The Arab Spring — which began in December 2010 and included Arab, African, and Iranian populations — started in Tunisia. The month before, a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi had doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire to protest police abuse. Bouazizi had been bullied and beaten by Tunisian police for years. They harassed him constantly about not having a vendor’s permit and demanded bribes to let him continue his daily work.
The wide-scale movement triggered by his death, however, was not about the need for fewer regulations or the benefits which a free-market economy would bring to the residents of the Middle East. The Arab Spring would be a broader response to tyranny.
In quick succession, tyrants in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt resigned or were removed from office.
Although its starting point is precise, there is no precise point at which the Arab Spring turned into the Arab Winter - the point at which the hope for freedom was dashed and at which one set of tyrants simply replaced another set. Like the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Spring Revolutions of 1848, the Arab Spring was crushed.
The details of the uprisings during the Arab Spring varied slightly from country to country - Libya, Egypt, Turkey, Syria - depending on the grievances of the residents: Brian Short reports that in Turkey, protests addressed a spectrum of topics, "censorship, police abuse,"
an unpopular ban on alcohol sales and consumption, and what many protestors saw as the creeping de-secularization of Turkish society.
The Justice and Development Party's influence on Turkey seemed to be in opposition to the modernizations introduced by Mustafa Kemal, known popularly as "Ataturk" and the leader who brought Turkey into contemporary world. The Turks of the Arab Spring were protesting an Islamist political trend that seems to be dragging them several centuries backward.
Present at the start of the Arab Spring was at least one of the causes of its failure: lack of a cohesive vision for what might replace the toppled dictators. An unharmonized mixture of views held by the protestors was
one of the problems that has kept many people's hopes for the Arab Spring from being realized: protestors' inability to cooperate with each once the revolution is over.
Sadly, the Arab Winter slowly emerged as the reality that would replace the Arab Spring. The Muslim Brotherhood replaced several fallen dictators, imposing versions of Sharia law as harsh, or harsher, than the regimes which it replaced.
The new autocrats, some of whom grabbed power via seemingly democratic elections held in an atmosphere of post-revolutionary chaos, and the Muslim Brotherhood as their political organization, have quickly sapped hope from many who had taken to the streets during the Arab Spring.
The attempted revolutions lacked not only a unified political vision for what would be instituted after the overthrow, but lacked also an attempt to address the cultural and societal deficits which have prevented the Middle East from establishing civil liberties. The traditions of this civilization are not a welcoming environment for the establishment of a republic with freely elected representatives.
Until foundational understandings - the value of each human life, personal freedom and individual liberty, the protection of the dignity of each man and woman - are introduced and take root, it will be difficult to establish the types of government the protestors desired. The governments are the symptoms; the deeper cultural values are the causes.
