Ten years of cold winter after the "Arab Spring"
【International Observation】
Ten years ago, on December 17, 2010, the death of Tunisian vendor Mohamed Bowajiji triggered the "Arab Spring" that hit the entire Middle East.
This storm caused political powerhouses such as Ben Ali in Tunisia, Mubarak in Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, and Saleh in Yemen to withdraw from the stage of history.
Ten years later, the Arab world has not ushered in the desired democracy, prosperity and peace, and the United States, as the initiator of the "Arab Spring", cannot escape its harm.
It is very ironic that with this "spring" comes not the recovery of everything, but the bitter "winter".
After the overthrow of the governments of most countries that experienced the "Arab Spring", the political vacuum was not filled by the democratic reformers.
Libya, Yemen and other countries have experienced continuous chaos and armed conflicts. The new government established by warlords is more tough than before the "Arab Spring"; extremist organizations such as the "Islamic State" sprout and become stronger Expansion, people fleeing their hometowns suffering from wars, and even triggered a refugee crisis in Europe.
Looking back at the past ten years in 2020, the Arab people found that what the so-called "democracy movement" brought them was not new life, but endless disasters and suffering.
The international community and even the United States have increasingly negative comments on this movement.
American scholar Noah Federman replaced "Arab Spring" with "Arab Winter", and Canadian scholar Michael Ignativ also described this history as "tragic failure".
To this day, the driving force behind this "democracy movement" is the United States and there is no controversy.
In 2013, the book "The Hidden Side Behind the Arab Revolution" published in France made a detailed argument for this conclusion: The United States invested a lot of manpower and material resources to contribute to this tragedy through two major means of on-site guidance and Internet incitement.
On the one hand, the United States uses non-governmental organizations and foundations that "export democracy", such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Foundation for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the National Institute for Democracy in International Affairs, Freedom House, and the Open Society Institute to deeply intervene This street "revolution"; on the other hand, the United States trained a large number of Arab Internet instigators, used the Internet, a new medium at the time, to fuel the flames, and then controlled the international mainstream media to praise them, and overwhelmingly exaggerated the "spontaneity and spontaneity" Positivity".
From the drastic changes in Eastern Europe twenty years before the "Arab Spring" to the turmoil in Hong Kong ten years later, American methods and details may have changed, but the "Sima Zhao's heart" of the United States has not changed: "Democratization" The promise of a "better future" in the name is secretly only to satisfy his own self-interest, and in the end he can only leave a place for the incident.
Looking back at the node of the tenth anniversary of the "Arab Spring", what this massive and lasting turmoil has brought to the Arab world is nothing but the defeat of democracy, economic tragedy, and political chaos.
The scores of relevant agencies show that the governance level, political environment and public rights of most countries that have experienced the "Arab Spring" are far from the sensational slogans of the "Arab Spring."
The economic level in the Middle East continues to deteriorate.
Due to falling oil prices, high unemployment, and corrupt elite politics, many Middle Eastern countries are in economic difficulties.
Political elites sacrificed the interests of ordinary people, causing high poverty rates and polarization between the rich and the poor in these countries.
The region’s economic development has fallen into a “decade of regression,” and Libya has stepped into poverty from above the global average per capita income, becoming one of the most turbulent and backward countries in the world today.
The political decline in the Middle East is getting worse.
Anti-corruption was the initial appeal of the people in the Middle East to participate in the "revolution." However, judging from the results ten years later, the level of corruption in many countries has become more serious.
Corruption and civil war continue, and the people cannot see the future, so they choose to flee.
According to United Nations data, after the "Arab Spring", the civil war caused mass displacement of people. The Syrian conflict alone caused more than 5 million refugees and more than 6 million displaced people. These refugees flooded into Europe and became the main cause of the European refugee crisis.
Ten years later, street fires similar to the "Arab Spring" ignited in the United States instead.
The "Floyd Incident" once again uncovered the wounds of racism in the United States for hundreds of years and set off a long-term social unrest and street riots that are rare in American history.
The fundamental reason why the "Death of Freud" can trigger the "butterfly effect" in the United States is that the domestic social contradictions, class differentiation and political decline in the United States have also reached unprecedented levels, even as much as the Middle East ten years ago. area.
Under the impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, the simple living conditions and deformed medical insurance policies have made minorities and other disadvantaged groups truly "susceptible people" and "patients with high mortality"; the economic impact of the epidemic has made people of color even more Facing the danger of massive unemployment and bankruptcy, the epidemic is disproportionately affecting them.
The New York Times stated at the beginning of a report that “two parallel plagues are sweeping the United States: the new crown virus and the police killing black people.”
The "Freud Incident" has become one of the focus issues in the 2020 U.S. election. It has further intensified U.S. bipartisan politics, disrupted U.S. political order, and may trigger other similar violence in the future.
Even if the US government changes, the United States will still lack effective ways to deal with domestic racial problems.
U.S. politics has accumulated so many evils that it is difficult to be cured by one person or a single president.
In this context, the United States is more likely to lead the "disaster" to other countries, trying to set off a new wave of "democracy" in the international community.
Ten years later, from all levels, the "Arab Spring" did not bring spring to the Arab region. Instead, it was another negative example of the United States' global "democracy advancement".
The main reason for the failure of the "Arab Spring" is that the country in question drank the ecstasy of American "democratic values" and chose the wrong path of change.
This wrong path not only failed to solve the existing political, economic, and social problems in these countries, but also intensified the ethnic, religious, and stratum contradictions within these countries, and paralyzed the state apparatus and state governance.
The country is in chaos, and any good vision of the people will be quickly wiped out in the smoke of gunpowder.
Facts have proved that the more complex difficulties are solved and the more major changes are made, the more a country needs a strong leadership core and a ruling force that is closely connected with the people and can fully organize and mobilize different groups of society.
Only in this way can the country resolve old contradictions through stability and development, resolve new problems through reform and innovation, and give the people a realistic and promising future.
The true practice of democracy should center on the people and serve the people.
The "color revolutions" and the "democratic checks" that some countries deliberately deliberately bring about tragedy, not "spring".
(Author: Li Zheng, China Institute of Contemporary International Relations Department of the US Research Associate; Hanya Feng, China Institute of Contemporary International Relations Department of the United States intern Research)