Sustaining the Arab Spring

Floor Speech

Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, when a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire nearly 3 years ago to protest his lack of economic opportunity and maltreatment at the hands of local police, his desperate act touched off a political revolution that has convulsed the Arab world from the Maghreb to the Gulf.

First in Tunisia and then in Egypt, popular protests toppled long-serving autocrats while Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi was ousted by NATO-backed rebels. Elsewhere, from Bahrain to Syria, regimes have proven more resilient and, in several cases, willing to use extreme levels of violence to maintain their survival.

So, in the waning months of the third year of what has been dubbed the ``Arab Spring,'' the future of a large swath of the global community remains uncertain. With Egypt under military control and Syria ablaze, it is not surprising that many here in the United States and elsewhere in the West view each new development with concern that an already volatile region could spiral completely out of control.

The situation in Syria is undoubtedly grim and Egypt faces a prolonged period of instability, but the news is not uniformly bad. In Tunisia, the Islamist government, headed by the Enhadda Party, has acceded to opposition demands that it hand over power to a caretaker government and schedule new elections.

Tiny Tunisia could again show its larger neighbors that a democratic transition--even an extended one of several intermediate steps--is possible in a region buffeted by the crosscurrents of religion, tribalism, and authoritarianism, and fueled by a huge demographic bulge of young people who are better educated and more connected to the world than their parents but who lack jobs and hope.

But even if Tunisia's next government is more reflective of the desires of the Tunisian people and is able to attack the problems that have retarded the country's progress, the pace of change will be slower than many Tunisians will desire. Entrenched interests and institutions connected to the ancien regime, what Egyptians have dubbed the ``deep state,'' will conspire to stand in the way of a brighter future for Tunisia's people and slow the pace of change throughout the region.

Around the world, but especially here in Washington, the regional developments have fostered unease as events on the ground have proven less than amenable to external ``management.'' The power of entrenched interests was more than offset by the early strength of Islamist parties in Tunisia and Egypt, giving rise to the fear of secular autocracies being supplanted by theocratically-oriented governments that would embrace the principle of ``one man, one vote, one time.''

This fear of an Islamist takeover has had two main effects in the first years of the Arab transition. The first is that it served to inhibit the American response for fear of strengthening the Islamists' hold or provoking a popular backlash. The other has been to drive a wedge between the United States and the Gulf Arab monarchs, who have been the most resistant to change and accommodation and understand fully the implications for their rule.

But change will be hard to resist. The same forces that swept aside Egypt's Mubarak and Tunisia's Ben Ali are at work throughout the region. The United States needs to craft policies that acknowledge the centrality of that fact, as well as the reality that this is a process that will play itself out over a generation and perhaps longer. We need to build mechanisms capable of supporting a transition in the Arab world in three dimensions: political, economic, and civil society.

Next week, I will discuss how the U.S. can help foster these three pillars of democratic development in a way that can be sustained without requiring an outsized share of our limited resources. In the weeks to come, I will be sharing a few more detailed thoughts on the struggles going on in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere in this critical and dangerous part of the world.

The yearning for freedom is a universal one, but getting there has never been easy. The Egyptians, Syrians, Tunisians, and others have taken the first step towards taking their societies back. We must stand ready to help, and we must be prepared for a long and uneven journey.

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