John Lloyd

The Tunisian Foreign Minister, Rafik Abdesslem, visited Gaza last week to give a speech. Abdesslem, who spent many years in exile studying international relations at the University of Westminster in London, is an intellectual with little adult experience of the rougher side of the Middle East.

His speech condemned Israel, of course, while not mentioning that the Gazans had launched many rockets over the past few days – a few of them, for the first time, hitting the major centers of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. As foreign policy intellectuals do, he sought to put events into a geopolitical framework. He pointed to what he believes is the underlying truth of the time: “Israel should understand,” he said, “that many things have changed and that lots of water has run in the Arab river.”

In the two pioneer countries of the Arab Spring, Islamists have been elected as the major political force, and provide the government. As Rami G. Khouri pointed out in his column in Lebanon’s Daily Star, these new governments “more accurately reflect the sentiments of their citizens vis-à-vis the Palestine issue… which will increase the political pressure on Israel.” Egypt’s President Mohamed Mursi and Tunisia’s President Moncef Marzouki are Islamists, with (especially in the first case) a well-documented detestation of the Jewish state. They are constrained to be cautious, but their decision to send high-level emissaries to Gaza – more are scheduled to go – gives the Hamas government there both a shield and an encouragement. Were an Egyptian killed in a bombing raid, the resulting outrage could mean, writes Eric Trager in The Atlantic, a breaking of Egyptian diplomatic relations with Israel, even a renunciation of the peace treaty. The “Arab Street” would be roused.

The “Arab Street” is a phrase still much used in news bulletins everywhere: yet a conversation in London this past week made me question its usefulness. Olivier Roy is one of the world’s most feted observers of the Middle East, a habitué of the most prestigious foreign policy centers and an advisor to French governments. In a talk at the European Council on Foreign Relations, he presented a view of the Arab world that went beyond the crudely assumed predictability of Arab Street militancy. Instead he talked about a series of movements in Arab societies that do not immediately inspire optimism, but give some hope of better.

He questioned the view that sees the major movement in these societies as that of Islamization. If this were the case, he asked, why were the revolts of 2011 led by secularists – with the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood and others so lagging in their response? “The first demonstrators didn’t want power,” Roy said. “They wanted elections. They wanted democracy of some sort.”

Radicals of left and right like to say that the American election is an affair of sound and fury, signifying nothing. One guy in a suit replaces another guy in a suit, the two mostly agree on the basics: the economy, capitalist; foreign policy, hegemonic.

To be sure, American elections remain battlegrounds: a resurgent right has, in the past two decades, drawn sharper lines on a culture war that puts sexuality and its effects at the center of a national debate. Homosexuality, abortion and reproductive rights are divisive issues. But radicals believe that overall, little changes: An elite governs, and largely governs the same way regardless of party.

Yet both capitalism and hegemony have served the U.S., and much of the world, better than any other obviously available option. In the last few years, democratic practice has certainly seen a number of setbacks: The victory of the conservative group Citizens United in having the Supreme Court overturn the provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 – which had prohibited corporations and unions paying for political propaganda independently of the candidates’ campaigns – is only the latest obvious example. But U.S. civil society remains among the liveliest, most rambunctious and exemplary in the world, a large part of the reason why the U.S. is still the destination of choice of those yearning to breathe a little freer (and earn at least a little more).

Multiculturalism is a Western ideal, amounting to a secular faith. Every Western government at least mouths its mantras – that a mix of peoples in one nation is a social good, that it enriches what had been a tediously monolithic culture, that it improves (especially for the Anglo-Saxons) our cuisine, our dress sense and our love lives. Besides, we need these immigrants: In Europe at least, where demographic decline is still the order of the day in most states, where else will the labor come from? Who else replenishes the state pension fund? Even where leaders criticize multiculturalism’s tendency to shield communities from justified criticism – Angela Merkel of Germany and David Cameron of the UK have both spoken out on this – they touch only on its more obvious failings. As a process, they agree it is welcome.

Forgotten, or at least suppressed, in this narrative is religion and the animating force it still gives to many groups. Animating – and also divisive. To believe deeply in a religion had been, in the West as well as elsewhere, to believe deeply in the error of those not of the same faith, and to shun them. It has been one of the remarkable transformations of the past century that in the West, those of religious faith, or none, should accommodate the faiths of others. Indeed, they should even honor them. Those societies where that did not happen — say, until very recently, Ireland — the culture was seen as aberrant.

The reverse is true in many strongly Islamic societies. And that’s causing a problem for the Christians still living in them.

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.