Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl and Julia Choucair have a post at HuffPo on the current contagion of protest movements in the Arab world (link). As I noted in a previous post (link), from the perspective of current social science theory it isn’t at all obvious why events in Tunisia should inspire events in other countries in the region. I proposed that the contagion may be based on the events in Tunisia creating a “normative reset” moment, with Tunisian protesters having “established a new embodiment of dignity” to which others in similar circumstances are emotionally driven to live up. In addition to rational “focal point” effects and updating about the vulnerability of authoritarian regimes, Schulhofer-Wohl and Chocair propose a similar hypothesis to explain this contagion:
Tunisians’ sacrifices have created a new moral climate in the region. If Tunisians were willing to die for the future of their country, then citizens of other countries have to ask a new question about facing down their regimes. Rather than calculating the risks and rewards to participating in uprisings, the question now is: If Tunisians were willing to make this sacrifice, why shouldn’t I also be willing? Continuing sacrifices, now on the streets of Egypt, underscore it.
I find this to be a compelling hypothesis, worthy of more rigorous investigation. I find that it is consistent, for example, with the fact that the Iranian protests did not inspire protests elsewhere: the emotional connection to other peoples in the region would not have been as strong.
I don’t think that the Iranian example is valid. The big diff is that in Egypt on Thursday two weeks ago the military announced that it will not shoot protestors, reducing significantly the cost of protesting. that was the game changer. Nothing like that happened in Iran, where the military is not getting $1.5B from the US gov. If the military in Egypt would have used the same force as the Iranian militias, we very well would have sat here explaining why Egypt is so different than Tunisia.
Historically, regional spillovers are the norm. See the way that Eastern Europe democratized in a period of 1-2 years and the way Latin America’s juntas crumbled one after the other in the early 1980s.
Sure there are lots of reasons why Iran 1979 and Iran 2010 did not inspire waves of protests elsewhere. So I take your point Guy that it isn’t a compelling case to demonstrate the validity of the hypothesis. But what I meant to suggest is that by this “normative reset” hypothesis, the scope for contagion is limited by the scope of moral resonance in other countries. Thus, events in Tunisia resonate in Egypt because of a stronger sense of co-identification among people in those two countries. I guess what I was really thinking was that, had the recent Iranian protests actually succeeded, they would not have inspired protests elsewhere in the Middle East largely because the Iranian example would not have had enough moral resonance due to the boundaries in the minds of many that separate Persian and Arab identities. For the same reason, by this hypothesis, I would doubt that any success in Egypt would inspire broad based revolutionary protests in, say, sub-Saharan Africa. But this is proto-theoretical speculation.