Tuesday, February 15, 2011

The Arab world is dead, but the Egyptians may revive it

Egypt's revolution has not just deposed a dictator, it has breathed life into an exhausted idea: Arab self-determination

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 February 2011

"The protesters on the streets of Cairo who, in just 18 days, ended the three-decade rule of Hosni Mubarak were not merely demanding the end of an unjust, corrupt and oppressive regime. They did not merely decry privation, unemployment or the disdain with which their leaders treated them. They had long suffered such indignities. What they fought for was something more elusive and more visceral.

The Arab world is dead. Egypt's revolution is trying to revive it.


From the 1950s onwards, Arabs took pride in their anti-colonial struggle, in their leaders' standing and in the sense that the Arab world stood for something, that it had a mission: to build independent nation-states and resist foreign domination.....

For decades, the Arab world has been drained of its sovereignty, its freedom, its pride. It has been drained of politics. Today marks politics' revenge."

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