The Arab Spring: A re-synchronization of socio-political clocks?

Until very recently, many Arab countries encountered two contradictory socio-political trends: on the one hand they were ruled by paternalistic, authoritarian regimes, which  imposed more and more restrictions on civil liberties and political rights. On the other hand, many of them made tremendous progress with regard to educational and other forms of social modernization. As a result, in 2010 the citizens of these countries were often living in different social times.

This paper tries to measure the deviance of the afore mentioned social time from conventional calendar time. For this purpose, the article compares the trajectories of a country with regard to civil liberties, political rights, and educational attainments with the corresponding reference trajectories, which represent standards of the world system. The results obviously depend on whether international mean values, best practice, or some kind of self-reference are taken as the standard of measurement. In any case, the empirical results corroborate the hypothesis that social time is multi-dimensional and can be represented by clocks progressing at different speeds. Empirical results also suggest that social time may be stagnant or even relapse to an earlier stage in national history. Consequently, most Arab countries finally had huge asynchronies between political development and educational modernization.

Asynchronies between politics and education are insofar a problem, as mass education endows young citizens with the technical and cognitive capabilities to read and write also „politically deviant“ texts, which are however often denied by the paternalistic, authoritarian regimes still in power. A solution to this contradiction is a re-synchronization of clocks by accelerating the pace of political time. The Arab Spring 2011 can probably be understood this way. Whether this re-synchronization-hypothesis really holds, can be investigated in early 2012, when the latest available data about civil liberties and political rights will be released by Freedom House.