As the Arab Spring slumps into the Arab Mess in most areas, we ignorant onlookers find ourselves wondering about the real range of political options and opinions in that region. What spectrum of options do most Arabs accept as legitimate and realistic when they sit at home moaning about their leaders and arguing over what should be done about them?

Right back in early 2008 just when I started this site I wrote about our prejudices towards Balkan voters:

We give the impression of assuming that deep in the forests and steep valleys of former Yugoslavia are hidden large armies of mild-mannered reasonable social democrats just itching at last to burst forth and vote for the European Highroad.

In fact the politicians in these countries have the voters they have, not the ones we’d like them to have. These voters tend to vote fairly rationally. Their votes are skewed in a populist/nationalist direction not because they are inbred bigots but rather as a sort of political fire insurance – plenty of smoke and sparks still float around in the air there.

Former Bosnian President Izetbegovic once told me that Bosnia would be ready for ‘ethnic disarmament’ only in fifty years. Which in practice means that if one uneasy ethnic community thinks that it needs to vote in the toughest available leader to help deal with other ethnic communities, those other communities say ‘Ah, I told you so’ and do the same.

Nothing has changed since then.

In the Middle East we see people rising up against corrupt and violent leaders and find ourselves assuming/hoping that they represent something ‘better’.

There is a case to be made that it is – all things considered – better that the current group of dictators be ousted by new dictators (if that’s all that’s available), who themselves will learn the hard way that you can’t run a modern country on mysticism and propaganda: you need hard-nosed, sensible policies.

It nonetheless is striking that the forces representing some sort of pragmatic modernity seem so inchoate, as compared to the broad Islamist and Muslim Brotherhood tendency. Or is that tendency itself a force for some sort of modernisation?

Hard to say, and no doubt these things vary widely from country to country anyway.

For a good look at the failure of Arab Liberalism, check out this piece by Sohrab Ahmari at Commentary:

Long before the Arab Spring, many in the West—neoconservative thinkers above all—blamed the region’s autocrats for the persistence of the Algiers syndrome. By effectively suffocating all forms of secular dissent, the reasoning went, the autocrats had left mosques and Islamist organizations as the only available outlets for channeling opposition.

This is still the best account of why liberalism has failed to take root in the Middle East and North Africa and why Islamist politics have made such significant inroads among the Arabs. Other accounts, which rely on religion and culture to explain the perennial fragility of Arab liberalism, are not entirely without merit. But in elevating Islamism to the status of an inherent, immutable, and permanent characteristic of Arab polities, such accounts betray one of the central premises of liberalism itself: universality—the notion that all people are endowed with and aspire to the same fundamental rights, which all states have an obligation to protect.

To place the blame for the Algiers syndrome solely at the feet of the autocrats, however, is equally mistaken. The region’s self-proclaimed liberals and democrats must be held accountable for having articulated an Arab liberalism that is inchoate and incoherent and that often betrays liberal first principles in the name of political expediency and opportunity.

As the article explains, when things get tough the self-proclaimed Arab liberals default into clumsy bashing of Western policies in general and Israel in particular. That’s where the masses are.

As I wrote back in early 2011:

The main problem for us and indeed for Egypt is that insofar as there is any coherent world-view in Egypt, it appears to be yet more Muslims-as-victims lumpen Islamistic ideology. The prospects of the tumult leading in the short term to something like a ‘normal’ democratic new form of government in Egypt must be close to nil. 

That said, for decades too long we have nodded deferentially at the different dreary national socialistic regimes sprawled across the Middle East, somehow caught between the racist view that ‘Arabs can’t run a modern open society’ and a fear of anything which might threaten ‘stability’…

So if anything the problem is not that Arabs/Muslims of the region have been helpless victims of Western manipulation – the problem is that they have largely been left by us to rot in sub-standard autocracies on their own terms, give or take huge sums of defence and other support thrown at Egypt by Washington for many years. What a dismal return on all that investment.

Maybe it is not surprising that in this dusty parched political soil the only things that grow have large spikes on them.