Currents of the Arab Revolution

Each Arab state has its own characteristics and its evolution will surely be different. Ultimately, a historical event is unique and unrepeatable. But the philosophy of history searches for some basic element in them that allows them to be categorized and thus perceive tendencies over the long run. It is evident to me that, when in a few months’ time, popular movements arise in more and more countries whose forms of government, international alignments and economic resources are very different, some ingredient of the explosive mixture ought to be searched out in a deeper and longer-lasting phenomenon.

In the 1960-61 academic year, the historian and philosopher of history Arnold Toynbee gave three lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. Emecé published them in Spanish with the title of Los Estados Unidos y la revolución mundial (America and the World Revolution). Delivered in the context of the Cold War, today they shed some light on the position of the United States with respect to the rebellions that are altering the Arab world.

On April 19, 1775, the first battle of the American Revolutionary War was fought on the bridge of Concord, Massachusetts. Recalling this episode, Emerson coined a phrase that Toynbee cited as the basis of his later reflections: “the shot heard ‘round the world.”

That shot, said Toynbee, traveled round the world. “It had been heard in France before the eighteenth century was over. It was heard in Spanish America and in Greece while the nineteenth century was still young. In 1848 … the sound reverberated, like a thunderclap, over the whole of Continental Europe. … The sound was heard in Paris again in 1871; this time the Commune was Paris’s response to it. Traveling on eastward, the sound touched off the Russian revolution of 1905, the Persian revolution of 1906, and the Turkish revolution of 1908. By that date it had already roused the Founding Fathers of the Indian National Congress. … The Indian Congress Movement has been the mother of all the independence movements in all the Asian and African countries … that, till recently, have been under the rule of West European colonial powers.”

The echo of that shot continued producing social upheavals: in Mexico, in 1910; in China, in 1911; in Russia, in 1917; in Turkey, in 1919; once again in China, in 1948; in Cuba, in 1959. It is evident that many of these movements failed and gave way to regimes that distorted the initial objectives. The main thread that Toynbee saw in them, however, is the people’s yearning and search for greater dignity, freedom and equality. The people’s yearning began to awaken upon hearing the echo of that battle in 1775, in the century that saw the birth of the Industrial Revolution. Until this era, productivity was so low that only a minuscule minority could benefit from production that exceeded mere subsistence levels. Inequality was inevitable. After that revolution of production, the transformation of societies toward states of greater freedom and equality became possible. But the nature of world revolution is spiritual. “The impetus behind the American Revolution is the spirit of Christianity; the sound is the voice of God which speaks not only through Christianity but through all the historical religions which have preached their gospels to all the World and which, between them, have reached almost the whole of mankind.”

Toynbee expressed consternation because the United States, after leading the world revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries, in the 20th had ceded the torch to Russia, the arch-conservative power of the preceding periods.

In my judgment, the U.S. has newly changed its role and resolved to support the revolution. The speech given by Barack Obama in Cairo on June 4, 2009, proclaimed it. But his attitude is not just that of a leader or a party. The naive belief that the fall of a monstrous tyranny would lead naturally to the installation of a democratic system, as in West Germany after 1945, also garnered the support of American society up until the military intervention in Iraq, plagued by spurious motivations.

Just as during the world revolutions, there will be failures and frustrations. And the United States, like other actors, will commit errors. Most likely we will see ambiguities due to practical considerations. But the echo of the Battle of Concord has been heard in the Arab world, and the United States appears to be willing to support the demands of the people.

I do not know if Obama has read Toynbee. But his Cairo speech, which advocated for “a world where governments serve their citizens, and the rights of all God’s children are respected” ends with quotes from the Quran, Talmud and Sermon on the Mount. His invocation of God coincides with the English historian’s interpretation that fields throughout the globe have been sown by the major religions. In the final sentence of his address, Obama calls for work to germinate those seeds.