Six years on, if there were any lingering doubts about a certain romanticism attached to the so-called Arab Spring, the UN has put that sentiment to rest with its latest report. The protest movement has cost the region $614 billion in lost growth since 2011. That, according to a study conducted by the UN›s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), is equivalent to six percent of the region›s total GDP between 2011 and 2015.
The UN says Arab states have faced economic stagnation since the uprisings in 2011. The data also says conflicts have worsened debt, unemployment, corruption and poverty, and exacerbated the refugee crisis. It included countries not directly affected by political conflict but subject to spillover effects from it, like refugee arrivals, lost remittances and falls in tourism. And in countries where political transitions have occurred, new governments have not made economic reforms required to address the issues that led to unrest in the first place, the report says.
The Arab Spring started after a young, unemployed man, Mohamed Bouazizi, set fire to himself after officials stopped him from selling vegetables in central Tunisia in December 2010. Bouazizi›s action ignited a string of protests across Tunisia, which led to the then president›s resignation and exile. The protests in Tunisia acted as a catalyst for revolts and protests in several other Arab states. Libya, Yemen and Syria remain locked in civil wars, which have cost tens of thousands of lives and have left these countries without a functioning central government.
The Arab Spring was an unexpected nightmare. A decade›s worth of events unfolded in the space of a single year. Most of the Arab Spring countries experienced the same scenario: hopeful revolution which turned into belligerence, then into strife followed by war. It is as if the new regional order was guaranteed to lead to instability and chaos. The entire Arab region was thrown into turmoil.
Revolutions never follow in a nice straight line and this certainly applied to the Arab Spring. As much hope as they inspired, they also brought an equal amount of harbingers of a future that was not all poetry and roses. Consider, for example, that in some instances states remained relatively intact, whereas in Libya, by contrast, there was never a state to begin with, but rather some vague political scaffolding that collapsed, leaving the revolutionaries nothing solid to take hold of.
Syria is another case entirely. There, the blood has been flowing for years and the Syrian people are still holding out against a nightmarish machine of violence and amidst uncertainty as to whether the state will change fundamentally or collapse entirely.
Yet now we realize that this was just the beginning but one which never had a happy ending. After succeeding in their immediate aims, the revolutions found themselves in unchartered territory. The plan was to get rid of governments and replace them with perceived better ones. Protesters quickly (or rather slowly) found out that while the former could be done by force, a different principle was needed for the latter. But, as when the US never had a Plan B for an Iraq after Saddam Hussein, so, too, the Arab Spring protesters focused almost entirely on Plan A. Stage two was an afterthought and became so complex as to defy comprehension.
The Arab Spring has long ago come to a halt in every Arab country but not after having cost the lives of hundreds of thousands and hundreds of billions of dollars. The result has been great bitterness and more violence. The Arab Spring doubled the rates of Arab pain and suffering. As such, it has lost not a small degree of its romanticism.
