The Tunisian Spring in the test of the unknown perpetrator

The apparently trouble-free progress of the Arab Spring process, in the form of popular uprisings and revolutions following one another in several countries, was regarded as the most important sign that there was a hidden hand behind this. Popular uprisings could not happen this easily, and governments that had lasted half a century could not change hands this quickly and this easily. Surely someone's button-pushing must have been somewhere in the affair.

Yet there was nothing strange in popular uprisings gaining such breadth and shaking, even toppling, governments that had reached half a century. It was a matter of the governments that had ruled in these countries gradually causing a discontent in the people that could no longer be easily suppressed, as much as of the peoples having acquired sociological characteristics that could no longer be governed with the old tools and methods of power. With the education level rising over time, and with urbanization, there was a new mass of citizens produced by the relative integration with the world that globalization brought with it. In contrast, not only had the administration failed to develop the competence, merit and skill to respond to the needs and demands of this new mass of citizens, but corruption in government, which could no longer be hidden from the people's eyes as before, and a problem of governance that could not be legitimized as it stood, had reached the extreme.

The situation had clearly become unsustainable, and a spark was awaited for an explosion. When this spark came in Tunisia, it was not difficult for the other countries to follow it. Searching for someone's button behind the event is therefore nothing but a mental habit harboring a series of ailments. This ailment can be seen as an inferiority complex that suggests knowing whatever happens in the world to be the doing of certain well-known parties. We can also count as another manifestation of this ailment a political theology that suggests there is always a planning mind and hand far beyond what is visible in the background of what happens.

However, as we have been trying to say from the beginning, saying that there is no hidden hand directing revolutionary processes, or that what happens stems from the people's will to say stop to what is happening after a certain point, just as it appears to us, does not mean that those someones have no calculations or intention to intervene regarding what happens.

Truly, it is one thing for revolutions to be entirely by the will of the people, but it is always another for them to be able to continue under the will of the people. Some countries' not being in the picture during revolutionary processes did not mean that they were the "hidden hand" that pressed the button of those processes, or at least that they approved those processes. On the contrary, it could simply mean that they were watching for the appropriate timing to intervene in those processes, waiting for appropriate opportunities, or trying to prepare appropriate tools. Indeed, the series of interventions undertaken in Egypt from the very beginning of the revolutionary process shows how vigilantly all the elements were acting to prevent the process from turning into a harsh revolution.

What is happening in Tunisia these days also shows that the revolution's only rival or only concern is not the remnants of the old regime. In the upheavals after the revolution, quite different elements of balance have emerged, and these elements display no benevolent attitude either toward the revolution or toward one another. Protests that began with the killing of an opposition representative can quickly turn into a mass demonstration against the government, even exclusively against the Nahda movement.

Of course many quarters think to question what kind of interest a Nahda in power could have in committing such a political murder, but there are also those who get carried away by the atmosphere this murder created, and it also offers an important opportunity for those who attempt to fill their sails with this atmosphere. The fact that the Nahda party, the biggest partner of the post-revolution government, has not been able to respond quickly to the people's urgent economic and public-order expectations also helps in this.

Perhaps the revolution's greatest difficulty is the difficulty of governing masses whose demands have grown with the revolutionary process and, moreover, who have lived through the experience of a revolution. Expectations of miraculous solutions arise toward those who take office after the revolution, and meeting these is the hardest. This is one of the most serious problems in all the countries after the Arab Spring.

France's announcement that it would keep its schools closed during the two days when a general strike call accompanying these demonstrations was made was perceived as open support for the anti-government demonstration. Will this choice by France enlarge the anti-Nahda front further, or will it backfire because of the effect of the mass antipathy that exists against France, which, when the revolutionary process began, maintained its support for the former dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali until the day he left his country? We will have a chance to see that again, but this and many similar events allow us to see why those who stood by as spectators during the revolutionary process stood by, and that they will not pass up any opportunity in which they could become involved.