A Riot of Me Own

Given the events in Africa and the Middle East, I went to my riot file to see if there was anything there of interest.  There is, of course, lots.  But this one is on the intertubes for free, it's Timothy Garton Ash making a public middle-brow intellectual case for how to understand the riots and mass demos associated with if not the cause of the collapse of the Soviet Empire.You should, by all means, read the whole thing is cleanly written and makes a strong case for considering the manifold causes of 1989.  This paragraph, however, I think is very helpful when considering the shape of things to come and how, why, or why not pushing for more international involvement might be helpful.

In truth, the essence of 1989 lies in the multiple interactions not merely of a single society and party-state, but of many societies and states, in a series of interconnected three-dimensional chess games. While the French Revolution of 1789 always had foreign dimensions and repercussions, and became an international event with the revolutionary wars, it originated as a domestic development in one large country. The European revolution of 1989 was, from the outset, an international event—and by international I mean not just the diplomatic relations between states but also the interactions of both states and societies across borders. So the lines of causation include the influence of individual states on their own societies, societies on their own states, states on other states, societies on other societies, states on other societies (for example, Gorbachev’s direct impact on East-Central Europeans), and societies on other states (for example, the knock-on effect on the Soviet Union of popular protest in East-Central Europe). These portmanteau notions of state and society have themselves to be disaggregated into groups, factions, and individuals, including unique actors such as Pope John Paul II.

I would argue that, as was the case in Iran, an American refusal to participate in immediately aiding any emergent  multivocal coalition, particularly if some one or another of those voices are viewed as insalubrious, that might now be forming by creating or participating  in the creation of a space within which the Egyptians, Tunisians, Yemeni, and whoever else can act.

See also where Ash asks

A further question is whether the aspiration to more democracy is also definitionally characteristic of [non-Violent Revolution]—in which case, however, the argument for a link between nonviolence and liberal democracy would risk becoming circular. Could you have a velvet revolution to establish a different kind of dictatorship? Hamas and Hezbollah hardly qualify as nonviolent, although they have done well in elections, but what would emerge from, say, a “scarab revolution” led by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt?

The coming days may well answer his question.

And for more on the history of velvet revolutions see here.