CAIRO - 2011 has been a momentous year, full of agonies and grievances, but laden with hope for a promising future. Still, this linguistic compression of thoughts and impressions may not tell the whole story of 2011. After decades of a world accumulating an image of the Arabs as immune to reform and alien to democracy, the process of political awakening took the world's intellectual elites and media by surprise, including those in the Arab world itself. Political science and thought seemed to have been lagging behind, preferring, as it did, the easier approach of engaging only in descriptive exercises that usually stop short of recognising the potential consequences of the interplay of numerous variables. So when the wave of revolts, massive protests and bold challenge to the status quo that swept through large areas of the Arab world, including in particular Egypt, its most populous country of nearly 85 million people, the principal impression that was created by an endless flood of research papers, articles and media commentaries had ‘the unthinkable' theory as its basis, with the ensuing deduction that the Arab Spring, as this revolutionary tide has come to be called, is but a case of mere historical coincidence. In yet another exercise in doing it the easy way, the idea that the cause of the Arab Spring was the rise of new media social networks gained prominence from the very beginning, prompting authorities in revolting countries to rush at the time to disrupt the social media networks as if that were the means to address the cause of socio-political unrest. In most of the debates, public and expert alike, that preceded the advent of the Arab Spring, the notion of the inevitability of a major eruption of discontent remained almost untraceable. While the reasons underlying this observation are many and most of them are vague, the dearth of ‘illuminating' ideas, the absence of swift and well-informed decision-making and failed political thought have certainly contributed to the aggravation of the consequences. Thousands have lost their lives, many more have been injured or disabled and grievances have increased, let alone the public security problems and economic difficulties. As 2011 drew to a close, however, a denouement seemed drawing near. With the exception of Syria, where the regime's crackdown on protesters continues unabated, and Yemen, where the political settlement process is yet to be completed, the overall scene of the Arab Spring appears well set for such a denouement. The profound transition to democracy in Tunisia, the institution of a broad-based government in Libya to oversee the transformation to political freedoms and the remarkable management in Egypt of two thirds of the procedures to freely and democratically elect a truly representative parliament together with the steady progress of democratic transition according to a declared road map, all foretell the advent of a hopefully rewarding and qualitatively different 2012.
