Transcriber: Beomjo Park Reviewer: Capa Girl
Good afternoon. Thank you all very much for having me.
I thought I would talk to you today
first about the only time in my life
anybody ever shot at me.
And for those of you who haven't had the pleasure,
let me let you know that it is not an experience I would care to repeat,
under any circumstances.
Probably what made it worse from my personal standpoint
is that they were justified in shooting at me --
which is a very awkward situation to be in --
and I wasn't even feeling I was in a riot
nor did I have any weapon of any kind on me.
So, let me just tell you that story very briefly
and then connect it to the substantive question
I want to discuss with you today,
which is the question of what it takes to make a revolution
and the two stages in which revolutions must engage,
and the difference between those two stages.
But first, a brief and embarrassing story.
I was in Baghdad in Iraq
in 2003, about a month at this point
after Saddam Hussein's statue had come down,
and it was my third day in the country,
and I was with the group of MPs
and one Judge Advocate General officer,
driving around Baghdad and checking out some of the mass grave scenes
that have been left behind
by the fleeing regime of Saddam.
Truly horrifying things to see.
And on the way back to what was not yet known as the green zone
but would shortly be called that,
we drove through a very poor but it seemed friendly,
Shia section of Baghdad,
and I noticed that there was a bakery open.
Now the guys that I was with had been in the desert,
and had been on eating MREs, meals ready to eat,
these disgusting rations,
for the previous something like four months.
And I said, you know, "Do you guys want some fresh bread?"
and they said, "Absolutely!"
They said, 'Well should we pull over?'
I said, "It would be completely fine."
Never say that!
We stop, we start chatting,
and very quickly a crowd builds up
first of kids, and then of adults.
And the adults had some hard questions,
like, "Why is there no running water?"
I said, "I don't know."
They said, "Why is there no electricity?"
I said, "I don't know."
They said, "Are you Lebanese?"
I had an answer for that one.
I said, "No, I'm American. Why do you think I'm Lebanese?"
They're like, "Well, you don't look Iraqi,
and you can speak Arabic,
so you must be Lebanese."
That gave me some sense of the environment I was in,
and then came the punch line question,
"Who's the government?"
And I didn't have an answer for that one either
and that was especially bad.
In fact I had to ask them to repeat the question,
now they thought I was a blubbering idiot, Lebanese or otherwise.
They said, "Who is the government?",
and finally I said to them, "Well, Ambassador Bremer is the government."
He had arrived a day or two before.
And then they said, "Who the hell is ambassador Bremer?"
I said, "Well, you know, he was sent by the President of the United States".
And they said, "Well, that's okay.
As long as somebody is the government."
And it was right at that moment that someone started shooting at us.
The kids ran away extremely quickly,
and they also seemed to know
where the bullets were coming from which put them one up on me.
And I found myself trying to work out
whether it would be better to be seen
by whoever were shooting at us,
as though I had a weapon,
so that maybe they would go away,
or as though I didn't have a weapon
so that maybe they would shoot at somebody other than me.
As it turned out, while I was trying to make this decision,
we got up and hauled ass.
I wish, by the way, that I had a cool image of this to show you,
but I was too busy fleeing to take out a camera.
Now, in this situation, we were an occupying force,
and they were justified in some sense
whoever they were in shooting at us.
I was with uniform personnel.
I don't mean it was a good thing for them to do
and fortunatelly nobody was hurt in that incident,
but their instinct was not an unreasonable one.
This was an occupying army in their country,
and somebody, and it turned out many, many hundred of thousands of people,
maybe millions, wanted us out right away.
The reason that they began to want us out more and more and more with time
had everything to do with the revolution question,
and everything to do also with the question
that I was asked of who is the government.
So now let me connect this to the central theme
of what I want to discuss in the few minutes that we have.
A revolution has two stages.
The first stage requires you -- and this by the way is true
of not only political revolutions but anything that counts as a revolution.
First, you have to disrupt the existing order.
You have to make a fundamental and meaningful change
in how the world is organized,
in ways that everyone around can see and sense.
That's stage one of revolution.
In the 'Arab Spring' which extends
in stark and absolute contrast to the events in Iraq,
that first change happened by hundreds of thousands
and then millions of people going on to the streets,
first in Tunisia, then in Egypt, then across the region,
as far away as Bahrain, Yemen, and of course in Syria
where matters remain unresolved, and it took longer for things to get going.
That's the first crucial stage in Iraq,
which in the end ultimately I will suggest you
probably was not a revolution.
The change in existing order actually happened in different way.
It happened because of an invasion.
It happened because the United States government bombed the hell out of Iraq,
sent its troops, and forced the old regime to leave.
In each case, we are talking about the model
of a fundamental change in the existing order.
The second part of a revolution, however,
requires putting in place a new functioning order
that is in a meaningful way different from the order that came before.
That is the second stage that turns the thing into a revolution proper.
And in fact if all you do is the first,
if all you do is fundamentally break
the situation that's in existence,
and do not replace it with anything meaningfully
or significantly different and lasting,
you have a failed revolution.
And eventually people will come to say
you didn't have the revolution at all.
Now the reason I was getting shot at in Iraq,
and the reason people were angry, and got angrier over time
was that the United States did step one
but the United States did not create the sense of security in Iraq
that would have facilitated step two.
That's a broad proposition, and there are people who would disagree with it
but I think it's fair.
Now let me contrast that with step two in the Arab Spring.
In those countries where the Arab Spring
has turned out to be truly revolutionary --
and so far only one Tunisia definitively counts,
although others may follow --
people living in a country have to engage now
in the serious process of reshaping a new political order
that will be fundamentally different to what came before,
that will be functional and that will be sustained.
Now how do you do that?
There are lots of ways.
But the way that has become most common in our era
-- and this actually goes back a couple of hundred years --
is to try to shape a new constitution,
a new constitutional order that would memorialize
and put into institutional form
the deal that is sealed among the people of the country
about how they are going to change the political order.
Now let me say something specific
about the difference between the skill set
that is necessary for stage one of the revolution and stage two of the revolution.
Let me say that using the example of the Arab Spring.
By the way, parenthetically, it is obvious in the US case
why the US couldn't do stage two in Iraq.
Nobody can arrange a new political order from the outside of a society.
I mean, you can force it on people,
but they have to adopt it themselves over time.
Forcing it would be the examples of
United States and Germany after WW2
or Japan after WW2.
So if people say, you can never successfully impose a constitution,
that's not literally true,
United States did so, in both Japan and in Germany.
But for that to become an actually existing,
functioning, long term blueprint for the society,
it has to be adopted by the people who live there,
both the people with power and the people without power.
That's why it couldn't happen in Iraq.
At least not in the time frame that United States was there.
In the Arab Spring cases, the situation is all together different.
So let's start with the skill set to change the order.
This is peaceful revolution, not violent revolution imposed from the outside.
I think you're going to hear from some of the next speakers
in this particular series more about the extraordinary ways
that young people and especially connected, educated
and in some sense, elite young people
went into the streets in the Arab Spring countries,
convinced the public that change was possible
and coordinated amongst themselves
the extraordinary efforts of people who were extremely brave
and went into the streets knowing full well
that they will get tear gassed, shot at and very well possibly killed.
So these were people who, unlike me
who got shot at by accident, were actually brave,
people who were choosing to go into the streets
knowing that they were going to get shot at.
Now to convince people to do ,
you have to have charisma,
you have to have organization,
and above all else, you have to have imagination.
You have to be able to imagine
that the world can be different.
And you have to be willing to take enormous risk
for that to happen both individually and collectively.
That was extraordinary thing as it happens in the Arab world.
And what happened was that these young leaders
inspired lots more people throughout the society
so that eventually the people in the streets
were not just the educator, or the young,
or people with the access to a twitter account,
but broad cross-sections of the society in these different countries.
So in Tunisia, you saw labor unions
and in Egypt, you saw an enormous cross-section of society.
That was stage one.
As it turned out, even that was not necessarily enough
fully to displace the governments,
because the governments as we see in Syria today,
turned to their militaries and said shut it down.
And as we see in Syria,I mean the game is not over there --
it's not a game, it's a life or death situation --
the process is not over there,
but it can work. It can be possible to repress people
if you're willing to kill enough of them.
In Tunisia, and then again in Egypt,
the militaries refused to enforce the will of the presidents,
and the very next day in each case,
the presidents, Mubarak in Egypt, and Ben Ali in Tunisia, fled.
So credit for what was accomplished there
lies overwhelmingly with the people
who went into the streets, but notice that the mechanism
whereby the first stage of revolution took place
was not the mechanism of literal overthrow.
It was convincing the military that it was not a good idea to back the dictators,
and in fact, a better idea to back whatever the new order would be.
So extraordinary accomplishment, distinctive skill set.
Then an extraordinary thing happened
that I think is almost unprecedentedin the history of revolutions.
Now what happens usually between stage one and stage two of a revolution?
Well, the people who made stage one
would like to reshape the world
in a lasting way according to stage two.
They usually call themselves a 'Revolutionary Vanguard' .
And what does the revolutionary vanguard do
to give itself a chance to create a new world?
It starts ordering people around.
It justifies that usually on the grounds that
we are in a extraordinary new situation,
things are changing very fast,
we are going to be in charge here.
You can see this in the case of the Egyptian military incidentally,
which talks this way
They didn't make the revolution
but they still say that things are unstable,
and uncertain, you really need us.
In any case, most revolutions entail
the group of people who made stage one
trying to make stage two happen.
This revolutionary situation was extraordinary
because the people who did stage one believed in democracy.
Now it's beyond the time that I have today
to say whether this was a good idea on their part
or a bad idea on their part,
but you can think about that for yourselves.
What this revolutionary group did
is they put themselves up for election almost immediately
they created national elections,
and immediately they were almost all swept out of office.
You can imagine a sort of
classic communist revolutionary vanguard --
-- they couldn't contain their laughter at the situation.
You made a revolution, and now you put yourself up for election
and you're immediately voted out of office,
and what's more, they probably knew on some level
they'd be voted out of office.
Because in every single Arabic speaking country
where there has been a free election since 1990,
Islamic democrats, people who are focused on
religion and democracy have won.
And it is exactly what happened in parliamentary elections in Egypt.
It is exactly what happenedin the parliamentary elections in Tunisia,
and what it meant was that the class of people
who had made the revolution were gone from the political scene
at least in terms of occupying office in the senior political positions.
They are still there.
They represent minority parties
or some of them are in coalition with Islamic parties
as one sees for example in Tunisia.
But for the most part, and I think I want to emphasize this point
and if you only take away one thing from what I've said then I hope is this.
By putting themselves up for election,
the stage two revolutionaries abolished their own political authority,
and that is either the most admirable thing I've ever heard of
in the history of revolutions, or the craziest.
It all depends on what happens now in stage two.
In stage two, the people who're going to have the opportunity
to shape a new functioning order are mostly people
who are themselves engaged in a unique historical undertaking
of trying to reconcile Islamic values
drawn in part from Sharia, the classical Islamic law,
with western democratic institutions.
They will no longer be Western
as they are oriented to and made to exist
in majority of Muslim countries.
There's nothing inherently Western about democracy.
India when I last checked is not a Western country
and it is the largest and among the better functioning
democratic countries in the world.
So democracy can adapt, adjust, and be moved
from place to place, and can be made to be reconciled
with different world views.
But it will be altogether original
if the Islamic democrats elected in Tunisia
and now governing there, or the Islamic democrats
in Egypt who hoped to have an opportunity
to govern where it remains complex
because of their relationship with the military,
can actually successfully shape in the stage two process
a real and meaningful political order
that solves the structural and economic problems
in their societies,
that solves the political balance question
in which the fact that these countries
have suffered under dictatorship is resolved
by the existence of institutions that balance each other.
That is to say, legislature, a court system,
an executive branch, administrators
and yes, religious authorities, too,
not perhaps holding formal jobs
but offering some sort of a moral bullwork
against which societal affairs can progress.
Now it is much too soon
to say they will succeed.
But what is remarkable is that the skill set that they have
is so strikingly disparate and different,
divergent from the skill set possessed by the stage one revolutionaries.
They are good at grassroots organization,
drawing people into ordinary political practices,
convincing them that they have the values and ideals
that will sustain society over time,
and doing all this in real time.
This is not, everyone get together, let's have protest.
This is, let's reorganize our society and draft a new constitution
that will enable us to govern according to new principles.
This is iterative,
repeated over months, not days.
This is ideological.
It requires people to have beliefs
about the right way to be governed.
It is institutional.
It requires the building of lasting and enduring institutions
that have to actually work,
and it is above all else, boring.
It's not charismatic.
Sure, you can be charismatic in this process
but that's not in any way, shape or form a guide to winning.
It's good to have good ideas,
but one striking feature of the Islamist movements
as they exist in Tunisia and Egypt
is that they do not have
charismatic, remarkable, impressive people at the top.
They have ideas that carry charisma,
and they have above all else, the idea of Islam,
which is a tremendously rich, powerful, and charismatic idea
but they are not dependent on charismatic leadership.
They're also by the way, at least so far,
not very technologically wired.
The technologies that we have seen
being so effective at stage one
-- organizing people to do something rapidly --
have not as of yet been very effective in stage two.
That's itself a topic for another talk.
So if I could leave you
with central message here about the nature of revolutions
it's that revolutionary efforts
that clear the table but don't create something new
ultimately fail.
That the only way
that a revolution can ultimately succeed
is if the boring practical institutional work
of shaping new institutions can happen
and ultimately the public in a given country
has to believe that the system they have
is legitimate, effective, and capable of working.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)