Western journalists flocked to Cairo’s Tahrir Square and wrote euphoric articles echoing William Wordsworth’s lines on the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!” With a blithe disregard for historical accuracy, they dubbed it the Arab Spring, an allusion to the (unsuccessful) 1968 Czech uprising against Soviet communism.
Well, it’s not so blissful now, and least of all for the youthful Arabs who began this revolution...
and
In a report published last month, the Institute of International Finance predicted that growth in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia will fall from 4.4 percent in 2010 to -0.5 percent this year. Egypt’s economy will contract by 2.5 percent, Yemen’s by 4 percent.
This is partly because revolutions themselves cause damage and disrupt work. The big story, however, is capital flight. Egyptian businessmen complain of soaring crime in the cities, the difficulty of carrying out normal transactions, and, above all, nerve--racking political uncertainty. Rich Arabs do not trust this revolution...What begins with euphoric crowds soon slides into a second phase of economic paralysis. The same happened in France after the initial “bliss” of 1789 and in Russia after 1917. In each case, exuberance at the overthrow of the old regime was swiftly succeeded by exasperation at the decline in living standards. And that was what gave the political extremists their opportunity to peddle their radical ideology of war against internal and external foes. Yesterday, the Jacobins and Bolsheviks. Tomorrow, I fear, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda.
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