Tomorrow's Tunisia and Egypt: reform or revolution?

• Author: Safieddine, Hicham

Arab uprisings are taking place with the historical speed of light. I began writing this piece following the downfall of Tunisian dictator Ben Ali and closed with the imminent downfall of Egypt's dictator, Hosni Mubarak. The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings are not, as some armchair pundits have called the Tunisian one, Jasmine revolutions. They are ones of bread, bullets, blood, democracy and dignity.

Immediate and tangible gains have already been won in Egypt and more so in Tunisia, but the long-term outcomes are far from certain. Will they lead to revolutionary transformation of the political system or are they going to turn into reformist ones that simply curb the excesses of the neoliberal world order and imperial designs that largely produced them? And is there room for the resurgence of yet another dictatorship?

The answers to these questions depend on a multiplicity of factors, including the resiliency of the ancien regimes beyond the longevity of their immediate and tottering symbols, the severity of the objective socioeconomic conditions fuelling the mass movement, the perseverance of the rebelling forces and the type of leadership--or lack thereof--emerging in their midst, as well as the role of the military and the various political factions that were operating within varying constraints including leftist, liberal and Islamist forces.

Many commentators were quick to frame these events within the general global and specific local Arab orders. There is little doubt that the unfolding events have an umbilical link to the global economic crisis. But the line of causality is not one-directional. These transformations will in turn have grave implications for the global US-led imperial order. There is also no question that the common linguistic, political, cultural and social links within the Arab world have played and continue to play a key role in creating what is looking like a domino effect. But to treat all these movements as some single major event is to treat the Arab world as one cogent social unit in isolation from global forces and without differentiation of local ones. The cunningly similar uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt might exhibit cunningly similar patterns and trends, but they may end up with different results.

Lastly, under the current unpredictable conditions, any attempt to fit these upheavals into the straitjacket of classical revolutionary theory is very likely to obscure the potential new ways of thinking about 21st century revolts that the current events have furnished for us. Pending a fuller understanding of what happened and is happening, some general remarks about the causes, mechanisms and fates of the revolts and the emergent discourse surrounding them are in order.

Independent unions, the left and the "leaderless" paradigm

A defining feature of both uprisings is their apparent spontaneity. This is true in terms of the absence of a revolutionary vanguard in the classical Marxist-Leninist sense of the word. Rallies have been largely sustained by the iron will of ordinary people with nothing more to lose. But this "spontaneity" has both a history and a future.

In Tunisia, the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) had historically--since the day of the first Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba--played an active role in popular protests (less so under Ben Ali), but remained short of antagonizing the regime. The union leadership, however, eventually succumbed to pressure from its membership bases and took on a pivotal role in mobilizing people and providing an organizational framework for them in their one-month successful push...