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The New Arabs: How The Millennial Generation Is Changing The Middle East
Best known for his wide-ranging blog on Middle Eastern developments, Juan Cole argues that the new generation of Arab youth – sometimes called “Gen Y”, sometimes “the millennials” – is quite unlike its failed predecessors and that much of their success in the Arab spring is due to the use of social media.
In support of his view he notes, for example, that the number of Tunisians online doubled to 1.7 million between 2006 and 2008, and doubled again within a year, by which time 90% of the citizenry had mobile phones and nearly a million of the country’s 10 million people were Facebook users. In Egypt 46% of urban dwellers were online by 2012, 40% having internet-capable mobile phones. Libya, the third country on which Cole focuses, was much less connected, but its youth still figured prominently in the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi. By communicating pictures of police assaults and witnesses’ statements of torture, and by texting where marches were forming and relaying the lyrics of protest songs, demonstrators were able to rally their cohort and overcome their fear of coming into the street.
But demography is not destiny, and Cole is far too good a historian to suggest as much. His comprehensive narrative of political events will long serve as a vital resource for those wanting to understand this era. Yet at each point, despite more problematising evidence, Cole proclaims the transformative power of the new generation. He shows that anywhere from a quarter to a third of young people were unemployed, a rate that only increases with levels of education; that 8 million Egyptians applied for the US immigration lottery in 2006 and that by 2008 nearly half of young people wanted to go abroad. He rightly stresses the role of the Egyptian unions and lower-class youth in the events leading up to Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, as well as the effects of a worldwide recession and droughts on jobs and bread prices – all of which helped to mobilise the twentysomethings of Egypt and Tunisia.
But look closely at the photos from Tahrir Square and you will see a lot of grey hair. According to a YouGov-Cambridge survey, “in contrast to those who have portrayed the participants in the Arab spring as predominantly young, educated and unemployed – the ‘youth bulge’ explanation for the uprisings – the results we’ve seen indicate that in most (though not all) countries, those over 35 years old are slightly more likely to take part in protests than those under 35”. Whether it was parents furious at a regime that undermined their children’s education, or workers who were more concerned with their pay packets than changing the structure of government, the sources of frustration went well beyond those of the young alone. Cole never discusses the corrosive nature of everyday corruption – in which one commonly had to bribe a child’s teacher or a hospital orderly to visit a relative or a postal clerk to get a form. Adults were made complicit in this ever-present corruption and felt dirtied by it. When the time came, it was the youth who precipitated events, but it was the parents who made those events unstoppable.
Cole’s illustrations of the importance of social media also do not point in a single direction. He calls use of the internet “formational” but notes that “the rise of the internet may not have been as central to these social movements as some western press coverage assumed”. Indeed, his own description shows that information disseminated by pamphlet and word of mouth was usually more important. He makes a common mistake when he says that the younger generation took over “public” spaces like Tahrir. But there is no concept of “public” space for which individuals feel responsibility in the Arab world: space is either private or controlled by the government. Indeed, on his own evidence the occupied plazas were treated like private space, where (until government thugs broke in) women were safe and unveiled, where tea was offered and where people cleaned up rubbish. Critics say the youth revolution lacked leadership. But private space requires no leaders, since everyone knows how to act in an area that is likened to one’s home.
It is also an open question whether the demonstrators imagined a truly different relation to the state. TE Lawrence once said that Arabs believe in persons, not institutions. In a political culture of intense personalism – where corruption is seen less as abuse of office than as failure to share with your dependants – reciprocity is crucial. However, the state is not an entity with which one can enjoy a reciprocal relationship. And this is where the younger generation failed to differentiate itself from its predecessors. Young men wanted to prove their adulthood in a culture that lacks any other rite of passage than collecting the allies necessary to fund a marriage. But with jobs and housing scarce, the average age of marriage for both sexes had been pushed to the late 20s. Sexually and sociologically frustrated, unable to imagine that authorities could separate personal ties from official duties, the younger generation was unable to effect the one thing (as Hannah Arendt noted) necessary to make a revolution – not just a change in ways of thinking but a change in ways of relating.
Ultimately, Cole concludes that these young people “forever changed their societies” (indeed, “forever changed the world”), and that however matters have developed since the heady days of the Arab spring “it seems unlikely that we have heard the last of the Egyptian millennials”. But while Tunisia may prove the exception, Jules Michelet’s description of the Champs de Mars after the French revolution sounds hauntingly like the “revolution” of Tahrir Square, which in the light of subsequent events “has for her monument empty space … this sandy place, flat as Arabia”. The private space is gone, the public space has yet to be created, and areas like Tahrir have reverted to government space.
Still, what happened is not insignificant. The people in the Arab street sank to the depths of cultural discomfort and then extricated themselves through practices that felt both familiar and authentic. The millennials were unable to shift the categories by which they grasp the world, but for a time they were a catalyst for rebellion, altering their surroundings while themselves remaining largely intact. The “New Arabs” may not have succeeded in revolutionising their societies, but they may have sensed the possibilities of a new world and the solidarity it will take to achieve it.
The Guardian
Lawrence Rosen