Sunday, February 6, 2011

Democratising the Arab world

Planting a dream: "Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate"

The right to dream cannot be entrusted to demagogues, megalomaniacs or leaders. The people want to dream their own dreams. Here begins reclamation and assumption of lost agency in the Arab Middle East. Success of people's power in Egypt would change the entire Middle East region. Elites, policies, alliances, strategic doctrines, and Arab-Arab relations would be changed forever. It would re-write Egypt-Israeli relations as much as reposition the Palestinian question at the centre not only of Arab-Israeli relations, but also of Arab-Western relations. Many of the existing delegitimised Arab ruling elites have more or less dropped Palestine from their foreign policy-making agendas.

The incapacity to dream is a slow death. Giant steps from self-empowering dreams. Popular sovereignty.

From Tunis to Cairo, "people's power" represents a watershed, an Inception in the making. It now serves as a fount of democratic streams with a fierce and determined thirst for self-governance by the oppressed across the Arab geography.

unleashing shockwaves whose political reverberations will be felt for a long time.

The agency that Arabs are assuming to unseat Arab hegemons. This agency is unshackling itself from a threefold dynamic: the fear of the Arab police state; Orientalist constructions demoting Arab agency; and Euro-American democratisation theorists' obsession with structure, culture and top-down institution-building.

Distributive justice. The uncontrollable wrath expressed by millions of Egyptians derives from the damage afflicted upon a whole nation by politicians whose corruption, nepotism and disregard for the intelligence of Egypt's people litter the pages of hundreds of opposition newspapers.

The tiny, global, corporate community, underestimates how dismantling the welfare state could prove calamitous for its own survival. Their assumption that millions of inhabitants are happy being forever the down-trodden is now being disproved.

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