1848 and all that

As freedom blooms in the Arab world, newspaper comment pages are experiencing a springtime of vague historical analogies. In an attempt to grasp the significance of events in Benghazi, Bahrain and Sidi Bouzid, columnists are falling over themselves in evoking Europe’s inheritance of resistance and revolt. Which enlightened model will the young Arabs choose in their quest for democracy and justice: 1848, 1968 or 1989? But while there is no substitute for historical perspective when attempting to understand current events, we should at least employ an appropriate perspective. The recent clamour for European precedents betrays an impoverished understanding of the history of recent events in the Arab world.

Some commentary has indeed proved enlightening. Several experts at Open Democracy have identified features common to the Arab uprisings today and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe: “the economic stagnation of the region, the failures of corrupt and repressive autocratic regimes, and a disenchanted youthful population wired together as never before.” In typically provocative spirit, Niall Ferguson recalled how “while other commentators ran around Cairo’s Tahrir Square, hyperventilating about what they saw as an Arab 1989,” he flew to Tel Aviv to learn that experts on the Middle East have condemned the past few months as “a colossal failure of American foreign policy.” Drawing intriguing parallels with Jimmy Carter’s muddled response to the Iranian revolution of 1979, Ferguson suggests that Obama’s “foreign policy debacle” is a result of a lack of “coherent thinking” and a “grand strategy.” Such historical comparisons, as Timothy Garton Ash has rightly pointed out, offer “an extensive toolkit of experience, showing the many ways in which a revolution can go wrong and the rare combination needed for it to keep going right.”

The virtue of a historical analogy, then, lies in its capacity to clarify events both past and present. Too many recent examples, however, have only served to muddy the waters of both.  Tariq Ali simplistically asserts that “Like Europeans in 1848 the Arab people are fighting against foreign domination; against the violation of their democratic rights; against an elite blinded by its own illegitimate wealth—and in favour of economic justice.” These causes no doubt apply to some of the protesters, somewhere and at some point in either Europe in 1848 or the Arab world in 2011, but as a historical analysis it is too general to improve our understanding of either revolution.

With more attention to detail, Anne Applebaum has stressed the importance of national contexts in both 1848 and 2011. Just as the Hungarian nobility’s anti-Austrian grievances differed from those of German nationalists, so the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites distinguishes uprisings in Bahrain from those in Libya, where the violent response of Gadaffi’s regime is dictating events. Whereas the revolutionaries of 1848 universally failed in their objectives of effecting immediate institutional change, their long-term impact on the democratic political culture of European states was significant. Perhaps the ongoing Libyan struggle shall also be better understood by posterity.

Applebaum is no doubt spot-on in her conclusion that the Arab revolutions will prove to be, like 1848, “complicated and messy.” But from her retrospective of nineteenth-century barricades, what have we learned that we can apply to our understanding of events in Tunis and Tripoli? That, as Zhou Enlai famously quipped when asked about the impact of the French Revolution, “it is to soon to tell”?

Such a response would dishearten Garton Ash, who spoke last month at the LSE literary festival about the possibility of writing a history of very recent events. Good history and good journalism, Garton Ash argued, share common criteria that, if satisfied, can create not a first draft of history but an authoritative analysis of current events. This ‘history of the present’ consists of a determination to get to relevant sources and assess them critically; a sympathy with all sides involved whilst aspiring to objective analysis; and an attention to literary style with vivid and clear writing.

He is right that such analysis of current events is both possible and desirable (see, for instance, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia). But far from converging towards this happy hybrid, the respective practices of history and journalism have drifted further apart, creating a void of ignorance into which columnists and commentators have tipped their dated templates of European revolutions past. Broadcasters rely on vox pops and ‘I witness’ accounts, while over-specialised academics speculate from western universities on how the unrest might affect British, European or American interests.

Rarely do these academics or journalists give the impression of being familiar with the languages and contemporary cultures on which they are reporting. It is no surprise that one recent example of comprehensive and engaging analysis, which avoided speculation on the cornucopia of potential causes (let alone consequences), flowed from the pen of Max Rodenbeck, the Economist’s Middle East correspondent based permanently in Cairo.

A “toolkit of experience” is a handy resource for interpreting events, but only if the tools work. “When I read my yellowed lecture notes and tattered paperbacks, I do not see a model for Egyptians,” writes Robert Darnton when pondering Tahrir Square’s relationship to the Bastille and beyond. When even Darnton’s vast historical knowledge fails to help him “understand today’s newscasts,” it is time to ignore the glib confusion of historical analogies and to ensure instead that the newscasters themselves make the most of their privileged first-hand perspective.