is a necessity for the doing of it you must ask leave.”

Robert Desman, a Professor of Management at Kennesaw State University in Georgia – in a speech in Stockholm earlier this year – translated that to our times as “do not read or send text messages 1) when involved in a conversation, 2) in class, 3) during meetings, or 4) while driving.” The sheer fascination of hand-held computers which can give you friendship, organization, entertainment and enlightenment demands new rules of civility: and so far, these are slow in coming (whatever the Young Foundation says).

P M Forni, another professor, who created the Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore – a city where, as we learn from The Wire, the commodity can be in short supply – says that civility is “a code of decency to be applied in everyday life…fundamental to the making of a good, successful and serene life.” This is something like the core of it. It isn’t just being polite and it’s not just tolerating others. It’s not etiquette, which is small-scale ceremony, nor civic behavior, which are large-scale actions to underpin democratic and open societies.

It’s small acts of daily civility. It’s a hand to the elderly, a smile to the neighbors in the street, a chat with the check-out guy, a lowering of the voice when on the cellphone, a curbing of the irritation when cut up on the motorway, a thought that a mess left in a hotel room will add to the burden of an underpaid woman, or that a rant to a call center will be the straw that breaks a harassed operator down into tears.

It’s a reading of the contemporary scene and a hundred decisions a day to at least make its annoyances no worse – or better, make its opportunities richer, warmer.

Does this sound corny? Let’s hope so. In the matter of manners, that would be a compliment.

PHOTO: A sculpture of an angel with a broken wing is seen on the wall of music and spiritual room of the Detention Unit of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in Hague, in this September 20, 2011 photo. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj