That this popular uprising has now spread across the region shows that it is not simply a product of specific local conditions. Indeed, the nature of the state system in the Arab world, which endured for the last four decades, is no longer sustainable and is showing all the signs of decay and self-destruction that are bringing it down from inside. The revolutionary current that is now blowing across the region was ignited by a desperate act of self-immolation in Tunisia on 17 December 2010, which sparked the popular uprising.

I was in Egypt in December and also in Tunisia, my place of birth, during the first week of the revolution when the protests in the central province of Sidi Bouzid had just started, and I must admit I did not expect that two weeks later these protests would become fully fledged revolutions that would oust the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes.

What happened in Tunisia and Egypt is nothing short of a seismic change in the political landscape of the region and the local political dynamics. These historical events refute once and for all the well-rehearsed Western argument that the Arab people are incapable of achieving genuine political change through peaceful revolutionary means. Civil revolutions, we were told, are not likely to occur in the Arab world because the political culture there was not conducive to the emergence of vibrant civil societies as argued by Max Weber. Therefore, any political change was only possible through either foreign interventions, military coups or radical religious movements.

Until the events of January 2011, the dominant discourse that prevailed in the West when discussing the Arab world’s many failures at the social and political fronts was that the US and its allies did not overtly encourage genuine democracy in the region because it was feared that this may result in the emergence of radical religious groups with anti-Western agendas seizing power, as was the case with the Iranian revolution of 1979.

Thus, the policy options were conveniently reduced to a stark choice between pro-Western dictatorships with varying degrees of corruption and authoritarianism, or anti-Western religious radical groups whose socio-political outlook is anything but democratic and modernist.

The scenario of Tunisia and Egypt has shown an alternative road map to change that is conceived and delivered largely through authentic local civil movements. This road map is now spreading to many other Arab countries. Of course, the manifestations of change in each country will play out differently, as there are context-specific realities that might engender particular courses of actions and political outcomes for each country. But, as the rapid escalation in Libya shows, no regime is immune from the revolutionary ‘bug’, not even those trying desperately to offer concessions before they face their own version of this irresistible political tsunami.

The West has a real stake in what is unfolding in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and beyond. But, above all, it must not fall into the same mistake yet again of misreading the situation and divorcing it from its socio-political context.

As I write this piece, the Libyan regime, in a final desperate attempt to stay in power, is subjecting its people to unprecedented levels of violence bordering on genocide and crimes against humanity. This should never be tolerated, nor should it go unpunished, and the UN Security Council recently condemning the bloody crackdown is a step in the right direction, although it falls short of setting a practical course of action.

Yet the overall picture in the region, with the early successes of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, is providing unequivocal evidence that the Arab people’s hunger for the universal values of dignity, justice and freedom is no less potent than that of the Eastern European or South American people. There is hope yet for the Middle East.

Fethi Mansouri is Director of the Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation in Deakin University, Australia and UN Global Expert.

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