The year of the revolutions began in January, in a small country of little importance. Then the protests spread to the region’s largest and most important state, toppling a regime that had seemed firmly entrenched. The effect was far-reaching. The air was filled with talk of liberty and freedom. Street protests cropped up everywhere, challenging the rule of autocrats and monarchs, who watched from their palaces with fear.
That could be a description of events in Tunisia and Egypt as those countries’ peaceful revolutions have inspired and galvanized people across the Middle East. In fact, it refers to popular uprisings 162 years earlier that began in Sicily and France. The revolutions of 1848, as they were called, were remarkably similar in mood to what is happening right now in the Middle East. The backdrop then, as now, was a recession and rising food prices. The monarchies were old and sclerotic. The young were in the forefront. New information technologies — mass newspapers! — connected the crowds.
Except that the story didn’t end so well. The protesters gained power but then splintered, fought one another and weakened themselves. The military stayed loyal to the old order and cracked down on protests. The monarchs waited things out, and within a few years, the old regimes had reconstituted themselves. “History reached its turning point, and failed to turn,” wrote the British historian A.J.P. Taylor.
Will history fail to turn in the Middle East? Will these protests in Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan and beyond peter out, and in a few years, will we look back at 2011 and realize that very little actually changed? It’s certainly possible, but there are two fundamental reasons the tensions that have been let loose in the Middle East over the past few weeks are unlikely to disappear, and they encompass two of the most powerful forces changing the world today: youth and technology.
