Liam Fox

Egypt on the brink

We must do all we can to promote democracy in Egypt – the future of the region depends on it

It is strange now to recall the jubilation with which the ‘Arab Spring’ was welcomed. Amid all the excitement of dictators toppling, many people here in the West, as well as some over there on the ground, forgot that the test of a revolution is not the overthrow of a tyrant, but what comes next.

Though they will never admit it, the Arab revolutions surprised western governments as much as the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe. History is always producing the unexpected, which is why some of us never took it for granted that all this would have a happy ending. Now, almost two years after the Tahrir Square uprising, the fates of the revolutions and the region are at a deadly junction.

The West’s swift initial support for the Egyptian rebels was understandable. First, because of the fresh memory of our failure to back the Green reform movement in Iran. But second, because it is just so easy to imagine from a position of comfort that when a dictator falls, a democracy like our own will take its place. It seems so logical that people elsewhere would want the same liberal system which has made our own lives so materially and socially richer. Through our empire and its aftermath, Britain has been able to export ideas of democratic government, law and rights to the furthest reaches of the globe. It is easy to fall into the trap of simply assuming this is the direction in which history is going.

Instead of allowing hope to become the father of expectation, the United States and its European allies ought to have given far more thought to what would come next. Once the bottle of autocracy was smashed, the genie of Islamist political movements was first out.

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