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Syrian Rebel Fighters in Aleppo |
Samuel
Huntington believed that democratization came in spikes over periods of time.
For example the first spike came with the French and the American revolutions.
For every spike to occur you must also have a fall, for instance in the 1920’s
and 1930’s in Europe with fascism. You may be wondering, what does this have to
do with anything, but this involves the world still today. Some would even say
that a fourth spike may be happening now in the Middle East and Northern
Africa, or you may have heard it as the Arab Spring.
With
the Arab Spring being the fourth democratic wave and the French and American
revolutions being the first means that there are two others. The second wave
came post WWII with Japan, Germany and Turkey. Following this peak, Turkey fell
away from democracy during a military coup in the 60’s, along with many Latin
American countries. This led to the next wave of democracy in the 1970’s with
Spain, Greece and Turkey back to Democracy. With a rise in democracy, it led to
another reversal in the Balkans during the 1990’s. This then leads to the
fourth and most current wave of democratization, with the Arab Spring.
The
Arab spring started in late 2010 to the beginning of 2011. It began due to the lack of human
rights, and abuse of
dictatorships, along with many other factors. The citizens began to start
protesting due to the issues. Many of the younger citizens became more internet
savvy and were able to set up many protests through social media. This led to
many countries filtering and censoring the internet even more than they may
have already. In some cases countries such as Libya, Egypt and Syria have had
full internet shutdown for periods of time to help stop the spread of the
democratic ideologies. This would only make the riots even more important in
the eyes of the rioters.
16
countries have witnessed large numbers of their citizens protesting, including
four countries which successfully forced their leaders from power including;
Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, and Libya. This then leads to a whole new problem where
the people now choose the new government. Tunisia had this problem after 14
January 2011 when president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was taken from power after
very large political protests. All current members of the government were
ousted and banned from ever going back, regardless of whether they were later
elected or not. Mohammed Ghannouchi then became the prime minister. With
protests still continuing the prime minister stepped down and democratic
elections were held in October. On the 23rd of October citizens of
Tunisia voted in a 217 member constituent assembly which was now in charge of
creating a brand new constitution. The moderate Islamist party won the election
with 37% of the vote. This now gave the Arab Spring a flagship country about
what could happen with the democratic revolution. With a state like this I
believe that it has influenced many others and motivated other Arab
revolutions.
As
was said before, Tunisia wasn’t the only country to oust its leader but that it
was the first to succeed, giving hope to many other states. Egypt started its
revolution just 11 days after Tunisia ousted its leader. Egypt’s revolution was
very similar to Tunisia, and ended up electing Mohammed Mursi as the first
democratically elected president through the Supreme Constitutional Court, by
judges within the government. Not all countries were as lucky to go through a
revolution so smooth and non-violent. Countries such as Libya and Syria were
plunged into civil war.
The
Syrian protests began around the same time as many of the other countries
around mid-January 2011. On the 6th of March, 15 children were
arrested by Syrian security forces, which spawned an even larger amount of
protesters. By mid-April hundreds of thousands of protesters began gathering in
the main square of Homs. This worried the president Bashar-al-Assad, and on the
31st of July he sent tanks into many cities to quell the uprising.
This led to one of the biggest days of the uprising with an unconfirmed amount
of 136 citizens killed. Bloodshed would continue even to this day, 18 months
from the beginning of the uprising with the total number of deaths rising beyond
20,000 total, along with over 100,000 refugees in Turkey and tens of thousands
in Jordan, testing the capabilities of these countries to provide support in
these quantities. This has led to international talks with the U.N. about
foreign intervention. This strategy did work in Libya where NATO Forces
proceeded with a no-fly zone, but it is unknown whether it will work against
Syria due to its larger military force, as the number of defecting officers is
much lower than other states, therefore keeping domestic support. Along with the no-fly zone in Libya it
also had a large number of military defectors. Unless this occurs in Syria, I
believe that any revolution will be crushed by a military take over.
With
all of the refugees flooding into the surrounding states, I feel that these
governments will be the most pressured to act rather than states from afar. If
Syria were to have foreign intervention, Turkey will more than likely be the
state that would intervene solely, at least in the beginning. They are the one
of the few states that are involved now due to the fact that mortars are
landing on their soil and killing Turkish civilians. And rightfully so I
believe that they should at least to protect their own territory, but as for
ousting Bashar al-Assad, I believe this is in the hands of the Syrian people.
It
may still be too early to tell if the Arab Spring truly is the fourth wave of
democratization, but only time will tell.
All information on this blog was
found on:
www.bbc.co.uk
