Book World: For the Middle East, the Arab Spring was a rare chance to control its own fate

The Arab Winter

By Noah Feldman Princeton. 192 pp. $22.95 --When Egyptians gathered in 2011 in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand an end to the regime of president-for-life Hosni Mubarak, they did more than topple an unpopular dictator. Through their bravery, they sent a message to their fellow Arabs and to the world at large that change, finally, was coming to the Middle East.

Today the heady dreams of 2011 seem from another era. A military coup in Egypt returned that country to tyranny, a Saudi military intervention on behalf of the regime in Bahrain ended the hopes of demonstrators there, and civil wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen have made a bloody mockery of visions of a new era of democracy. The only democratic revolution still standing is in Tunisia, where the protests began and the first dictator fell. As Noah Feldman contends in his important new book, “The Arab Winter: A Tragedy,” “the Arab spring ultimately made many people’s lives worse than they were before.”

A professor at Harvard Law School, Feldman served as an adviser to U.S. officials in the early days of the Iraq occupation and after 2011 engaged with Tunisians seeking help as they designed their first real democratic constitution. “The Arab Winter” reviews four major incidents of the Arab Spring - the Egyptian uprising and coup, the Syrian civil war, the Islamic State “caliphate,” and Tunisia’s fitful progress toward democracy - to make its main points.

Feldman’s book is a reflection on the Arab Spring and, as its title suggests, its disastrous ending. “The Arab Winter” is not a history. Rather, it is an argument, in the best sense of that word, couched in political philosophy. To get the most out of the argument (for who doesn’t want to argue back?) the reader should be somewhat familiar with the Middle East. An engaged Washington Post reader would appreciate the book, but it’s not for the uninitiated.

Agency and meaning are at the heart of Feldman’s argument. For centuries, outsiders, be they Ottoman, British, French or American, controlled the fate of the Middle East. No longer. “The central political meaning of the Arab spring and its aftermath is that it featured Arabic-speaking people acting essentially on their own, as full-fledged independent makers of their own history.” In Egypt, the people spoke when they invited the army to remove Mubarak, and they spoke again two years later when they invited it to remove the democratically elected

Muslim Brotherhood government led by Mohamed Morsi. Feldman respects their choice even as he disagrees with it. “They took their fate in their own hands - and gave it away.”

Agency means uncertainty, and personalities loom large in “The Arab Winter.” In both Egypt and Tunisia, no strong institutions guided the process from revolution to democracy, allowing leaders to exert tremendous sway. The Tunisian Islamists of Ennahda proved more compromising than the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in part because their leader, Rachedel Ghannouchi, recognized the need for compromise. In contrast, “Morsi almost invited the crisis that built against him,” failing to work with political opponents. This scorn led intellectuals and Western-learning Egyptians to turn to the military as a savior, legitimating the coup and even, in Feldman’s eyes, making it a reflection of the people’s will.