The 1989 changes in central and eastern Europe : lessons for the Arab nations?

Abstract

Popular uprisings are not unusual, including those in favour of democratic goals, but it is when they occur in waves that they attract widespread attention. It is these multiple uprisings that also give rise to expectations of major change in a region, and the sense that we are witnessing the fall of regimes like collapsing dominoes; it is this that gives a sense of the world being changed in some significant way, well beyond any significance for the individual societies. So it was with the astonishing events of what came to be called the Arab Spring of 2011, and it is not surprising that it gave rise to comparisons with the anti-communist uprisings in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. It was this comparison that bolstered a sense of the world’s geo-political map being redrawn, and that a new era of relations within and with the Arab nations was beginning.