Madina newspaperA FRIEND, who works in media, asked me on Facebook to give him a reasonable explanation of why the world is witnessing revolutions and changes. An editor-of-chief of an English daily and another of a Gulf daily wanted an explanation for these events as well. This means that even those who are in media are baffled by what is going on in the world. They want to understand the events that happened subsequent to Muhammad Bouazizi's revolution in Tunisia and Mark Duggan's in London. Could it be that some kind of a virus has spread these revolutions all over the globe? Or could it be that the movement of the planets and stars in the constellations have influenced the mood of people on earth? Or there could have been some other reasons that we cannot put our finger on easily although they are there before our eyes. Of course, we cannot find a reasonable explanation from the famous astrologer Nostradamus for what has happened, is happening and will happen in the future. However, I don't find it highly unlikely that at this moment someone on this planet somewhere is searching for his future at the bottom of a coffee cup or with a fortune teller. Those who search for the future in a cup of coffee are the reason why many parts of the world are witnessing angry protests. The only way we can understand what is happening is by finding the most common denominators of all protests in terms of the mechanism of staging them, their contexts and their end results. Then we should try to come up with some results, if possible. We have revolutions and angry protests that started in Tunisia a few days before 2011 and spread like a raging fire to other Arab countries like Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria and we have movements in Morocco, Jordan, Bahrain and Oman. Protests also reached India, Israel, Britain, San Francisco in the United States. Of course, there are new prospects in Europe such as Greece, Portugal, France and Italy. The most common denominators of these revolutions and angry protests are the police and the protesters, the two main parties involved. In some cases, they are triggered when a civilian is killed by the police. Angry protests were staged against police because of the draconian measures of suppression, resulting in many protestors being killed. That's what happened in Egypt when the first spark of protests was ignited in the mid-2010 following the brutal killing of Khaled Sa'eed in Alexandria at the hands of the police. The spark of protests was ignited in Tunisia when Muhammad Bouazizi set himself on fire at Sidi Bouzaid town after being humiliated and slapped on the face by a policewoman. In London, the spark of protests was ignited when Mark Duggan, who was black, was shot dead by police, an incident from which protests spread to several British cities. In San Francisco, the spark of protests was ignited when Charles Blair Hill was shot dead by the police. In India, the catalyst for angry protests was the arrest of Anna Hazare, a human rights activist, who spoke against corruption. Although over 2,000 Syrian civilians were shot dead by snipers or “Shabeeha” and the army, the killing of 12-year-old Hamza Al-Khateeb, whose body was dismembered, turned the boy a symbol for those who want to topple the Syrian regime. All these events, which have been going on over the past eight months, started before the end of 2010. They took place after the so-called global financial crisis in the late 2008 subsequent to the collapse of the Lehman Brothers Bank in the United States and the real estate mortgage crisis with its ramifications and repercussions, which we still see today. Each country dealt with the crisis differently based on the strength of its financial and political systems. What has happened and is still happening might be the indirect effects of the global financial crisis, which I think are still there with their political repercussions that will take a heavy toll on countries. How much damage a country's economy will sustain will surely depend on how much that country is merged into the global economic system. The more a country is merged into the system, the faster it will be impacted by repercussions. That is why I was surprised when some senior officials of third-world countries were quick to make a statement saying “We have a strong economy that will pull through the US financial crisis” following the financial crisis three years ago. Of course, they were right in saying that their economy would not be affected immediately by what was happening in the world at the time because their economic systems had a limited degree of merging into the global economic system. But, of course, they were not right in saying that they had “strong economy”. The proof that they did not have such strong economies were the events in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries gripped by revolutions and protests that were driven largely by the ramifications and repercussions of the global financial crisis. These repercussions and ramifications have brought about social protests and demands in different regions of the world, which culminated in political revolutions. Those who staged the revolution should realize that there was a link that should not be overlooked between the weakness of economy as well as deteriorating social conditions and political systems. This could explain what had happened between 1950s and 1960s when most protests in third-world countries including Egypt (July 1952) were staged in a late response to the Great Depression which took place in 1930s. The depression led to the Second World War and ushered in a new world order. The most prominent political manifestation was the creation of the United Nations while the most economic manifestation was the Bretton Woods Agreement. The revolutions that are taking place now might be in the process preceding the emergence of a new world order which will deal with the absence of democracy in international relations, reconsider Bretton Woods Agreement, restructure the global financial system and end dollar hegemony. A new global mood roadmap, I invented this term, might be on the verge of being formulated because of the revolution in communication technology which expanded the definition of human rights and contributed largely to spreading the virus of protests through social networking websites. These websites have played a major role in the Egyptian uprising. Those who took to the street demanding change were about 18 million people, 20 percent of population. According to global indicators, 22 percent of the population uses Internet in Egypt. The new global mood roadmap was formulated by many factors and I do not know what role the movement of planets and stars played in this process. But I can definitely repeat what Bill Clinton told his presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush, the father, “It's the economy, stupid.” __
