Monday 14 February 2011

FT.com - Arab rulers confront a new world

Opposition protesters celebrate Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak's resignation, from their stronghold of Tahrir Square in Cairo

Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution last month blew a hole in the armour of the Arab security state, and the lazily settled opinion that Arab autocracies, with their backbone in the military and their nervous system in the security services, were bulletproof. Egypt’s Nile Revolution is of altogether another order.

It has dropped a great boulder into the stagnant pool of Arab despotism that will set waves coursing across the region. Egypt’s insurgents did not just take power from Hosni Mubarak. They have leeched it from every autocrat in the Arab world.

That is only partly because of Egypt’s historic and cultural weight in the region, diminished by the Mubarak era’s stagnation and political degradation.


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