Neither the political, ruling systems in the Arab world nor its western supporting powers are used to take the Arabic public square seriously into consideration. Undeniable is the attention of the international research centres of political and civil studies to the conditions of human rights, democracy and freedom in the Arab world, as well as the NGOs’ general call for respecting the public’s rights in the Arab world and serving the purpose of its progress, leave alone the typical slogans on justice, freedom, truth and prosperity, which every Arab keeps hearing from the local rulers and oppositions alike. However, none of the international sides, the Arab rulers or their opponents have taken the public’s point of view of their own condition seriously, listened to its real voice or took the people’s ability to make the change they aspire at into reliable consideration. These people’s ability has, rather, been often undermined upon the presumption that the Arab public are either merely herds of humans that are dictated by the hegemonic regimes, or merely fragmented, able-less societal segments that desperately need the established opposition movements to unite them in one front, to mobilize their activities and pall them out of their miserable passivity. Until very recently, the Arabic public square’s image in the mind of the international society was just a fake, substance-less scene, an ‘echo’ of the discourse of either the regimes or their foes.
What, nevertheless, recently confuses all of the western powers, the national oppositions and the local hegemonic regimes in the Arab world is that this Arabic public square has in the past weeks proven to the whole world that it is not a stagnant oasis nor is it an unreliable herd that serves the will of its tenders.
The western world witnesses with clear ambivalence the Arabic young public confronting stubbornly and straightforwardly the brutal and criminal security forces of the Arab tyrannical and corrupted dictatorships with open, unarmed hands and fearless determination, loaded only with voices and convictions free from any affiliation to the old-fashioned and classical sectarian and dogmatic ideologies; such ideologies, that is, which these youth believe they would eventually make them bend their heads down and compromise their revolt. The Western powers observe this phenomenon with unconcealed confusion as they see their media broadcasts to them an Arabic public square that is not only new and unprecedented in terms of its members’ young age, their mainly economically driven motif and multifarious sociological identity, but also in terms of this square’s non-conventional worldview, genuinely uncontrolled thought form and non-premeditated freedom. For the first time the western world notices that the recent Arabic society is made of a young generation that stands in the present historical era and belongs to a postmodernist intellectual sphere, emancipated from all forms of monolithic, absolutist and collectivist referentialism that was characteristic of the past Arabic context. It is a postmodernist generation par-excellence, shaped after the values of pluralism, relativity and heterogeneity. It does not only deem these values power-gaining instruments or expression means, but more importantly constructive notions inherent to human being and existence. The west’s caution and a noticeable degree of suspicion indicates that the West does not yet know how it should approach this rising generation and how it aught to deal with such a factual, influential public existence that seems to be exceeding all the preconditions and calculations that have always been taken-for-granted in reading the sociological context of the region.
On the other hand, the present ruling regimes are the first victims of these uprisings in the Arabic public squares. The first lesson one wish these rulers to learn from this situation is the total failure and ineffectiveness of their ruling strategies and the impossibility of ignoring or undermining anymore the capabilities of peoples’ anger, frustration and despair. What energizes such influence is the fact that this new Arab youth do not abide with the traditional culture of ‘obeying the leaders’ and, contrary to previous Arab generations, it is not ready to marsh behind any allegedly ‘saving leader’, ‘patriotic liberator’, ‘freeing sect’ or even to concede an idealist ‘truth-possessing ideology’. Such traditional notions and slogans were once the energizing engines of the Arabic political train that brought the recent Arabic hegemonic systems into rule. These regimes can no more rely on these principles to remain in power, because, like other parts of the contemporary world, the shores of the Arab world has also been bathed with the high waves of postmodernity that started to crack from-within all the foundations of the conventional forms of authoritarianism, collectivism, oneness and referentiality. The old-fashioned Arab regimes can no more assume that the populations are ready to burry their criticism and rejection against all forms of political, economic and social corruption and suppression. For the present public square, such forms or leadership represent a fossilized, aggressive and irrelevant statehood inheritance, their parents and grandparents once were obliged to belonged to and live with, while this generation neither know nor identify itself with.
Moreover, one has also to realize that even the political opponents in every Arabic country cannot also overshadow the fact that the new Arabic public square attributes no representational role to the traditional, national opposition and no more really believe that this opposition either speaks on its behalf or fits as a possible alternative to the present rotten regimes they revolt against. The youth who lately jammed the cities and froze daily life in many Arabic countries are not tools in the hands of their countries’ known oppositions. They do not reflect in their movement and their understanding of such movement alike an uprising form that can by any means be similar to the sectarian and ideological revolutions the Arab world experienced and the Arabic political literature preached about during the last four decades of the past century. Therefore, no conventional liberal, leftist, communist, nationalist or Islamist opposition movement in the Arab world has the right to attribute these youth’s uprising to its public work, intellectual discourse or private agenda. Mistaken is the one who reads the latest events in the Arabic public squares as a political transference of the public from the campaign of fear, obedience and subordination to the hegemonic, dictatorial regimes towards the campaign of these regimes’ opposing powers. For the new generation of Arabs, these oppositions themselves are the production of the very same outdated and equally abandoned conventional mentality and thought form, to which these postmodernist Arab youth do not belong. As the principles and premises of the tyrannical regimes are alien to them and their webs of meaning, the oppositions’ understanding and implementation of the values of freedom, democracy, justice etc, leave alone these latter’s antagonism with the regimes in relation to such values, are as alien, meaningless and useless in the eyes of those who strolled the streets and called for changing the regimes. Be that as it may, one can validly say that the Arabic public square’s movement, which started in Tunisia and Egypt and is rapidly permeating the Arab world, does not only challenge the shaky structure and legibility of the Arabic tyrannical regimes. It is also, and undoubtedly, a real challenge to the traditional image of the Arabic public square in the mind of the western powers, on one side, and to the local expectations and appraisal of this square in the eyes of the various trends of the Arab traditional oppositions, on another.
The Arabic public squares witness this time the evident birth of an unprecedented historical, constructive and unstoppable public, sociological and political transformation. We have in the region the glorious genesis of a new form of political orientation, a longed-for formation of a new identity for the Arabic states that exceed the region’s ruling systems and opposition trends alike. The most significant alternative phenomenon that will stem out of these pivotal uprisings will not primarily be the new ruling orders that will rise up from the ashes of the previous ones, but more substantially the new ever-active role of an Arabic, broadly spreading public square, emancipated from old confessional, sectarian, ideological, social, ethnic and even religious labels and divisions; a square, that is, whose members will not go home and re-hibernate for many other decades to come, but will inhibit the streets over and over again and will unflinchingly re-raise their rejecting voice whenever they believe it necessary to do so, unhindered by fear and uninfluenced by any obedience demand or controlling side.
Just few weeks earlier, none in the Arab or the western world could have imagined that such a new public square can be a reality in our region. Yet, the new generations of the Arab people are shaping their own destiny today and declaring to the whole world that they have not left the track of history and they will not allow any one to derail them from it.
