Ron Smith: Of Springs and False Dawns

The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ has been in progress for about a year and it may be appropriate now to take stock of what was anticipated, or hoped for, and what we seem to have got. Of course, as Zhou Enlai famously once said of the effect of the French Revolution on western civilisation, it may be ‘too soon to tell’, but as far as the ‘Arab Spring’ is concerned, some things may already be evident.

Most obvious amongst these is that the analogy with the ‘Prague Spring’ is not appropriate and that western media interpretation of unfolding events in the Arab world, as similar to those that took place in Eastern Europe in 1989, may have been nothing more than wistful thinking. The Prague Spring, itself, was a 1968 attempt to throw-off the worst excesses of communism in Czechoslovakia, but it did presage a wider struggle for liberty that was dramatically and surprisingly successful, twenty-one years later.